Arthur C. Clarke: Party Pooper?...not!

Arthur, author of "2001: A Space Odyssey" issued a public statement concerning the Big Mistake everyone’s making…. calling the year 2000 the Millennial Year. As every Geek worth his or her Y2K knows, 2000 is NOT the Millennial year! Instead, as Arthur points out, it should be called the Centennial year. The year 2001 is the one, the only, the REAL Millennial year!

Some may call this nit picking, but let’s face it, he’s 2001% right. This "next year is the new millenium" farce is getting too much for us numerically-superior geeks to take any more. The whole world is being marketed to ring in the New Millennium on December 31, 1999, yet geeky logic tells us that the Millennium doesn’t really start until January 1, 2001.

What is this logic? As Arthur pointed out, "Because the Western calendar starts with Year 1, and not Year 0, the 21st Century and the Third Millennium do not begin until January 1, 2001…We'll have had only 99 years of this century by January 1, 2000: we'll have to wait until December 31 for the full hundred."

No doubt this is why he called his super cool novel "2001: A Space Odyssey", not "2000: A Space Odyssey". And you thought he was just being goofy….

Arthur C. is truly one of the greatest Geek minds around. Besides writing many, many great science-fiction novels and creating several documentaries, he is a real visionary. In 1945, he predicted a network of geo-stationary communication satellites. This is at a time when no one had yet figured out how to leave Earth’s atmosphere!

Thanks Arthur for setting it straight. You're not a party pooper, in fact, you're setting the stage for TWO big parties!