Toasting New Year's Eve 2099

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It’s New Year’s Eve, 2099, and you’re in your sky condo with the one you love, toasting the passing of the twenty-first century. What were the greatest events of that century, events that change the course of history?

 

To help frame this question in political terms, I recall an observation of historical succession—generally agreed to by Toynbee, Sorokin, and Durant—that civilization evolves cyclically: monarchy —> aristocracy —> democracy —> dictatorship —> monarchy —> etc.

 

Between democracy and dictatorship, they collectively observed, there was always an occurrence of extreme anarchy.

 

I would probably make a toast for the anarchy that broke out worldwide in 2019 and ended democracy, as we knew it. And I would probably be required to do that, and also to pay homage to The Great Google of Oz (or Whomever) in my toast, because democracy will be just a sweet memory and we’ll need a benevolent and loving dictator to protect us from the street predators who kill us and eat us on our way to the grocery store.

 

All this will be the harvest of seeds sown before 2019; seeds that were evident even in 2009, when sea piracy occurred with impunity off Somalia's coast on a daily basis. They’re just as invincible as the Al-Qaeda and the suicide bombers.

 

But there were other great events in the twenty-first century. Any speculations that would be remembered in a toast on New Year’s Eve 2099?