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	CNN Special Section: Countdown to 2000

April 30, 1999
Web posted at: 12:14 p.m. EDT (1614 GMT)

In this story: Yesterday: Been there, going back A primer on time and space Time traveler packages Message Board: Tell us your plans RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Jennifer Merin

(Los Angeles Times Syndicate) -- If you believe the transition from 1999 to 2000 should be a special, magical and cherished event, and you want to experience it in the most perfect and exciting way, the pressure is on to get up and go.

Tourist boards, tour operators and travel providers of all sorts are clamoring to persuade you that one particular place, pursuit and perspective -- theirs -- will provide the perfect millennium memories.

There are at least 2,000 attractive celebratory offerings, ranging from sensible and affordable getaways to relaxation and romance destinations to splurge trips that promise fulfillment of exotic travel dreams and escapes into heightened states of luxury, indulgence and consciousness. Many are catalogued in Richard Knight's thorough and thoroughly entertaining "The Millennium Guide" (Trailblazer Publications, U.K., 1998, $10).

Some particularly creative travel packagers suggest that you commemorate the passage of time by dabbling in time travel -- at least as far as modern technology allows.

Princess Cruises (800-568-3262) offers you the chance to be not only among the first to enter the new millennium, but to re-enter the old one and enter the new one again.

How can this be?

The Sky Princess, on a 16-day cruise around Australia and New Zealand, will cross the International Date Line (IDL) at the very moment of the third millennium's dawning, and then will cross the IDL the other way to re-enter the second millennium, so passengers can experience the new millennium's moment of dawning again. Fun and exciting. You're beating time.

Is this time travel? Let's explore the idea.

Most travel is actually time travel. Think about it. We fly from Los Angeles to New York, the journey takes about five hours, and we pass through three time zones. We take Los Angeles-to-New York, New York-to-London and London-to-Hong Kong time changes for granted. We cross the IDL, instantly entering the next day or going back to a previous day, without thinking about it. We reset our watches and try to avoid jet lag.

If you forget whether your watch is put ahead or behind when you travel east or west, and have no idea what the IDL is, you're not alone. Most of us -- even those who travel frequently -- find time changes baffling. We trust that the system works, but don't know why.

Feel no shame. Brilliant philosophers, navigators and astronomers -- from Ptolemy to Columbus to Einstein -- have participated in intellectual Olympics through millennia to develop accurate measurements for time and space, and to define the relationship between them. The investigation is still under way.

However, the subject of time, space and navigation isn't emphasized in many schools. Pity.

Along comes the millennium, heightening our sense of time and pressuring us to decide where we want to celebrate the cosmic moment, and the whole phenomenon raises some profound questions about where we already are.

And answers to such questions are not easily come by. However, Time, Space and Navigation 101 can offer some insight into your millennium experience.

This explanation is fundamental -- but please stick with it. Like a good joke, there's a punch line.

Here goes:

We're riding a rotating ball through space. The ball's top is North, bottom is South. If you face North, East is to your right, West to your left. To find our location, we draw a grid on the ball's surface. The grid has two sets of lines: The parallels, also called latitude, encircle the ball from east to west and are always equidistant from each other but vary in length, with the longest, named the Equator, like a belt around the middle and the shortest near the top and bottom of the ball.

A second set of lines runs from North to South. Called meridians -- or longitude -- these are equal in length, but the distance between them is widest at the Equator and narrows as they approach North and South, where they all meet at the North and South Poles.

There are 360 meridians, dividing the ball into 360 "degrees" (consisting of the line and area between it and the next line). Measured in time, each degree equals four minutes. (The ball takes 24 hours -- or 1,440 minutes -- to make one complete rotation of 360 degrees; 1,440 minutes divided by 360 degrees equals four minutes per degree.) We have to designate one particular meridian as 0 degrees. Since 1765 A.D., when Greenwich, England (about seven miles from central London), was selected as 0 degrees, or the prime meridian, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) has been used to calculate time worldwide.

When it's 12 noon at Greenwich, the sun is at its highest. Across the ball, at the 180-degree meridian, it's 12 midnight. So 180 degrees, located in the Pacific Ocean near Fiji and other South Pacific nations, is the IDL, the place where one day officially slips into another, and where this millennium will first make the transition to the next. So, this is where you'll be if you take the Sky Princess' millennium cruise.

The fascinating history of the grid's development, how Greenwich became 0 degrees and why each day is born in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is well told in Dava Sobel's "Longitude" (Walker Books, 1995, $19), highly recommended as millennium reading.

Of course, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand and other nations west of the 180-degree meridian, laying claim to the new millennium first light, beckon you to join their exuberant parties and Greenwich (London, really) at 0 degrees promises amazing concerts and displays, but you'll experience the new millennium's dawn where ever you are -- even if you stay home -- because dawn is a function of time and space, and these are relative.

Another way to play with the idea of time travel a la Sky Princess' itinerary, is to board Concorde Spirit Tours' (800-863-9376) Air France Concorde, cruise at 1,100 miles per hour from Paris' New Years 2000 to New York's New Years 2000, and experience the millennium as it arrives in two major cities.

Or, embark upon Abercrombie and Kent's (800-323-7308) Explorer or Orient Lines' (800-333-7300) Marco Polo to cruise Antarctica, where the millennium's first light will illuminate a frozen landscape formed ages ago and, since Antarctica is near the South Pole where all meridians intersect, where time -- at least theoretically -- stands still.

Copyright © 1999, Jennifer Merin
Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate

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