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1993-04-08
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SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR, Page 2
"We should all be concerned about the future because we
will have to spend the rest of our lives there," said the
inventor Charles Kettering. In our time, no symbol of the future
has sparked more anticipation and mystery than the year 2000.
And now the epic moment is close at hand. Lucky us: few people
who ever walk the earth have had the opportunity to ring in, all
at once, a new year, a new decade, a new century and a new
millennium. The imminence of this extraordinary occasion
inspired us to devote an entire special issue to the
tantafuture before us and the great events that have set the
stage for it. We are happy that our plans for this project
appealed so much to IBM that it offered to become the sole
advertiser for this issue.
A subject so monumental calls for some unusual approaches.
In one such departure, we commissioned science-fiction master
Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to write a
new story, set in the third millennium. His tale, The Hammer of
God, about an asteroid that imperils the earth, is only the
second piece of fiction ever to be published in TIME. (The first
was a story by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1969.) The 74-year-old
British futurist, who has written more than 50 books, is often
as prescient as he is prolific. Clarke has long warned about
humankind's vulnerability to asteroid impacts, a subject that
is just now capturing the attention of the scientific
mainstream. "I'm not a predictor," says Clarke. "I'm an
extrapolator. Sometimes I hear of a scientific discovery or
invention, and then I say, `What if? What would it imply?' "
The future may be fantastic, but it will also be funny,
according to contribMerrill Markoe's portrayal of dating and
marriage in the 21st century. Markoe, an Emmy-winning TV
writer, is most recently the author of the essay collection What
the Dogs Have Taught Me. We also resolved to challenge some
assumptions about society's direction, a mission that historian
ChristoLasch handles skillfully in an essay on the shortcomings
of progress, which was the subject of his 1991 book, The True
and Only Heaven.
All told, TIME journalists consulted more than 200
futuristic thinkers to help shape this guide to the next
millennium. We hope you agree that the result is an exciting
preview of the world in which we will soon live.
Henry Muller