How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [123]
Actually, the date gets pushed off another year because, as Gould notes, there was no year zero in Western mathematics when the B.C.–A.D. system was introduced, so the first year of the first century was 1, not 0. So 6,000 years from 4004 B.C. is actually 1997, not 1996. Did anything of note happen on October 23, 1997? Yes, actually, something did. On that date the United States Energy Department released a statement disclosing that as many as 30,000 nuclear bombs cannot be accounted for in the disassembly process that is part of the latest arms control agreement. According to official records, approximately 70,000 nuclear bombs have been produced since World War II. Of these, 26,735 have been destroyed, 1,741 are awaiting destruction, and 11,000 remain active in the Pentagon’s strategic stockpile. Apparently no one knows what happened to the remaining 30,000 bombs. To make matters worse, the Energy Department also admitted that of the 95.5 tons of bomb-grade plutonium produced in the United States since the Second World War, 2.8 tons of it remain unaccounted for—not the end of the world, though perhaps the necessary ingredients for it.
Finally, it should be pointed out that the missing zero at the B.C.–A.D. marker solves the problem of when the next millennium really begins. Since the first century had no zero, it began with the year 1 and did not end until the end of the year 100. This is true for every century since, including ours. Therefore, the twentieth century, and the second millennium, end on December 31, 2000, and the new century and millennium begin the next day, January 1, 2001.
WHEN PROPHECY FAILS—A.D. 1000
Since myths tend to recur as enduring features of our cultural landscape (primarily due to the fact that there are only so many plot themes in stories, so they are bound to repeat in general outline), we should not be surprised that apocalyptic visions of the end have been reiterated throughout the past two thousand years. The most interesting year, for obvious reasons, is A.D. 1000. Did people then believe the end was nigh? Surprisingly, the matter of what happened at the last triple-zero cleavage in history is not at all clear, primarily owing to the historical black hole known as the Dark Ages. There just is not that much data from which to piece together an adequate picture. We do not know if this absence of evidence is evidence of an absence (of terror), or if the hysteria was expressed in some other fashion not clearly recorded for history. Chroniclers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, in the finest mode of progressivist history (with a little anti-Catholicism thrown in for good measure), portrayed their ancestors in the year 1000 as irrationally hysterical. The nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet, for example, saw evidence of the terror in statues of the period: “See how they implore, with clasped hands, that desired but dreaded moment … which is to redeem them from their unspeakable sorrows.” In his 1841 classic work, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay recorded that “during the thousandth year the number of pilgrims increased. Most of them were smitten with terror as with a plague. Every phenomenon of nature filled them with alarm. It was the opinion that thunder was the voice of God, announcing the day of judgment. Fanatic preachers kept up the flame of terror.”
The only problem with this account is that there is almost no evidence for it. This apparent nonevent led to an “anti-terror” movement among historians, who pointed out that nothing special happened in 1000 because other dates, such as 909, 950, 1010, and especially 1033 (a