47 Fun Facts About 21st Century

Why do purists say the 21st century began in 2001 rather than 2000?

The calendar has no year zero. It runs straight from 1 BC to AD 1, so the first century only ended with the year 100, and every century since has ended on a '00' year, not begun on one.

Roughly how many people were killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks?

Nearly 3,000. Of the 2,977 victims, 40 were aboard Flight 93, whose passengers fought the hijackers; the plane came down in a Pennsylvania field, about 20 minutes' flying time from Washington.

In 2001 Dennis Tito became the first space tourist, paying a reported $20 million to visit which destination?

The International Space Station. His first deal was for a trip to Russia's Mir, which fell through when the ageing station was scrapped, and NASA then advised against flying him at all.

Wikipedia, launched in January 2001, takes the 'wiki' in its name from which language's word for 'quick'?

Hawaiian. Programmer Ward Cunningham, who built the first wiki in 1995, learned the word when a Honolulu airport agent sent him to the 'wiki wiki' bus that ran between terminals.

Which large EU economy kept its own currency when euro cash arrived in 2002?

Britain. It had secured an opt-out when the single currency was agreed at Maastricht in 1992, so the pound stayed while the mark, the lira and the peseta were withdrawn.

Which airline operated Concorde's last commercial flight, on 24 October 2003?

British Airways. Air France had retired its Concordes that May, and when Richard Branson offered to buy BA's for £1 to keep them flying with Virgin, BA said they were not for sale.

Who unveiled the Human Genome Project's first draft with Tony Blair?

Bill Clinton. In June 2000 he called the draft 'the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind', with the heads of the rival public and private sequencing teams beside him.

The 26 December 2004 earthquake and tsunami was centred off the coast of which country?

Indonesia. The quake struck off Sumatra, and unlike the Pacific, the Indian Ocean had no tsunami warning network to alert the coasts in its path; one was up and running 18 months later.

Which social network, launched in February 2004, was at first open only to students at one university?

Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg coded 'thefacebook.com' in about a week, three months after Harvard's disciplinary board called him in over Facemash, his site for rating classmates' photos.

Which New Orleans stadium served as a 'shelter of last resort' for thousands of residents during Hurricane Katrina in 2005?

The Superdome. With no power or clean water, conditions inside collapsed within days, and its evacuees were bused to another stadium altogether: the Astrodome in Houston.

Which NASA probe set off for Pluto in January 2006, months before its target was reclassified as a dwarf planet?

New Horizons. It left Earth bound for the ninth planet, astronomers voted that title away seven months into the flight, and the probe flew on for nine years to reach Pluto in July 2015.

Which carrier was the exclusive US network for the first iPhone in 2007?

AT&T. Apple had signed the deal with Cingular, which took the AT&T name before launch, so American buyers had no choice of network until a Verizon iPhone arrived in February 2011.

Michael Phelps's eight golds at the 2008 Olympics beat whose record for a single Games?

Mark Spitz. His seven golds from 1972 were matched only when Phelps won the 100 m butterfly by one hundredth of a second, 50.58 to 50.59; a relay the next day brought the eighth.

Which Republican did Barack Obama defeat in the November 2008 US presidential election?

John McCain. Weeks before the vote he took the microphone from a supporter at his own rally who called Obama 'an Arab', telling the crowd his rival was 'a decent family man'.

What name did bitcoin's pseudonymous creator use when mining the 'genesis block' on 3 January 2009?

Satoshi Nakamoto. Whoever is behind the name hid a message in that first block, a headline from The Times of 3 January 2009: 'Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks'.

Usain Bolt set the 100 m world record in 2009 in which city's Olympic Stadium?

Berlin. He ran 9.58 on the track where Jesse Owens won four golds in 1936, and the city's mayor thanked him with a painted, three-ton slab of the Berlin Wall to take home to Jamaica.

Which film became the first to gross more than $2 billion at the worldwide box office, in January 2010?

Avatar. James Cameron beat his own 12-year-old box-office record with it, and re-releases have since lifted the film's worldwide total past $2.9 billion.

In which city does the Burj Khalifa, completed in 2010, stand?

Dubai. Until opening night it was the Burj Dubai; the emirate's ruler then renamed it for Sheikh Khalifa of neighbouring Abu Dhabi, which had just lent Dubai $10 billion to cover its debts.

In which country is Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano whose 2010 ash cloud grounded flights across much of Europe?

Iceland. The eruption broke out beneath the mountain's ice cap, and meltwater flashing to steam blasted fine ash up into the jet stream; fearing damage to jet engines, regulators closed the skies.

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill happened in which body of water?

Gulf of Mexico. Eleven workers died in the blast and oil flowed from the seabed well for 87 days; a US court later found BP grossly negligent, and the company agreed a record-setting settlement.

The Arab Spring uprisings began in December 2010 in which country?

Tunisia: the self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December 2010 sparked protests that toppled Ben Ali, then spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.

Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011 in a compound in which Pakistani city?

Abbottabad. The world's most wanted man had been living about a kilometre from Pakistan's top military academy, in a quiet garrison town; the raid on his walled compound took some 40 minutes.

Which earlier disaster is the only nuclear accident besides Fukushima in 2011 to be rated Level 7, the scale's maximum?

Chernobyl. The two share the top rung although Fukushima released only a fraction as much radioactive material, one reason critics say the scale lumps very different disasters together.

Which country became the world's newest sovereign state on 9 July 2011?

South Sudan. Independence from Sudan was the prize of a deal that ended Africa's longest-running civil war, but peace did not hold: within three years the new state was fighting one of its own.

On 4 July 2012, CERN announced a new particle believed to be which long-sought boson?

Higgs. In 1964 a journal rejected Peter Higgs's paper setting out the idea, so he added a paragraph predicting a new particle and sent it elsewhere; CERN announced that particle 48 years later.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, elected pope on 13 March 2013, was the first pope from which religious order?

The Jesuits. Yet he named himself after the founder of another order, Francis of Assisi: as the winning votes came in, a cardinal hugged him and said, 'Don't forget the poor!'

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished on 8 March 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to which city?

Beijing. The jet never came close: radar showed it turning back west across Malaysia, and satellite signals put its last hours far to the south, over the Indian Ocean off Australia.

Who became the youngest Nobel laureate ever when she shared the 2014 Peace Prize at age 17?

Malala Yousafzai, shot by a Taliban gunman on her school bus in Pakistan's Swat Valley in October 2012, shared the 2014 Peace Prize with Indian children's rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi.

What did LIGO detect for the first time on 14 September 2015, confirming Einstein's prediction?

Gravitational waves. They came from two black holes that collided over a billion years ago and, for an instant, radiated more power than all the stars in the visible universe combined.

What did SpaceX's Falcon 9 do in December 2015 that no orbital rocket had done before?

Landed its main stage upright. It was SpaceX's first launch since a Falcon 9 had broken apart in flight six months earlier, and the booster came back to a pad near its launch site.

Which club won the Premier League in 2016 after bookmakers had priced them as 5,000–1 outsiders?

Leicester City. A year before they went clear at the top they had been bottom of the table, seven points from safety, and only a late run of seven wins in nine games kept them up.

Which prime minister called the UK's 2016 EU referendum and resigned over the result?

David Cameron. He had promised the vote in his party's election manifesto and then urged the country to stay in; Leave won with 51.9%, and he announced he would go within hours.

Which team's 2016 World Series win ended a 108-year wait?

Chicago Cubs. Their last title had come in 1908, and they nearly missed this one: down three games to one against Cleveland, they won three straight, the last by 8–7 in the tenth inning.

Which planet-sized network of radio dishes produced the first image of a black hole, released in April 2019?

Event Horizon Telescope. It linked eight radio observatories around the globe so that they worked as one dish the size of Earth, sharp enough to show the glowing ring around galaxy M87's black hole.

Which city's Summer Olympics were postponed by a year after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020?

Tokyo. No Olympics had ever been postponed before, only cancelled, and when the Games finally opened in July 2021 they were still officially called Tokyo 2020.

For six days in March 2021 the 400-metre container ship Ever Given blocked which waterway?

The Suez Canal. A fleet of tugs and dredgers finally floated the ship off on a high tide, by which time hundreds of vessels were queuing at either end of the waterway.

Which space telescope left Earth on Christmas Day 2021, folded up inside a European Ariane 5 rocket?

Webb. Too wide for any rocket's nose cone, the James Webb telescope flew folded like origami, then opened itself out during the month-long trip to its post 1.5 million km from Earth.

Which Ukrainian territory did Russia annex in 2014, eight years before launching its full-scale invasion?

Crimea. Soldiers in uniforms without insignia seized the peninsula within three weeks in early 2014; Russia laid claim to the other three regions only after invading on 24 February 2022.

Queen Elizabeth II died in September 2022, after 70 years on the throne, at which royal residence?

Balmoral Castle. Two days earlier she had received Liz Truss there, the 15th and last prime minister of a reign that began with Winston Churchill, a man born 101 years before Truss.

Which company released ChatGPT in November 2022 and saw it reach an estimated 100 million users within two months?

OpenAI. Within weeks Google's managers had reportedly declared a 'code red' over the threat to their search business, and analysts said no consumer internet app had ever grown so fast.

According to the UN, world population passed which milestone on 15 November 2022?

8 billion. The UN put the growth down largely to longer lives: better public health, nutrition and medicine mean far fewer infants and mothers die, and it called the milestone a success story.

Robert Francis Prevost, elected on 8 May 2025 as Pope Leo XIV, is the first pope born in which country?

United States. Yet the Chicago-born pope gave his first address from the balcony in Italian and Spanish, with a greeting to 'my beloved Diocese of Chiclayo' in Peru, where he had been bishop.

ESA's Philae lander made the first soft landing on what, in 2014?

A comet. The harpoons meant to anchor Philae failed, so it bounced twice and came to rest in the shadow of a cliff, where its sun-starved batteries ran down within three days.

How did NASA's Cassini mission end in September 2017 after 13 years orbiting Saturn?

It dived into the planet. With its fuel almost spent, NASA steered Cassini into Saturn's atmosphere to burn up, so it could never crash into Enceladus, a moon whose hidden ocean might harbour life.

Before ending up in Moscow, Edward Snowden flew to which city in May 2013 to hand NSA documents to journalists?

Hong Kong. A month later he boarded a flight to Moscow, hoping to travel on to asylum in Latin America, and instead spent weeks stranded in the airport's transit zone before Russia took him in.

Which country made the first soft landing on the Moon's far side in January 2019?

China's Chang'e 4 touched down in the Von Kármán crater on 3 January 2019; the relay satellite Queqiao had been parked beyond the Moon first so the lander could talk to Earth.

Which company operated the Titan submersible that imploded on a dive to the Titanic in June 2023?

OceanGate. Deep-diving subs normally use a metal sphere; to seat five, the company built Titan's hull as a carbon-fibre tube despite experts' warnings, and its own chief executive died aboard.