1 : 21st century
2 : Important developments, events, achievements
3 : Influential people in politics as of 2004
4 : Influential people in technology as of 2003
5 : Influential people in science as of 2003
6 : Influential people in mathematics as of 2003
7 : Influential people in art as of 2003
8 : Predictions for the 21st century as of 2003
9 : Astronomical predictions
10 : Decades and years
11 : External links
(20th century - 21st century - 22nd century - other centuries)
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As a means of recording the passage of time, the 21st Century is the current century, lasting from 2001-2100. The twenty-first century is the first century of the third millennium (2001 - 3000).
The increasing prevalence of global communications and encounters with other calendars (Islamic calendar, Chinese calendar, Persian calendar, Hebrew calendar) suggest that the terms "21st century" and "the third millennium" have a substantial cultural bias. Some futurists suggest simply abandoning the idea of "centuries", setting the start date back to the beginning of human urbanization in the 4th millennium BC, making this the seventh millennium. Within that, some suggest also adopting a cyclic time model based on global climate change, which they view as the macro-equivalent of the annual seasons.
Important developments, events, achievements
Influential people in politics as of 2004
(in alphabetical order)
- Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority
- Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, de facto government leader
- Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations
- Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Authority
- Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda leader, in hiding (or possibly dead)
- Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
- George W. Bush, President of the United States of America
- Jacques Chirac, President of France
- Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II- Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and various other Commonwealth Realms.
- Saddam Hussein, deposed President of Iraq, currently held by US forces
- Hamid Karzai, interim president of the Afghan Transitional Administration
- John Kerry, Democratic candidate for Presidency of the United States of America
- Colin Powell, United States Secretary of State
- Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, President of the Russian Federation
- Gerhard Schröder, German Bundeskanzler (chancellor)
- Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel
Influential people in technology as of 2003
Influential people in science as of 2003
Influential people in mathematics as of 2003
Influential people in art as of 2003
Predictions for the 21st century as of 2003
''Please note that these predictions are controversial, and disputed by many other observers: they are listed here to show some late 20th century futurists' predictions of the events of the 21st century so that they may be compared with real events as they happen.''
- 2003: The last birth year of the Millennial Generation. (William Strauss and Neil Howe, 1991)
- 2005: Third turning (Unraveling, which began with 1984's "Morning in America") over; Fourth turning (Crisis era) begins (William Strauss and Neil Howe, 1997)
- 2006: GNU/Linux becomes the dominant operating system on the desktop (it became the dominant server OS at the end of the 20th century).
- 2006: Chinese passes English as the most prevalent language on the Internet
- 2007: Bulgaria and Romania join the European Union
- 2009: majority of text is created by continuous speech recognition (predicted by Ray Kurzweil 1999)
- 2010: robots appear with the processing power of lizard brains, capable of autonomously cleaning houses (predicted by Hans Moravec 1998)
- 2010: The audio CD is no longer the format of first choice
- 2012: the great cycle of the Maya calendar rolls over
- 2014: Fish farming, or aquaculture, provides a majority of seafood in the United States
- 2019: computers pass limited forms of the Turing test; people begin to have relationships with computers; visual, auditory and tactile virtual reality enables people to realistically interact with physically distant partners; automatically driving systems installed in most roads (predicted by Ray Kurzweil 1999)
- 2020: Peak year of the "Crisis of 2020" (Strauss and Howe, 1991)
- 2027: Crisis of 2020 over; First Turning (New High) begins (Strauss and Howe, 1997)
- 2029: Human - computer communication via direct neural connections; humans don't work in production, agriculture and transport anymore; computers claim to be conscious and these claims are generally accepted (predicted by Ray Kurzweil 1999)
- 2030: robots with monkey-like thinking capabilities, able to imitate tasks and solve simple problems, appear (predicted by Hans Moravec 1998)
- 2038: ctime overflow: The number of seconds since January 1, 1970 will no longer be storable as a 32-bit signed integer. Some expect this will be a second Y2K.
- 2040: robots comparable in ability to humans appear; soon thereafter, they surpass humans in most abilities (predicted by Hans Moravec 1998)
- 2047: High over; Awakening begins (Strauss and Howe, 1997) India celebrates 100 years of independence 1947
- 2049: Nanotechnology produces food without agriculture; nanobot swarms create tactile-realistic projections of people and objects (predicted by Ray Kurzweil 1999)
- 2050: the biggest war the world has ever seen is over, and rebuilding is ongoing (predicted by John Archibald Wheeler in 2002)
- 2069: Awakening over; Unraveling begins (Strauss and Howe, 1997)
- 2099: Humans and computers merge; most human consciousnesses don't employ carbon based hardware anymore (predicted by Ray Kurzweil 1999)
Astronomical predictions
Decades and years
External links
- Long Foundation to improve long-term thinking
- Long Long-term cultural institution
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