Millennium Dreams

I will be one of the 6 billion people that will witness the arrival of the new millenium. In just a couple of months, I, like everyone else, will be flooded with a plethora of emotions. The new millennium is a second chance for the entire world and this is my wish list as to what changes I think should occur.

Every civilization has had a healer, a doctor, or some profession set-aside for curing sickness. With frightful diseases such as AIDS claiming millions of lives across the world, I dream, however, of a future without disease. With the far-reaching powers of the Internet, we have the ability to inform more people than ever before. "Knowledge is power." It is in this knowledge where the power to conquer sickness and disease lies.

Knowledge in the technological field is only momentary, as it becomes obsolete the next day. For example Popular Mechanics, March 1949, stated, "Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1/2 tons." This, as any simpleton can tell you, is nowhere near the astonishingly tiny size and great power that computers have today. With such a dynamic industry, predictions as to what the future may hold can, at best, be vague. I cannot say how fast the computers will run in the future, but rather, how I think they should be used. I dream that technology will be applied more toward bringing the world together in a utopian society. Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." If we use the advanced technology we have today, and the much more advanced technology we shall have tomorrow, to bring the world together in peace, surely there can be no greater magic than that.

Magic, however, cannot erase the flaws omnipresent in human society. Prejudice is most definitely one of them. Our survival needs competition. It is in this competition where we find the need to call some group lower, less refined, and less advanced than our own. The cliché is, "Violence begets violence." The same is true with prejudice. I dream that a world without prejudice will be achieved, but part of me says that this dream is as if I were asking humans to survive without water.

The power of nature is amazing. Every year more severe weather pounds nations across the world, and the US is not, by any means, an exception. The east, west, north, south and all parts of the US almost expect to be pulverized by severe weather each year. With every disaster, comes an opportunity to develop the technology to prevent it. It is on this fact that I base my dream that the future will be a world without disasters.

The world of arts faced a disaster in the dark ages. However, a period of awakening in fourteenth century in Italy to the rest of Europe in the 17^th century, the Renaissance was a period caused many of the arts to flourish. Now where are the arts and the artists? Every artist now produces only abstract art, which no one seems to understand. Al Capp, a cartoonist and creator of Li'l Abner, put my feelings about abstract arts into words, "[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered." With all of us having absolutely no clue as to what to take from a picture, we have lost our desire to look at the arts. I dream of another Renaissance, where art will once more be something that everyone can relate to. The introduction of arts that no one can comprehend has estranged us from one of the most enriching experiences that the world has to offer.

Living on a planet other than Earth has always been a dream of mankind. It has become the vision of the entire world, embodied by authors, movie writers and everyone else. It has always intrigued us to see what lies beyond where we are today. Quoting Stephen Hawking, "To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." People say curiosity killed the cat, but it is the same curiosity that gave the cat something to live for. It is this unquenchable thirst of knowledge that almost compels me to dream that our reach will extend far beyond earth in the New Millennium.

All of us have a common cause and have had a common cause since our being. That cause is to live better and more comfortably, and most of all peacefully. What I have just narrated defines my vision of what the future should be, or could be. There are several other possibilities as to what the future may hold, but if it is dreamt, it has peace, calm, and serenity.