Chaos. Of course as any self respecting astronomer will tell you, the new millennium will not begin until December 31, 2000 ushers in the New Years celebration. But many people, if not most people including myself, will put logic aside and have one hell of a party on the evening of December 31, 1999. I have to admit that I feel very strange about 'joining the crowd' on this matter, because the correct day to celebrate the turn of the new century is not a matter of belief, fashion or opinion. Historians have lookied over how humans have celebrated the beginning of the new century for the last two or three times and have found that we have always 'done the right think' in the past. This time we will not. We will be celebrating the new millenium on the morning of January 1, 2000 rather than on January 1, 2001. It is a troubling example of how 'facts' can sometimes be mandated by popular vote rather than by logic. I think an excellent exercise for k-12 students would be to review this issue, and be shown how their parents are doing the right thing a year too early.
You can be certain that the networks will be filled with experts explaining in careful terms why celebrating the arrival of the New Millennium on January 1, 2000 is WRONG WRONG WRONG!!! There will be countless articles written by virtually anyone who has access into the media, explaining what to do. You will even have an endless number of surveys asking what the public thinks, as though somehow TRUTH can be arrived at by a show of hands.
More seriously, computer programs will start to screw up royally. I mean ROYALLY! Even now, computer consultants are beginning to make tons of money telling big companies how to modify or rewrite portions of their software so that pay checks and pension payouts don't suddenly start dishing out 100 year benefit paymemts on January 1, 2000. This is serious business. Just look at your checks. They have two blanks for the year, but have hard wired '19' because for 99 years it has been understood that all transactions are taking place in the 20th century. It also saves lots of computer memory and database size by hard wiring the first two digits and only performing the math on the last two digits of the year. But when 2000 rolls around, those last two digits will be '00' and all of a sudden the math gets fouled up.
Doug Fine in an April 10, 1995 article in 'INFOWORLD' a weekly newspaper for cop computer freaks, wrote a fine ( sorry) article 'Companies Brace for the Millennium' where he describes all of the problems that will start to happen when older programs begin to encounter the millennium '00' year; the 'Year-2000' problem as it is called. Literally, BILLIONS of dollars of software headaches that will have to be surmounted before the new year rolls in. Some companies are beginning to work on the problem now, especially the US Social Security Administration, who stand to loose huge sums of money if they don't get on the ball. There are probably other companies that won't bother with this problem until the year before the changeover. The consultants say, in Doug FIne's article, that the cost of correcting and validating software to work properly is measured in the tens of millions of dollars, and that for some companies, this added cost would be enough to drive them into bankruptcy!
I was once at a major observatory executing my observing run during the period from December 30 to January 1, when the guidance program crashed when the clock ticked over from December 31 to January 1 of the next year. I can imagine that there are lots of other programs out there that we think will work well, but have built-in time bombs waiting to go off to crash the program when December 31, 1999 becomes January 1, 2000. That 24 hour period will be a very exciting one to watch. I just hope all of the fancy military software doesn't have any glitches in it. It was, for the most part, written by the lowest bidder, and during a time when computer memory was expensive. This is just the kind of situation that would make the 2000-problem a veritable nightmare! Star tuned!
Oh, by the way, I will be celebrating December 31, 1999 as the last day of the Millennium, and will also celebrate December 31, 2000 as THE LAST DAY of the year '00'. It's been a long time since I had Nothing to celebrate!
So, what should we call the years '00' to '09' ? The 'Naughts'?