Farewell to the 2010s, a decade full of rockets, exoplanets, and horrifying social media

[View this email in your browser]( [Open Ars Technica in your browser]( [Image] [Catalina, an island off the coast of California and the new MacOS release name.]( The time has finally come to date all those paper documents with "2020." And more than just a new year getting underway, that means a new decade commences, too. ICYMI over the holidays: around Ars, we couldn't help but indulge in one of journalism's great historic traditions—[looking back on the decade that was]( and teasing out some of its most notable happenings. The three big tech companies all changed CEOs in ways that changed their corporate priorities. Disney kept acquiring everything. The courts dealt with patent trolls and Dark Web drug lords. Owning software died. Spaceflight lived. And net neutrality lived and died. A lot happened and we haven't even muttered the name, "Snowden." So for this week's Orbital Transmission, we're sharing a few of our favorite retrospectives on the past decade at Ars. While 2020 has very much already shifted into gear—[CES 2020]( practically started last week and [there may be major cyberattacks on the horizon](—recently looking back on the past 10 years made for a fascinating trip down memory lane. And if the 2010s are any indication, we should totally be paying attention to whatever the next dark thriller based on a seemingly harmless social network happens to be. (Does David Fincher know what a TikTok is?) —[@NathanMattise]( Orbital Transmission 01.08.2020 [(image) ]( [The 2010s had a lot of great TV, films, and video games]( Wait, there was more to the last decade than [the greatness of Watchmen](? It may be hard to think back to 2010, but it was a much different entertainment universe with a distinct lack of expanded universes, bingewatch shows, and good mobile games. Things have largely changed for the better from a consumer standpoint, with niche-ification and more production players leading to a more diverse and specialized slate of TV, film, and video games than perhaps ever before. Looking back, we had a lot to recommend and revisit—here's [the best TV](, [the best films](, and [the best video games]( of the 2010s. We'll even miss [the credit sequences](, tbh. [(image) ]( [The rise of private space will be the signature tech event of the 2010s]( Recently, it's been easy to define decades by an iconic piece of consumer tech. The 1990s had the rise of the Internet; the 2000s had smartphones. But looking back on the 2010s, no one would claim "tablets" or "smartwatches" had the same kind of impact. Instead, the defining technological thing from the last decade may literally be out of this world—the rise of private space companies from the big (SpaceX, Blue Origin) to the upstarts (Firefly Aerospace, Rocket Lab). Not only are these rocket launchers achieving amazing things on their own (and defining a burgeoning marketplace in the process), but they're pushing old space stalwarts from NASA to ULA to ESA to learn new tricks and try new things. Add it all together, and it's perhaps the most exciting time in space since the initial race to the moon. We couldn't even [narrow the 2010s down to 10 launches]( in retrospect. [(image) ]( [Science-wise, there was a tsunami of exoplanets]( You could make a “most significant science and technology happenings of the 2010s” list full of nothing but science, frankly. In no particular order, consider the fact that every one of the following incredible scientific achievements happened within the last 10 years: scientists officially [discovered gravitational waves]( (which leads to several other discoveries about the universe), [the Curiosity rover reached Mars]( (also leading to several other discoveries about the universe), humanity [landed on a comet]( and got [super close to the Sun](, [the CRISPR era]((controversially) began, [CERN tracked down the Higgs-boson](, archaeologists uncovered many new artifacts including finding [the lost city of Cahokia]( under St. Louis, humanity[found neutrino](s and weird physics, [AlphaGo won at virtually everything]( including StarCraft II, and our understanding of the climate crisis got better (as the situation overall [unfortunately got worse](). But we had to devote extra space to the amazing transformation that happened in space science due to the Kepler planet-hunting probe hitting its stride. The graph says it all—we've discovered more exoplanets this past decade than we had in the entire history of science up to that point. [(image) ]( [Facebook went from 350M users to 2.45B—nearly one-third of the population]( Oh the 2000s, we were so naive. Facebook was merely a "connecter," something college kids signed up for to keep in touch with other college kids and their friends from home. It helped the Obama campaign reach young voters. It became a signature app of the early iPhone. Fast-forward to 2019, and we all should've known something was up based solely on The Social Network: Russian-election influence campaigns, Cambridge Analytica, acquisitions from Instagram to WhatsApp, and more recently a slew of federal probes into everything from anti-competitive behavior to abuses of data handling. The 2010s may very well go down in history as the Facebook decade, and that picture is much darker than it once sounded. 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