Popular opinion says this is the last day of the millenium. The best solution to that argument is to party twice -- once this year and once next year -- although the whole party scene seems to be collapsing anyhow. A huge monster party with 11 bands and live New Year's celebratory footage was scheduled for the Corel Centre in Ottawa, and killed off yesterday. Sue the little bastard's pants off, the millenium only comes once (or twice) every thousand years and it's damn hard to reschedule one's plans. Sue the guy running the party in Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto -- and sue anybody else that defaulted like this too. Which I expect to be common.

Of course 2000 is the beginning of the new millenium -- which can be taken two ways. One is the millenium proper'll start out jinxed and possibly malevolent, like the forgotten fairy in Sleeping Beauty. The other possibility (and the one I prefer) is that this new millenium, starting off with those big sexy 0s scattered all over the place, the time a bit misplaced to feed our sense of poetry -- the whole millenium'll be the more rosy-fingered like Aurora for it.

The best millenial resolution anybody could make would be to enjoy the next one. Our planet's getting to a point where nobody needs to lack anything, money is a barbaric way of handling worth and we can overcome it, and instead of descending further into the paranoia of greed, laziness and doubletalk, we can purposefully rise and reinvent ourselves. This isn't just mystic metaphysical babble, this is an absolute necessity.

It is entirely possible that many of us now can and will live to see the next millenium, and the one after, and the one after... Medical science is advancing at a dazzling rate, so fast that there's no reason to suspect anything but techniques, within my lifetime or yours, to become available, that will allow us to live as long as we want. That will require that we re-evaluate a lot of our current priorities -- nothing is so interesting that anyone is going to want to do it for a thousand years, much less a hundred. People aren't content now doing the same thing for twemty years. The ideas of copyright lasting a lifetime plus fifty years or a web based email account being lifetime will be laughable. Are laughable.

The idea of immortality being something that the rich will be able to hold on to is also laughable. Sure, the initial treatments may be expensive and may even be able to be suppressed as theoretically as human cloning. Just like the original computers were the size of buildings and cost phenomenal dollars just to access for a few hours. Now I have something more powerful than UNIVAC sitting discarded on the floor by my dresser, because I have something ten times as powerful on my desk. The human body is a code to be cracked and it will be, if by no one else, by people who are simply young and curious.

So will medical science explode, from something practiced by a priesthood to something available to vast numbers, and finally down to the point where we're giving away our ten year lifespan boosters because we have thousand year lifespan boosters. Instead of money, there will be charitable organizations to dispense lifetime, or youthtime, to make sure artists have the energy to complete more works, or that the indigent have the energy to draw themselves up from the streets the same way welfare operations now retrain people and give them subsistence living allowances.

The obvious problem is allowing dramatically enhanced lifespans without the complete destruction of privacy or human rights, without choking off the necessary new blood that a society needs to prevent stagnation, and without brutal conflicts with institutions (such as the Catholic church) that promote unrestrained reproduction. The easiest solution is to continually force percentages of our population to emigrate to other planets -- once we understand the human body well enough to stabilize anabolic and catabolic processes, it should be equally possible to engineer it to breathe nitrogen and survive near absolute zero. And back again to handle Earth environs once again.

This is assuming we can bring two major cancers into check -- money and bureaucracy -- because it will be necessary for our new government to be dynamic and responsible. It will probably be necessary to restrict the vote to people who have actually done meaningful public service, regardless of their age. Restricting anything by age will be a ridiculous proposition and new systems will be forced to evolve that judge on merit. It will take a while, but eventually they'll be forced to become good systems.

I have learned to fail. And I have had my say.
Yet shall I sing until my voice crack
(this being my leisure, this my holiday)
That man was a special thing, and no commodity,
a thing improper to be sold.

Edna St. Vincent Millay