New Delhi: The first year of the current decade marked several firsts. The US got its first woman Vice President in the country's history. For the first time, humans went to space as tourists, the first non-fungible token was sold, and metaverse got 'real'. 


So, as we bid goodbye to the year 2021, let's have a look at some of the incidents that happened for the first time. 


1. US gets first woman vice president, also first second gentleman


The year 2021 saw the United States getting its first woman Vice President, Kamala Harris. She later also became the first woman president in the history of the country with a brief stint of one hour and 25 minutes. As Kamala Harris got elected as the 49th Vice President of the country, her husband Douglas Emhoff became the first second gentleman of the country.


2. Space tourism takes off


This was the year when humans started setting their foot in space for the purpose of tourism rather than research or study. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos put their money into this and many non-astronauts went to space. Inspiration4 became the world’s first all-civilian mission where four non-professional astronauts went to the space aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon Resilience Spacecraft.


3. New games at Olympics


The year 2021 saw the entry of five new games at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The new games that made their way into the Olympics were baseball/softball, karate, skateboard, sports climbing, and surfing. The Summer Olympics that was scheduled to be held in the year 2020 was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic and held this year. 


4. First X gender US passport


Gender rights activists and other people who support gender rights achieved a new milestone in the US this year as the country issued the first passport with the ‘X’ gender marker. The State Department said the objective was to give non-binary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people a gender marker other than male or female on their travel document, Reuters reported. A US Navy veteran was the recipient of this passport.


5. First Black American to head Pentagon


Lloyd J Auestin became the first Black secretary of Defence in the United States this year. As reported by AP, Austin ascended the elite ranks of the Army in his 41-year-old career cutting through racial barriers. Austin took to Twitter and expressed his pride for being the first Black secretary of Defence of the US.


6. Metaverse gets real


It won’t be an exaggeration if we say that ‘meta’ and ‘metaverse’ were the words of the year in the field of technology. From Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, all the big names in the tech industry have been talking about it. 


Metaverse was till now a fictional concept where the real and the virtual world came together. But the term now appears to get real. 


Zuckerberg made the big announcement this year to invest $50 million in the metaverse project and accordingly changed the name of his company to Meta. 


7. First NFT sold 


Another word that caught the fancy of everyone was NFT or Non-Fungible Tokens. An NFT of the digital artwork ‘Cryptopunk’ was sold for $11.8 million on September 11 this year in London. 


Cryptopunk is a set of 10,000-pixel art characters that was made by Larva Labs in 2017.


8. First Greenland rain


In a first that did not enthuse anyone, it rained at the highest point on Greenland’s ice sheet for several hours. The rain was a cause for concern as the Greenland ice sheet is the second largest after Antarctica and rainfall there is a sign of global warming. 


9. A NASA equipment entered Sun’s atmosphere 


In what was described as one of the major milestones in human history, a NASA spacecraft 'touched' the Sun for the first time. NASA spacecraft Parker Solar Probe entered the Sun’s upper atmosphere and sampled particles and magnetic fields there.


10. Bitcoin became legal tender in a country 


While India has been witnessing a big debate on the legal status for cryptocurrency and any decision on it is still pending as we write, El Salvador has made Bitcoin its legal tender. The country has become the first country in the world to give a legal nod to the cryptocurrency.