SHOULD auld acquaintance be forgot? Almost always, yes. But we must forgive the Bard this nostalgic indulgence, he only had the small pool of 18th-century Scotland to contend with – we have the world.

Social media now makes it possible to cultivate our own personalised reality bubbles, echo chambers where positive feedback loops silence any opposing voices.

Ultimately, our curated fantasy realities only serve to stunt personal development. Our past and present merge as a singularity, fuelling a self-serving, ego-driven gratification network where the people in our lives often become as disposable as our old phones. Blocking, ghosting and wilfully ignoring any digital communication from individuals are the new “forgetting auld acquaintance”.

Robert Burns would likely have struggled for inspiration in today’s shallow sea of vapidity, vanity and hive thought. Yet, hope remains. The darkest hour is always before the dawn and the great highs of scientific endeavour in 2017 certainly prove that the best of our species are not going gently into that goodnight.

Nature abhors a vacuum and the world’s scientific community has undoubtedly risen to meet the challenge of a terrifying new paradigm – a global pandemic of wilful ignorance led by the most wilfully ignorant US President that has ever been elected into office. As evidence, here are 12 snapshots of a turbulent yet still inspirational year on planet Earth...

----------------------------------------------------------------

JANUARY: New wave of discovery

WHA’S like us? Telly, phone, steam engine, Irn-Bru, square sausage and now the detection of gravitational waves – ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein which prove that the universe is far from an empty vacuum but wildly alive. Astrophysicists from the University of Glasgow played a major role in constructing the US-based LIGO telescope that detected them. The telescope is a device so powerful that it also spotted Chuck Berry sneaking through the gates of heaven past a snoring St Peter.

FEBRUARY: Animal magic

THE only known human/animal hybrid is Barry Gibb, an early gene-splicing experiment with a lion’s mane and howler monkey’s voicebox. This year, Oregon Health & Science University in Portland announced its commitment to this dark art, aiming to create similar genetically-modified chimeras. None of its modified embryos have yet been allowed to develop into a baby, but it seems a Thundercats movie may soon be possible without CGI.

MARCH: Future is nuclear

ONE day, our dying sun will expand and absorb the Earth, leaving no trace of the beautiful blue orb it birthed and nurtured. It means we have just five billion years to unlock its secrets and produce our own free energy. CEOs of gas and electric companies may shiver like pensioners in winter at that possibility, but such nuclear fusion research made an almighty leap this year, with scientists at the Chalmers University of Technology developing a technique to slow down electrons that have so far destroyed other fusion reactors. Warm grannies and Big Macs on the outer rim of Zeta Reticuli await.

APRIL: Going solar

LOOK out the window. See that rain? It’s the clouds crying. Why are they so sad? Well, they have a bird’s eye view of an incurable virus which now covers most of the Earth’s surface, one which seems to have evolved solely to create countless new ways of killing its host. What the clouds don’t know is that it’s all fine – there’s plenty more where this wee planet came from. In fact, seven new ones were discovered orbiting around a single “nearby” star this year. Apparently three of these worlds could potentially host life – and by life, those egotistical astrophysicists mean carbon-based humans. At just 39 light-years away in the Trappist-1 system, at least we know there’s another party to take our carry-out. Bring a good book and foot-long Sub too, as it’ll take 820,400 years to get there.

MAY: Long Trek to teleportation

IT’LL be a while before you can materialise in your bed directly from the bar stool, but Chinese scientists did manage to teleport a photon particle to a satellite 870 miles away this year. We’re not quite in Star Trek territory yet though – the experiment used the spooky “everything is entangled” mechanics of quantum physics to transmit the “state” rather than the proton itself. Not unlike a fax machine sending dots on a sheet of paper indistinguishable from the original. Or the guy who did Freddie Mercury on Stars In Their Eyes.

JUNE: Chill out about death

TALKING of Freddie, the singer once rhetorically asked “who wants to live forever?” as terminal illness tightened its grip. With death being an biological inevitability, we can certainly all sympathise. But before you set up that funeral plan direct debit, know that this was the year cryogenics (the process of freezing your body or head for future resurrection) came down in price to around £40,000. Hold off though, the accelerating pace of once-futuristic tech becoming affordable means you’ll soon have your own cryo-chamber in the spare room. Storing dead relatives at home will become second nature – just hope there’s never a power cut and granny’s head defrosts prematurely, or at least remember to store her upside down so the feet melt first.

JULY: Gold rush in space

NOT since Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens have two stars merged into one during a giant explosion. But taking place 130 million light years away, a head-on collision of two neutrons – superdense “corpses” of previously exploded stars – was observed this year. Not only that, it confirmed such violent processes create all precious metals in the universe. The material spewed out by this pair was enough to mould 200 solid gold Earths with diamond cores. Seems Einstein was right saying God doesn’t play dice – He clearly prefers blinged-out billiards.

AUGUST: Farewell, Cassini

STEVIE Wonder once sang about Saturn, describing a place where inhabitants “live to be 205”. Whether it’s a Logan’s Run-type situation upon reaching that age is never revealed, the song ending on a bit of a cliffhanger. With Stevie remaining tight-lipped, Nasa launched the Cessini probe to investigate. After spending 13 years orbiting the planet before plunging to its doom this year, the craft had snapped more than 453,000 pictures that prove Stevie a liar.

SEPTEMBER: Gunning for Trump

“I DO believe Cuba’s responsible. I do believe that, I do. It’s a very unusual attack, as you know. But I do believe Cuba is responsible.” Another winning example of diplomatic eloquence shaped by the flaccid, forked tongue of Donald Trump. What was he banging on about? Oh, just accusing Cuba of firing a non-existent futuristic Dan Dare-style sonic gun at US diplomats. Trump’s presidency remains a surrealistic fever dream so unfathomably bizarre that we have become increasingly desensitised to the insanity surrounding us. And that’s possibly the intent.

OCTOBER: Octopus apocalypse

MORE exotic fare than the usual faeces, nappies and condoms washed up on the shores of the sleepy Welsh village of Ceredigion this month – countless cephalopods rising up on the tips of their legs and toddling along the coast. Casting long shadows eerily evocative of the Martian invaders from War Of The Worlds, this Normandy-esque octopus invasion was over before it began – the hows and whys of their brief appearance unknown. The Nobel Prize-winning biologist Sydney Brenner once described cephalopods as the “first intelligent beings on Earth”, so perhaps they had a quick look around and realised there was little worth conquering.

NOVEMBER: The great pyramid scheme

SCIENTISTS in Egypt announced the discovery of a mysterious “void” inside the Great Pyramid of Giza rumoured to contain – depending on which internet forums you frequent – either an ancient library or alien skulls. More interesting was the tech used – sensors that could “see” high-energy subatomic particles called muons entering a “room”. It’s believed the same technology may one day make it possible to detect empathy in Tories.

DECEMBER: Illusion coins it in

LIKE Elvis, Bitcoin doesn’t exist physically yet its worth grows exponentially. Unlike Elvis, Bitcoin will be forgotten about after its demise – due anytime soon. What will survive is the democratic policing of the digital currency’s security, where a network of “miners” put their supercomputers to work making sure fraud is non-existent. These folk are rewarded in Bitcoin – including one unfortunate Welshman who accidentally binned his old laptop with £73m of Bitcoin on the hard drive. His current whereabouts? Neck-deep at a Newport dump.