While re-watching the X-Files from DVD, it recently hit me how much the entire mood of our society shifted since the 90s; I doubt a show like the X-Files would be able to gain traction in the current environment. So I started thinking about what defines a decade, and the defining moments seem to happen late in the previous decade or early in the current one.

For the 1990s it was the collapse communism in east europe from 1989 to 1991, resulting in a surge of optimism regarding the future.
For the 2000s it was undoubtably the attacks of 9-11, leading to an atmosphere of fear eagerly fed by most politicians, and Bushes crusades.
The sense of freedom that the internet offered to the individual during the late 1990s has been mostly crushed, that particular "war" has been lost to corporations and gouvernments regaining lost power and control (DMCA et al).

Whats it going to be for the 2010 decade? While I personally would love to see something that would cause a resurgence of optimism, the realist/fatalist in me disagrees. The most likely scenario I can currently think of is that the long awaited second financial crash will happen 2011 or 2012; with the worst case scenario of having the US plummeting in stature from the last superpower on earth to a third world/gateway country, defaulting on its debts and pulling a large part of the western european economies down with it (albeit not was far). China and India will continue to prosper, starting a more pronounced shifting of the focus of power to those countries that will define the world for the next 20-30 years.

On a purely speculative level, if this really happens, we might see rising tensions between China (needing resources to keep its economy going) and Russia over the resources in the eastern parts of Siberia that would start to be easier to harvest due to the continuing climate change, that may even lead to a territorial war for resources toward the end of the decade.

What ray of sunshine would you cast into foretelling the next decade?