The Millennium Has Landed

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 10, 2000 | by James P. Lucier

The Millennium Dome, an $800 million exhibition hall in Greenwich, England, is Britain's official site for Y2K fun, as well as a good place to think about the future.

The millennium has landed and it has arrived first in Greenwich, on the south side of the Thames River in London. To mark the occasion, Britain has erected a stately pleasure dome -- costing nearly $800 million -- on the Zero Meridian. Throughout the year 2000, the Millennium Dome is expecting 12 million visitors, where they will interact with some 14 learning-is-fun areas explaining the past and the high-tech future.

There are no parking lots. London Transport has constructed a brand-new tube line that includes a three-story underground station with shimmering blue glass walls resembling the throne room of Lord Archon. At press rime, Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Tony Blair were preparing to launch the venture with a New Year's Eve bash such as might happen once in 1,000 years.

Early in December, Insight donned hard hat and rubber boots to tour the vast construction site as workmen swarmed over it and rappelled up the side of the centerpiece -- the giant Millennium Body, a reclining golden figure that would be some 200 feet high if it could stand up. Visitors will tour the inside of the figure to learn how the human body operates. The dome itself, designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership (architects of the Pompidou Center in Paris), is more than half a mile in circumference and consists of two layers of Teflon-coated fiberglass supported by cables from 12 masts. Estimates of its life span range from 20 to 50 years, although the British government is entertaining proposals for new uses once the millennium year is over.

"It's actually a celebration of human achievement of the last 2,000 years and looks to the future and says, `We've done this much in 2,000 years, so where do we go from here?'," Dome spokeswoman Riazit Butt tells Insight. "It really explores those possibilities through technology and interactive exhibits. This is what differentiates the dome from a world's fair."

But why at Greenwich? That's because the British claim to have invented time. And maybe they did: Our time zones are measured in north-south global meridians, in terms of distance from the zero meridian, or longitude 0 [degrees], which happens to go through Greenwich.

In the 17th century, King Charles II founded the Royal Observatory at Greenwich to measure the position of the moon and the stars so sailors could find their way home. It took many years to find a solution, but by the end of the 19th century 72 percent of world commerce depended on the sea charts prepared at Greenwich. At the 1884 International Meridian Conference, held in Washington, delegates from the 25 major nations selected the Greenwich Meridian as the 0 [degrees] longitude.

That's why the Millenninm Dome is the official starting point for time and for Insight's special project on the future.