21st century

For other uses, see 21st century (disambiguation).

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 on the United States in 2001. The NATO intervention in Afghanistan and the United States-led coalition intervention in Iraq in the early 2000s, as well as 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. Beginning in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic began to rapidly spread worldwide, causing more than seven million reported deaths and up to 33.5 million estimated deaths, and severe global economic disruption including the largest global recession since the Great Depression in the 1930s. The pandemic remained a global health crisis until mid-2023, it went on to become the fifth deadliest pandemic in history. The early 2020s saw an increase in wars across the world, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gaza war, and 2026 Iran war. The war on drugs has continued, with the focus primarily on Mexico and the rest of Latin America. The United States is generally considered to have remained the sole global superpower in the 2000s and 2010s, but by the 2020s, China has increasingly been labeled as a superpower due to its influence in geopolitics, technology, manufacturing, economics, and culture, along with the United States' own decline that began in the 2010s.

In 2022, 45% of the world's population lived in "some form of democracy", although only 8% lived in "full democracies". This figure marks a decline in global democracy since the end of the 20th century, as more and more countries experience democratic backsliding. 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 $101 trillion in 2022, and though many economies rose at greater levels, some gradually contracted. Effects of global warming and rising sea levels exacerbated the ecological crises, with eight islands disappearing between 2007 and 2014.

Due to the sudden proliferation of internet-accessible mobile devices, such as smartphones becoming ubiquitous worldwide beginning in the early 2010s, nearly three-quarters of the world's population obtained access to the Internet by 2025. After the success of the Human Genome Project, DNA sequencing services became available and affordable. There were significant improvements in the complexity of artificial intelligence, with American companies, universities, and research labs pioneering advances in the field. Research into outer space accelerated in the 2020s, with the United States dominating space exploration, including the James Webb Space Telescope, Ingenuity Mars helicopter, and Artemis lunar exploration program.

Pronunciation

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). 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 Canada in 2010, was being officially referred to by Vancouver 2010 as "the twenty-ten Olympics".

Society

Technologies such as ultrasound, cloud computing, prenatal genetic testing, and genetic engineering have advanced significantly. Due to 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% of Indian births were of girls. This has led to an increase in bachelors in countries such as China and India. The first genetically modified children were born November 2018 in China to significant controversy, beginning a new biological era for the human species.

Anxiety and depression 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.

Knowledge and information

Shanghai has become a symbol of the recent economic boom of China.

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. Since 2003, with the beginning of social media and "user-generated content", the same amount of data is created every two days. With the AI boom of the 2020s gaining international prominence, as of 2024, mass-produced AI slop comprised over half of the Internet.

Telecommunications in the early 21st century are much more advanced and universal than they were in the late 20th century. Only a small percentage of the world's population were Internet users and cellular phone owners in the late 1990s; while as of 2023, 67% of the world's population is online, and 78% of all people aged 10 and above own a mobile phone. In the 2010s, artificial intelligence, mainly in the form of deep learning and machine learning, became more prevalent and in the early 2020s, with the rise of generative AI, the AI boom began. As of 2022, 8.6% of the world's population still lacked access to electricity.

India's Prayag Kumbh Mela is regarded as the world's largest religious festival.

In 2001, Dennis Tito became the first space tourist, beginning the era of commercial spaceflight. Meanwhile 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. On 23 August 2023, with the Chandrayaan-3 Mission, India became the first country to touch down near the lunar south pole.

Culture and politics

Further information: International relations since 1989

War and violence have declined considerably compared to the 20th century, continuing the post-World War II trend called Long Peace. However, since the beginning of the 2020s, geopolitical tensions and wars have been rising across the world, as seen with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Gaza war, the Tigray war, the Sudanese civil war, and the deterioration of China–United States relations. As of 2023, 14% of people in the world live within five kilometers of violent conflict; the highest number of ongoing conflicts across various since World War II.

Poverty is still widespread globally, but fewer people live in the most extreme forms of poverty. In 1990, 37.9% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty; by 2022, this had dropped to just 9%.

The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal drew international attention to the possible adverse effects of social media in influencing citizens' views, particularly regarding the 2016 United States presidential election.

Population and urbanization

Projected world population by 2100 based on the UN's medium population scenario.

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, and 9.8 billion by 2050. According to the United Nations World Urbanization prospects, 60% of the world's human population is projected to live in megacities and megalopolis/megalopolises by 2030, 70% by 2050, and 90% by 2080.

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. 10 million Britons (16% of the United Kingdom population) will, on average, live to 100 or older.

Climate change remains a serious concern; United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, for instance, has described it as an "existential threat" to humanity.