It’s human nature to arbitrarily divide time into blocks: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries and millennia.
This New Year’s Day marks the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. Yes, it’s been 25 years since the start of the century. A lot has changed.
Remember the Y2K disaster fear? We thought that moving to a new century was going to cause massive computer failures and bring our nation to its knees. How silly that seems in retrospect.
The first quarter of the 21st century saw our biggest epidemic in over 100 years. The covid crisis seems light years away now, yet another river humanity had to cross.
The early days of covid were dark. The virus was most deadly in its early form. But as time went by, both the virus and the human immune system adapted. Now covid has become like the other coronaviruses, a common cold. Life moves on.
Remember the first time you got covid? It was scary. For millions throughout the world, it was deadly. The epidemic was real, but it was not something that could destroy humanity. We survived.
I got covid relatively early, when it was still deadly. I had the worst headache of my life and my fever shot up to 104. I went to bed that night wondering if this was the end. I woke up 12 hours later, surprised to find how soundly I slept. I reached over and took my temperature — 98 degrees. And that was the end of covid for me.
My friend Kemal, who I got it from, didn’t fare so well. He spent 10 days in the hospital.
The first quarter of the 21st century saw the rise of a political phenomenon — Donald Trump. His election was one of the first times that an individual with zero government experience was elected to our highest office. He was unlike any other President we’ve ever had.
Then covid hit and Trump lost. Now, amazingly, despite felony convictions, he’s back in the Oval Office. Only the second time a U. S. President has returned to office after losing. (Grover Cleveland accomplished this feat in 1892.)
The first quarter of the 21st century saw the rise of Google and Facebook. Companies that changed the world performing tasks we didn’t even conceive of 10 years before. Now they have become trillion dollar monopolies along with Amazon and Microsoft.
We saw the rise of Elon Musk, who has become, by far, the richest man in the world, brazenly stomping into new markets like electric cars and private space launches. Who could have predicted his improbable rise?
This first quarter saw the first European war invasion since the Cold War with Russia trying to conquer Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in this bloody protracted war which has turned Russia and its leader Putin into a pariah state allied with North Korea. Who could have predicted that?
This quarter century saw the greatest percentage drop in extreme world poverty in all of history, dropping from 30 percent in 2000 to six percent today. In comparison, the drop from 1975 to 2000 was from 49 percent to 30 percent.
This makes world pessimists seem out of touch. In fact, the world has never been in such good shape. People are better off, by far, than at any other time in history.
Now in Africa, the poorest continent, obesity is a bigger health problem than malnourishment. Advanced nations now have a pill that will cause you to rapidly lose wight, saving millions from the plague of diabetes.
And who could forget how this quarter century started? With the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. This event started a massive global war against fanatical Islam, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and major war in the Middle East. Yet another existential threat that the U. S. and the world overcame.
In 2003, we sequenced the human genome for the first time. This quickly led to routine ability to analyze DNA, which had profound effects on humanity. By the end of the first quarter century, it was routine for people to have their DNA scanned and find out their ancestral history, linking millions of people to cousins and distant relatives. Thousands of innocent prisoners were released from jail after DNA testing proved their innocence. Medical advances using genome sequencing skyrocketed.
In 2004, a massive Indian Ocean tsunami with waves up to 100 feet high killed over 230,000 people in 14 different countries. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
And who could forget the financial crisis of 2008? It seemed as though the entire world financial system was collapsing. The U. S. government initiated first-ever, never-been-tried emergency measures and saved the day. Panic prevailed and the stock markets collapsed. But we survived and average annual stock gains were over 10 percent per year for this quarter century — one of the best quarter centuries ever for stocks.
And now, at the end of this quarter century, we see the rise of artificial intelligence and quantum computing. These advances could make our unbelievable progress look like nothing in comparison. The pace of progress advances logarithmically. Who knows what the future will hold? It’s exciting and scary.
There is no doubt this rapid pace of change is causing social turmoil as our institutions get shredded faster than we can replace them with new ones. Humans did not evolve in these conditions and we could be ill adapted.
But the plasticity and adaptability of the human brain has so far proven to be up for the task. The striving of humanity cannot be stopped. The future awaits and we must plow onward, even though danger and uncertainty lurks. The next quarter century is going to be a doozy!
There is one thing that will see us through and save us: Faith and obedience to God. As long as we do this, humanity will prevail.
