INDIA AND CHINA GOING TO THE MOON. NEXT STOP: ASIAN DISCO MUSIC!

The news that China and India are sending astronauts into space and probes to the moon leads one to wonder what's next for these 2 emerging world powers. By doing exactly what others have done 40 years earlier, you have to figure that it won't be long before they develop disco music and teen movies. Since they're so busy breaking old ground, they might as well start gearing up their societies for the 1970's.

Let's see, that means they can have Elvis die, whoever the Chinese and Indian Elvises (or maybe the plural is Elvi?) might be. Leisure suits will become popular with older guys. India's already on board with political scandals but the Chinese will need to step up and throw one of their leaders under the bus of public scorn, assuming they allow any of their citizens to speak up anytime soon. Music lovers will have to get into walkman players and boom boxes, playing those new-fangled cassette tapes, of course.

Both nations already have their fair share of whacky cults, so they're ahead of the curve there, except maybe to have one of them commit mass suicide or something equally dramatic. Not to worry on that front, wacky cults can be counted on to think of something bizarre to grab headlines. The Falun Gong crew in China shows promise the way they keep beating their heads against policemen's truncheons.

But both China and India need to move aggressively into the past now that they have joined the space race pretty much after it is over. If they want to be superpowers, perhaps a Cold War with one another would be a good idea. They've got a history of mutual hostility already and both of them have plenty of nuclear bombs so maybe a little international saber-rattling and scaring the crap out of the rest of world is in order. A few dangerous international incidents would go a long way towards cementing their status as world-class jerks.

Then in ten years or so their societies can move into the 1980's. They could begin dismantling their heavy industries and shipping their citizens' jobs overseas. Perhaps have an AIDS epidemic break out and ignore it other than condemning the afflicted while it spreads like wild fire. Then again, neither of these nations might not notice that since so many of them die every year of starvation already. Maybe they'll figure the AIDS victims are just more starving people as they shrivel and die.

Figure a ME Generation to spring up, complete with with yuppies, conspicuous consumption and a boom in Mercedes Benz and Rolex sales. Cocaine will be a problem with young corporate suits and the new breed of nightclub people who will frequent the Studio 54-type of clubs that will spring up. Celebrity cults will be started around people whose only apparent talent is being famous. Rock musicians will get turned off by the glitz and glitter and Asian Punk Music will be born. VCRs will be introduced, microwave ovens, maybe even salad shooters and useless abdomen exercise gadgets. Self help books, spy thrillers and romance novels will proliferate.

Graffiti will spring up everywhere, and some of it will be called art. Japanese cars will start dominating the auto markets. Everything they wear will have labels saying "Made in The Philippines." Their space craft will start to get old and one or two will blow up, then they'll sort of lose interest in the space program. Then it will be the 1990's for China and India and everyone will get a cell phone and a computer. Maybe not everyone, since a large portion of the people in both those nations don't even have running water, never mind luxuries like electricity, air conditioning or food. But being forward-looking countries, they don't let the inconvenient fact that so many of their people die of starvation every year stop them from exporting a whole lot of food.

Nor do they hesitate to spend billions on nukes and space ships. Hopefully they'll learn from the Soviet Union that having super-power status doesn't impress your own citizens all that much when their lives are miserable. Nobody conquered the Soviet Union, it just collapsed under the weight of its own sheer unmanageability and huge pieces of it spun off into enough new independent countries to send the good people at Rand-McNally into overdrive redrawing world maps. Life for the average citizen of the Soviet Union was a cakewalk compared to life for the average person in India and China, who have about 400 million malnourished citizens between them. That's twice the amount of people than live in modern day Russia. 200 million Indians and 200 million Chinese who are living hungry all the time. Rand-McNally waits with bated breath.