SHORT of an asteroid to finish us all off, or a super-AI to give us a brand new start, we can at least try to weave together anniversaries and “confirmed” events, and attempt a map of next year. (Big emphasis on try and attempt.)

To deal with Covid first: here’s hoping for a smooth take-up of the most effective vaccines. And let us trust that due diligence in development and testing has been followed. If so, then the great global grid of commerce, technology, culture and community can sputter back into action. With everyone at a nervous distance from each other, of course.

I imagine many nervous distances in the start-up offices of Andrew Neil’s GB News, the American-funded, Fox-style news channel launching in March: Mr Neil is not known for his group hugs on the editorial floor. It seems Neil will be facing a counter-operation from Rupert Murdoch (who hits 90 next year), titled News UK TV.

Do we need two more “right-leaning” media channels on these Brexit-laden islands? Yet the enduring power of TV is evoked by two anniversaries in June: 50 years since the passing of Lord Reith, the BBC’s stentorian founder, and 75 since the death of John Logie Baird, TV’s technological pioneer.

There’s another massive technological investment from the recent past that’s currently roaring into the future (it’s also very good for features like this – they rarely get cancelled). And that’s space exploration.

India is sending its Chandrayaan-3 to the Moon’s surface (No 2 crash-landed) this spring. Nasa’s Nova-C will be dropping mysterious “commercial payloads” on the lunar surface, launch date October 21.

Other stuff that’ll be clanking about up there includes two new modules for the Russian part of the International Space Station in September and the James Webb Space Telescope (so we can stare into the abyss and see if it stares back).

Not to mention Nasa’s DART experiment – that is, smashing an object into the asteroid Didymos to see if we can effectively deflect the path of these stadium-sized chunks as they hurtle toward Earth (launch window from July 22, 2021). Given the dinosaurs’ fate, I for one am faintly reassured.

Taking the planet-level viewpoint, there’s an event this year which puts Scotland right at the focal point of our collective survival. Mutant fourth wave permitting, COP26 – the latest massive intergovernmental climate conference – will physically take place in Glasgow, November 1 to 12.

Its official purpose is to be a “global stocktake” of the 2015 Paris Agreement: the hope is that states will see that they’ve so scarily fallen short of their targets that they’ll ratchet them up to new levels. Post our Holyrood elections on May 6, who knows what state (in all senses of the word) Scotland will be in, when this world spotlight falls?

Watch out, though, for the small country that might be the real star of the COP show. Costa Rica has committed that 2021 will see them running 100% on electricity from renewables, while enforcing a total ban on the use of polystyrene packaging and single-use plastic. Also, the European Investment Bank will phase out investment in fossil fuels by the end of 2021. Let’s hope we’re still in their contacts book.

And if we’re talking about massive constants, war and conflict next year is a tangled skein of anniversaries and current battlegrounds. We can contemplate the beginning and the end of the Cold War. March 5 is the 75th anniversary of Churchill’s Missouri speech where he envisioned an “Iron Curtain” descending on Europe. And December 26, 1991 was when the Soviet Union was voted out of existence.

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Also, if we’re minded, we can dwell on the lethal cycle between 9/11 (20 years ago) and the Syrian war, begun on March 15, 2011 (400,000 killed, 13 million displaced). Worryingly, we know that the START treaty – limiting US and Russian nuclear arsenals – officially comes to an end on February 5. Its renewal is already looming large in Biden’s in tray.

There you go – a few of the apocalyptic horsemen duly despatched. Now, let the gaiety commence!

TECH will continue to bubble over in 2021. Facebook threatens to bring out VR glasses designed by Ray-Ban. And Google are reportedly ramping up to challenge Facebook with a new social network. (Though we’ll have no new emoji this year – every one of the volunteers who make them is too busy, we’re told).

However, hardcore gamers can celebrate the 35th anniversary of The Legend Of Zelda, the 30th anniversary of Sonic The Hedgehog and the 25th anniversary of Pokemon.

And if you want to get a bead on that artificial intelligence I mentioned at the start, note the centenary (on 25 January) of the first performance of Karel Capek’s brilliant play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in Prague. It’s not only where the term “robot” was invented, but also one of the great critiques of technology.

After figuring out their thespian distancing, it seems that Hollywood is hurtling back into action. Delayed blockbusters – the new Bond, Mission: Impossible, Fast And Furious, Top Gun and Dune movies – will be hammering at us throughout the year. Though keep a cineaste’s eye out for The Tragedy Of Macbeth, directed by Joel Cohen (yes, one of the brothers), with Denzel Washington as Macbeth and Frances McDormand as his scary Lady.

In a year when we note the 70th anniversary of the first rock n roll record ever released (Rocket 88, by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, on March 3, 1951), we also have a pent-up explosion of Scottish rock recordings. Look out for new albums from Deacon Blue, Mogwai, Garbage, Del Amitri, Glasvegas, The Fratellis, Teenage Fanclub, Arab Strap and Texas.

There are some odd musical obituaries – for example Jim Morrison and Louis Armstrong both passing within days, in July 1971. And to really (and sadly) mark the passage of time, it’ll be a decade since Amy Winehouse left us (also July).

The big books of 2021 look like being Bill Gates’s How To Avoid A Climate Disaster, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara And The Sun, Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads: A Novel: A Key to All Mythologies, Volume 1 (yes, that’s the title), Mariana Mazzucato’s Mission Economics: A Moonshot Guide To Changing Capitalism and Paul Mason’s to-the-point How To Stop Fascism.

There are some Scottish and Celtic literary anniversaries to note as well. It’ll be 25 years since the death of Sorley MacLean, the titan of Gaelic poetry on November 24 – and 250 years since the birth of Sir Walter Scott, on August 15, 1771. Who could say that Scottish cultural identity isn’t still conditioned and clouded, from different directions, by both of these giants?

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” said Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. Tell us about it, Stephen … the 80th anniversary of the death of James Joyce, on January 13, should permit us some reflection of how literature and nationalism richly interrelate on these islands.

And finally, for my joy and hopefully yours, a recommendation to go see (if going outside has indeed become a thing again) the Joan Eardley 100 exhibition at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow, July 9 until October 13. Eardley’s dappled, embracing modernism, depicting cheeky Glasgow tenement weans, will be exactly the mid-year revitalisation we need.

Though now I’m wondering what unexpected weirdness will make most of the preceding list utterly moot … quickly, another vegan mince pie, to fill the abyss. And of course: Merry Christmas!