Being born in 1982, I was a teenager in the ’90s and I reached the age of maturity in 2000.
Even since childhood, I was extremely passionate about the possible future of humanity, especially since the ’90s were times when technology was just beginning to explode. The progress in technology had an immediate effect in real life, as the use by the average human of mobile phones, computers, gaming consoles, flat screens, internet, etc.
The year 2000 was the beginning of a new millennium, and I imagined that a new era will begin, that we will conquer the Moon, colonize Mars, make advancements in medicine and science, and things that will bring us a better life. I imagined electric cars, flying cars, computers in our pockets, and so on. Many of us did!
Some of these “predictions” happened (smartphones and tablets, electric cars), others have already been promised today (colonizing Mars by 2030) and others may be in a more distant future. I even imagined unfortunate scenarios, such as overpopulation, pollution, climate change, but there are other scenarios that I had no idea are possible or they can happen in our lifetime.
These are the things I didn’t anticipate:
The Twin Towers Attack From 11 September 2001
An event that took everyone by surprise happened immediately after the year 2000, on the 11th of September 2001. It was the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the monuments of power in the United States.
I heard about it on the radio, because I was at my grandmother's house, during the summer vacation as a high school student. We didn’t have television, so I ran to our neighbors to see the event on a tube TV.
It was a shock for everyone. Who would have thought of such an event before it actually happened? Surely no one.
The Occurrence and Rise of Cryptocurrency
Before the year 2000, I don’t think there was anything that could be even close to the concept of blockchain, or at least the knowledge was not a public thing.
If you do some research now, you can find that the first cryptographically secured chain of blocks ever described existed in 1991 and the first decentralized digital currency was Bit Gold in 1998, which is, in fact, the ancestor of Bitcoin, as a concept. Just think about it, this is just the time when the Internet was just entering our lives.
I imagined many scenarios for the future, but let’s be realistic now, who could predict cryptocurrencies would exist and not only exist but also go mainstream and rise to have such monetary value?
The Global COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020
I don't think anyone was prepared for this…What the pandemic brought to our lives, is something that has changed the world forever. None of us expected this level of restrictions and everything that followed.
I remember that more than ten years ago, I wanted to be a freelancer, but in my country, to everyone I said I want to work from home, solely the fact that I was working from home seemed odd.
Right now, working from home, also known as remote work, is something that most people are familiar with and it has become an accepted concept after the 2020 pandemic.
Climate Change Having a Huge Impact So Early
In the ’90s and even after 2000, people have been talking about the future effects that pollution will have on the environment. There was even a cartoon series called Captain Planet, that some of you surely know, and that I have viewed as a child on television. It was about 5 young people and a superhero who have united under a single power to fight pollution and save the environment.
Today, even the fact of saving the environment has become an emergency and some scientists say that it is too late to do anything about it. We are seeing with our own eyes and we are actually living in an era of severe climate change already, because of what we have done to the planet over time. I expected it would happen one day, but not in my lifetime.
Well, the ice storm that happened in my area in 2019 was so big that many people had their cars full of bumps after it passed. The hail was the size of chicken eggs and the storm came so fast that the sky changed from clear to very dark in just a few minutes.
