21st century
Time period between 1 January 2001 and 31 December 2100 / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The 21st century is the current century in the Anno Domini or Common Era, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar. It began on 1 January 2001 and will end on 31 December 2100. It is the first century of the 3rd millennium.
The rise of a global economy and Third World consumerism marked the beginning of the century, along with increased private enterprise and deepening concern over terrorism after the September 11 attacks in 2001.[1][2][3] The NATO interventions in Afghanistan, the United States-led coalition intervention in Iraq in the early 2000s, and the overthrow of several regimes during the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, led to mixed outcomes in the Arab world, resulting in several civil wars and political instability.[4] The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine became the largest conventional military offensive in Europe since World War II, resulting in a refugee crisis and disruptions to global trade. The United States has remained the sole global superpower while China is now considered an emerging superpower.
In 2022, 45% of the world's population lived in "some form of democracy", although only 8% lived in "full democracies."[5] The United Nations estimates that by 2050, two thirds of the world's population will be urbanized.
The world economy expanded at high rates from $42 trillion in 2000 to $94 trillion in 2021, though many economies rose at greater levels, some gradually contracted.[lower-alpha 1] The European Union greatly expanded in the 21st century, adding 13 member states, but the United Kingdom withdrew. Most EU member states introduced a common currency, the Euro. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was also greatly expanded, adding 13 member states.
Effects of global warming and rising sea levels exacerbated the ecological crises, with eight islands disappearing between 2007 and 2014.[6][7][8]
From January 2020 to May 2023, the COVID-19 pandemic began to rapidly spread worldwide, killing over 15 million people around the globe,[9] and causing severe global economic disruption, including the largest global recession since the Great Depression.
Due to the sudden proliferation of internet-accessible mobile devices, such as smartphones becoming ubiquitous worldwide beginning in the early 2010s, more than half of the world's population obtained access to the Internet by 2018.[10] After the success of the Human Genome Project, DNA sequencing services became available and affordable.[11][12]
There is a lack of general agreement over how to pronounce specific years of the 21st century in English. Academics have pointed out that the early years of previous centuries were commonly pronounced as, for example, "eighteen oh five" (for 1805) and "nineteen oh five" (for 1905).[13] Generally, the early years of the 21st century were pronounced as in "two-thousand (and) five," with a change taking place around 2010, when pronunciations often shifted between the early-years form of "two-thousand and ten" and the traditionally more concise form of "twenty-ten."
The Vancouver Olympics, which took place in 2010, was being officially referred to by Vancouver 2010 as "the twenty-ten Olympics".[further explanation needed]
Advances in technology such as ultrasound, prenatal genetic testing and genetic engineering are modifying the demographics[clarification needed] and have the potential to change the genetic makeup of the human population. Because of sex-selective abortion, fewer girls have been born in the 21st century (and since the early 1980s) compared to past centuries, mostly because of son preference in East and South Asia. In 2014, only 47 percent of Indian births were of girls.[14] This has led to an increase in bachelors in countries such as China and India. The first genetically modified children were born in November 2018 in China, beginning a new biological era for the human species and raising great controversy.
Anxiety[15] and depression[16] rates have risen in the United States and many other parts of the world. However, suicide rates have fallen in Europe and most of the rest of the world so far this century, declining 29% globally between 2000 and 2018, despite rising 18% in the United States in the same period. The decline in suicide has been most notable among Chinese and Indian women, the elderly, and middle-aged Russian men.[17][18]
Knowledge and information
The entire written works of humanity, from the beginning of recorded history to 2003, in all known languages, are estimated to amount to five exabytes of data.[19][20] Since 2003, with the beginning of social media and "user-generated content", the same amount of data is created every two days.[21] The growth of human knowledge and information continues at an exponential rate.[further explanation needed]
Telecommunications in the early 21st century are much more advanced and universal than they were in the late 20th century. Only a few percent of the world's population were Internet users and cellular phone owners in the late 1990s; as of 2023, 64.4% of the world's population is online, and as of 2019, an estimated 67% own a cell phone.[22] In the 2010s, artificial intelligence, mainly in the form of deep learning and machine learning, became more prevalent and is prominently used in Gmail and Google's search engine, in banking, with the military and other areas. In 2020, 9% of the world's population still lacked access to electricity.[23]
In 2001, Dennis Tito became the first space tourist, beginning the era of commercial spaceflight. Entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Richard Branson are working towards commercial space exploration, colonization and tourism, while China and India have made substantial strides in their space programs. On 3 January 2019, China landed a robotic spacecraft on the far side of the Moon, the first to do so.[24]
Culture and politics
War and violence have declined considerably compared to the 20th century, continuing the post-World War II trend called Long Peace. Malnourishment and poverty are still widespread globally, but fewer people live in the most extreme forms of poverty. In 1990, approximately one-in-four people were malnourished, and nearly 36% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty; by 2015, these numbers had dropped to approximately one-in-eight and 10%, respectively.[citation needed]
The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal drew international attention to the possible adverse effects of social media in influencing citizen's views, particularly regarding the 2016 United States presidential election.[further explanation needed]
Population and urbanization
The world population was about 6.1 billion at the start of the 21st century and reached 8 billion by November 2022. It is estimated to reach nearly 8.6 billion by 2030,[25] and 9.8 billion by 2050. According to the United Nations World Urbanization prospects, a 60% projection of the world's human population is to live in megacities and megalopolises by 2030, 70% by 2050, and 90% by 2080. It is expected by 2040, the investing of more than 5 times the current global gross domestic product is expected to be in urban infrastructure.[26]
Life expectancy has increased as child mortality continues to decline. A baby born in 2019, for example, will, on average (globally), live to 73 years—27 years longer than the global average of someone born in 1950.[27] Ten million Britons (16% of the United Kingdom population) will, on average, live to 100 or older.[28]
Climate change remains a serious concern; UN Chief António Guterres, for instance, has described it as an "existential threat" to humanity.[29] Furthermore, the Holocene extinction event, the sixth most significant extinction event in the Earth's history, continues with the widespread degradation of highly biodiverse habitats as a by-product of human activity.[30]
Economics, education and retirement
Economically and politically, the United States and Western Europe were dominant at the beginning of the century; by the 2010s, China became an emerging global superpower and, by some measures, the world's largest economy. In terms of purchasing power parity, India's economy became more significant than Japan's around 2011.[31]
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are decentralized currencies that are not controlled by any central bank. These currencies are increasing in popularity worldwide due to the expanding availability of the internet and are mainly used as a store of value.
There is an ongoing impact of technological unemployment due to automation and computerization: the rate at which jobs are disappearing—due to machines replacing them—is expected to escalate.[32] Automation alters the number of jobs and the skills demands of industries. As of 2019, the production output of first world nations' manufacturing sectors was doubled when compared to 1984 output; but it is now produced with one-third fewer workers and at significantly reduced operating costs.[33] Half of all jobs with requirements lower than a bachelor's degree are currently in the process of being replaced with partial- or full-automation.[34]
The World Economic Forum forecast that 65% of children entering primary school will end up in jobs or careers that currently do not yet exist.[35]
A rise in the retirement age has been called for in view of an increase in life expectancy and has been put in place in many jurisdictions.[36][37]
Linguistic diversity
As of 2009, Ethnologue catalogued 6,909 living human languages.[38] The exact number of known living languages will vary from 5,000 to 10,000, generally depending on the precision of one's definition of "language", and in particular, on how one classifies dialects.
Estimates vary depending on many factors, but the general consensus is that there are between 6,000 and 7,000 languages currently spoken. Between 50% and 90% of those will have become extinct by the year 2100.[39]
The top 20 languages spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the world's population. In contrast, many of the other languages are spoken by small communities, most of them with fewer than 10,000 speakers.[39]