Few believe in the end of the world, but it is also hard to imagine that an out of common progress half-century can endure forever. It still takes eleven months to reach the year two thousand, but the so-called millenarists are already working. It seems that a lot of them have decided to wait the X hour at Jerusalem, a holy place for three religions, in the conviction that this way their access to Paradise will be easier. But even getting not to this utmost pessimism , there's who is seriously meditating about what will bring us, not so much the January 31st 1999, that probably reserves us only a great consumption of champagne, an infinite number of fireworks and a serious crisis of the information systems, as out of the XXI century or, more in general, the third millennium. At the root of many worries there are - a little paradoxically - the impressive changing rhythm and the spectacular acceleration of progress, that have featured the last two centuries, and particularly the last fifty years as regards to what had happened in the previous centuries. Between the Alexander the Great's way of life and Napoleon's one there was not really a great difference. Both in the IV century b.c. and at the end of the eighteen century, people travelled by horse or carriage, ships functioned by sails, people warmed with open fire, lighting was by torches and candles, medicine and pharmacy were primitive, payments were carried out by the material change of gold or silver coins, messages were entrusted to couriers. Let's try instead to imagine what would happen if Napoleon gets back among us. The poor man would not be able to find his way. Along less than two centuries, we say since 1825 when the first steam engine started working, all has changed in a so radical way that we can talk about, without fearing of mistaking, a different world. Energy, coming from different sources, has revolutionised our life intra and extra moenia, allowing us to reduce to the minimum the physical effort any activity human being practices. Concerning distance communications, gradually arrived the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the fax, the modem, Internet and other devilries on arrive. We have been on the moon, we have got back from and in few years we will build a permanent colony before venturing out to Mars. Nowadays medicine and surgery have nothing to reckon even with the nineteenth century ones, bringing the result that de average duration of life has extended as far as forty per cent. As regard to drugs, there are medicines for all needs, even to cure conditions that till some years ago were not deemed diseases. The same physical pain, at least in its sharp manifestations, has been defeated. All these conquers have been carried out by a relatively small part of the world population and then extended , progressively, to all the world. From Stevenson to Volta, from Fleming to Fermi, from Einstein to Bill Gates, all who has contributed to change our life are European stock, and (more often) Hebrews who, even if native of Palestine, have incorporated since ever our cilivization. Only recently, in the list of the Nobel awarded, that is of the protagonists of the scientific and technological revolution has peeped out some Asiatic. Paradoxically the population that moves civilisation, seems to have exhausted, with the spate of discovers that have changed (and extended) their life, also their propulsive thrust. Europeans (and in a less measure the white Americans and even the Japanese) have halved in the space of one generation the birth number, the per capita birth and if they go on this way will be destined, even not properly to extinction, to reduce themselves to a little minority. The percentage of whites out of the world population is enormously diminished between the moment, few more than a century ago, mankind reached one billion and the 1999 when, attending the UNO demographic survey we will pass the line of six billions. When in fifty years the inhabitants of the earth will be eleven billions, the Europe we know nowadays could not exist any more since it will be invaded by the “new barbarians” arriving from every corner of the earth and who, with the assistance of the European medicine, will find their way also here to implement their out of common fertility. If demographers' predictions will be exact, a sizeable part of the Europe inhabitants will be African, since the black continent will redouble its populations next years. It's over these premises we must basis to get a reasonable prediction for the next century (or by choice for the next millennium). First question concerns if it is possible that technological, scientific and also economic progress can go on according to the frenetic rhythm we got used in the second half of the twentieth century, and that has reached the paroxysm since twenty years, compelling us to replace continuously yet not wasted but already obsolete objects. There's a theory, fortunately of a minority, according to which the mad run that featured the last generation is not only destined to end but represents furthermore the premise for a catastrophic 'landing', for an historical phase when the great inventions of the twentieth century will turn against men under the form of natural and artificial calamities. Unfortunately, possibilities are a lot and part of them has been already anticipated by the science fiction. It's enough to think about the nuclear war hypothesis, maybe more real nowadays than in the times of the bipolarism, or a disaster provoked by the hole in the ozone layer or maybe a massive employ by some third world despot of chemical or bacteriological weapons whose potential few know. Another danger, of different nature but not for that less concrete, is the hydrocarbon reserves exhausting that seem abundant nowadays since it's impossible for politicians to plan beyond 50 years, but that could easily end at the middle of the century. Till now, putting at the disposal of the Third world countries the west science conquers, it had been possible (statistically even not practically) to produce enough proteins, vitamins and carbohydrates to nourish all the 6 billions earth inhabitants. But also the genetic engineering and prodigies of chemistry have presumably a limit, and 'regenerate' a too much exploited land, in changed climatic conditions due to forests destruction , could be impossible even for the Nobel awarded of the future. Yet scientists have not succeeded in agreeing about how many inhabitants the earth can nourish: someone talks about 9 billions, someone twelve, someone fifteen, but also the most optimists acknowledge that it exists a limit. Chasing us next millennium there is also a possible 'revenge' of the nature over the man concerning health. Already in this century we have seen that, while science succeeded in defeating a disease, other spread, sometimes more dangerous. It's the case of cancer nowadays spread infinitely more than a century ago, and it is now the case of AIDS, till now enough contained in the developed countries, but that already affects a quarter of the African population and against which yet it has not been founded a sure medicine. Another consequence of the technological progress is, paradoxically, the job destruction. At least in the industrialised countries, the invention of any new machine turns needless a certain number of workers, who must find job in the so called tertiary sector or are marginalized from the production process. Already in this close of century this process has brought (and taken into the whole positive till now) social and economic changes , but nobody knows at which extent it can go on without breaking the essential equilibrium of surviving. A consideration seems to me incontrovertible: the whole mankind, and not only that privileged part of it residing in the most advanced and welfare countries, has lived the best fifty years of its history. It's true that countries like Vietnam and Korea, Angola and Iraq have been devastated by war, it is sure that billions people has suffered for two generations under the communist totalitarianism, it is true that a billion and a half still live under the surviving threshold. But all have benefit from the tow of the developed world, and even who has been left at the post can hope, at least theoretically, for a better future, if it will be go on the cycle that was begun with the second world war. The unknown is just this: we are at the peak of a parabola or the year two thousand is only a stage along an ever-climbing way? Both thesis can be borne. But to have a sure answer it is not necessary to apply neither to Nostradamus who, so to keep us happy, has predicted the third world war for July 1999.

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