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.^[1][2][3] 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.^[4] The 2020s saw an increase in wars across the world, as seen with conflicts such as the Russian Invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war.^[5][6] 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".^[7] The United Nations estimates that by 2050, two-thirds of the world's population will be urbanized.^[8]

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.^[a] Effects of global warming and rising sea levels exacerbated the ecological crises, with eight islands disappearing between 2007 and 2014.^[9][10][11]

Globally, from January 2020 to May 2023, the COVID-19 pandemic began to rapidly spread worldwide, causing more than 7 million reported deaths,^[12] and around 18.2 to 33.5 million estimated deaths,^[13] while at the same time, causing severe global economic disruption, including the largest global recession since the Great Depression in the 1930s.^[14]

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.^[15] After the success of the Human Genome Project, DNA sequencing services became available and affordable.^[16][17] There were significant improvements in the complexity of artificial intelligence, with American companies, universities, and research labs pioneering advances in the field.^[18] Generative AI-based applications such as ChatGPT and DALL-E have accumulated billions of users, and allow users to instantly generate complex texts, images, art, and video, comparable to the sophistication of human work.^[19] 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.^[20][21]

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