This business about the world ending tomorrow got me to thinking about famous dates that were once in the future. We've lived through all sorts of doomsday predictions, some relatively recently -- anybody remember the flap over Y2K?
It's funny how people who write books about the future pick dates that seem at the time to be way in the future -- Orwell in 1949 chose 1984, Arthur Clark in 1948 figured 2001 would be a good year for a space odyssey. When those years come and go, it just sort of loses something.
In the spring of 1961 when I was a freshman in high school, the teacher I had for General Science wrote in my yearbook next to his picture, "Remember Halley's Comet in 1986." He wrote that in everybody's year book, and we all laughed because -- 1986? Are you kidding? That's a real long way off!
But now all of a sudden it's a real long way ago.
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