21st century

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. 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. The early 2020s saw an increase in wars across the world, as seen with conflicts such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Gaza war. The United States has remained the sole global superpower, while China is now considered to be an emerging superpower.
In 2022, 45% of the world's population lived in "some form of democracy", although only 8% lived in "full democracies". 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.
Globally, from January 2020 to May 2023, the COVID-19 pandemic began to rapidly spread worldwide, causing more than 7 million reported deaths, and around 18.2 to 33.5 million estimated deaths, while at the same time, causing severe global economic disruption, including the largest global recession since the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Due to the sudden proliferation of internet-accessible mobile devices, such as smartphones becoming ubiquitous worldwide beginning in the early 2010s, more than two-thirds of the world's population obtained access to the Internet by 2023. 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 greatly accelerated in the 2020s, with the United States mainly dominating space exploration, including the James Webb Space Telescope, Ingenuity helicopter, Lunar Gateway, and Artemis program.
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 2010, was being officially referred to by Vancouver 2010 as "the twenty-ten Olympics".
Technologies such as ultrasound, 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.
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-generated content 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 few percent 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 late 2010s, 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.
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.
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 regions than at any point 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.
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 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. 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.
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.
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. 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. 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.
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.
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.
As of 2009, Ethnologue catalogued 6,909 living human languages. 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.
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.
Some territories and states have gained independence during the 21st century. This is a list of sovereign states that have gained independence in the 21st century and have been recognized by the UN.
These nations gained sovereignty through government reform.
The Union of the Comoros replaced the Federal Islamic Republic of the Comoros
The Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan replaced the Islamic State of Afghanistan.
The State Union of Serbia and Montenegro replaced the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan replaced the Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan
The Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal replaced the Kingdom of Nepal.
The National Transitional Council of Libya replaced the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
The State of Libya replaced the National Transitional Council of Libya.
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan replaced the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
These territories have declared independence and secured relative autonomy but they have only been recognized by some UN member states:
These territories have declared independence and secured relative autonomy but they have been recognized by no one:
These territories were annexed from a sovereign country, the action has only been recognized by some UN member states:
These territories were ceded to another country:
The Digital Revolution continued into the early 21st century with mobile phone usage and Global Internet usage growing massively, becoming available to many more people, with more applications and faster speeds.
Social networking emerged in the mid-2000s as a popular form of social communication, partly replacing much of the function of email, message boards and instant messaging services. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and WeChat are all major examples of social media which have gained widespread popularity. The use of webcams and front-facing cameras on PCs and related devices, and services such as Skype, Zoom and FaceTime, have made video calling and video conferencing widespread. Their use hugely increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.
2000s
2010s
2020s
Association football is the most popular sport worldwide with the FIFA World Cup being the most viewed football event. Other sports such as rugby, cricket, baseball, basketball, ice hockey, tennis, and golf are popular globally. In cricket, the emergence of the Twenty20 format and the creation of the Indian Premier League led to changes in the nature of the sport. American swimmer Michael Phelps won an Olympic record setting 8 Gold medals at the 2008 Summer Olympics.
The rise of the Internet and Social Media led to art being democratized and revolutionized. Art websites and spaces such as DeviantArt grew rapidly. New art movements, such as minimalism, craftivism, stuckism, and remodernism, as well as art forms such as street art, environmental art, and pixel art, rose as well. However, concerns grew over the dilution and commercialization of art.
In the late 2010s, NFTs, unique digital assets that represent ownership or proof of authenticity for a specific item, primarily used for digital art, as a new form of investment asset, began surging dramatically. However, many considered them to be an economic bubble or a Ponzi scheme. In 2022, the NFT market collapsed; a May 2022 estimate was that the number of sales was down over 90% compared to 2021. By September 2023, over 95% of all NFTs had zero monetary value.
At the beginning of the century, the compact disc (CD) was the standard form of music media, but alternative forms of music media started to take its place such as music downloading and online streaming. A resurgence in sales of vinyl records in the 2010s was driven by record collectors and audiophiles who prefer the sound of analog vinyl records to digital recordings. In 2020, for the first time since the 1980s, vinyl surpassed CDs as the primary form of physical media for consumers of music, though both were still surpassed by online streaming, which by the 2020s became the predominant way that people consumed music. As of 2024, the most active music streaming services were YouTube (2 billion monthly music users, 100 million premium subscribers), Spotify (615 million monthly users, 239 million premium subscribers), Tencent Music (576 million monthly users, 106.7 million premium subscribers), NetEase Cloud Music (205.9 million monthly users, 44.1 million premium subscribers), Gaana (185 million monthly users), SoundCloud (175 million monthly users), JioSaavn (100 million monthly users), and Apple Music (60 million subscribers).
As with music, the story of the first three decades of the 21st century was the growth of streaming television services in competition with older forms of television, such as Terrestrial television, cable television, and satellite television. The first major company to dominate the streaming service market was Netflix, which began as a DVD-delivery service in the late 1990s, transitioned into an online media streaming platform initially focused on delivering content produced by studios, then began to produce its own content, beginning with the popular and critically acclaimed series House of Cards in 2013. Netflix's success encouraged the creation of numerous other streaming services, such as Hulu, YouTube Premium, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+, the latter of which, within a year of its launch, overtook Netflix as the most downloaded television streaming application.