> > Did anyone else calculate there age when Y2K hits? Did you wonder how > if you'd still be alive then? Are you doing anything now to live a > less risky lifestyle so that you will be around at Y2K? I mean, we're > so close, I'd hate to miss it.My earliest memory of any of this was 3rd grade math class (1974?) when the teacher said, "By the year 2000, most of you are going to be 35".
I didn't think much about it. What would I be doing at 35? I'd figure I'd be married (to one of the girls in the class, natch), perhaps a couple of kids, and working at some job (exactly what kind of job? Hell if I knew. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" "I don't know")
Well, here I am, still single. . .Work? I'm a medical librarian at a major county hospital, and am satisfied with it.
As far as what would life be like in general: I used to read a lot of science fiction books. We had the stories where live in the 1980's, let alone in 2000, would be full of flying cars , robots, and safe, clean nuclear energy. Then we had the stories about how we'd all be destroyed by various types of environmental degradation (pollution, new ice age, etc.), economic/political instability (inflation, large scale unemployment, race riots and such) and/or war (especially nuclear war)
Then there was the really freaky stuff, like cloning human beings and other artificial reproduction techniques. (Much of which came to pass-- not cloning of humans (yet)--but artificial insemination techniques)
So we didn't get the flying cars, but we did get a lot of technological advancement that made our lives easier. (Who, outside of a few academic circles, would have ever thought up this thing called the Internet--and envisioned it being the commercial success that it is? It was only a few years ago that the Web was filled with almost nothing but academic papers and a few student home pages. Now everywhere you go, it's "dot-com" this and "www" that!)
And no, the Commies haven't nuked us, and our major cities are not quite at the "Blade Runner" stage yet. We've come a long way in dealing with many of the environmental and social problems of the earlier decades, but we've still got a long way to go.