Mine is the computer. I continue to be amazed at what we can do with them.
Bread.
I love bread.
But did you hear about SLICED bread!??
Yes and i hate it
Printing Press
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It’s hard to choose, but I would say the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production. It’s a miracle of chemistry that almost single-handedly vaporized the population doomers. As much as half of the nitrogen in your body comes from Haber-process-derived synthetic fertilizer!
The printing press. It allowed us for the first time to share knowledge at a scale we only dreamed of.
Soap easily. God the lives it saved and continues to save easily makes it the best invention imo
Surely it has to the FRIDGE?
Literature, Writing, Written Word. If we couldn’t document and share ideas, we’d be nowhere.
Screw the running water and antibiotics. I don’t need no machinery or amenities, give me cheese!
Computers are cool though
Writing. Being able to record facts, thoughts, and stories that can be (mostly) read thousands of miles away and thousands of years later changed civilisation.
Consider: Writing is also the closest thing to magic that we have in the real world. You make a particular pattern of markings on a piece of paper using an arcane body of knowledge, and then a wizard in a black robe with a special hammer makes an illegible squiggle on the paper in just the right spot, and it makes new things happen.
It is crazy that. For time immemorial we used to transmit information from our mouths or using hand signals, and receive that information through eyes and ears, all in realtime.
(side thought: how awesome would it be if we had a single organ for both? e.g. communication solely through blinking)
Then suddenly we have this system where someone can code meaning onto a sheet, and we can receive entire contexts from a glance alone, purely at our leisure. Nuts.
The wheel and the derivatives of the circular shape in general; they powered all human innovations from abstract mathematics to real life applications and everything in between.
Agricolture.
It’s what brought us working together in the first place, shifting our habits from nomadic to sedentary and started the concept of civilization.When scarcity should have died, but shitters divided the people for power and wealth.
I was gonna say the plow. Agriculture means your tribe get to spend less time hunting and gathering, but the plow means your tribe get a chance to become an empire
In this case I’m taking the word “greatest” more as “biggest/most impactful” and not necessarily “most good” but also I’m no anarcho-primitivist, idk…
In this case I’m taking the word “greatest” more as “biggest/most impactful” and not necessarily “most good”
Yeah that’s what I meant, I agree with the topic of “it might be what started workers exploitation”, but what I’m talking about is “it’s an invention/discovery that was so powerful to shift the natural behaviour of a species”. We’re not even talking about antropology now, it’s an etological impact and there haven’t been many others in our history
Fire
It’s a toss up: either chalkboards or dry erase boards. Both are remarkable.
::groan::
I think you mean “dyaaadddddd…”
Fire. The rest followed.
Interesting, my first thought was similar but different.
Clothing.
Now I have to go poke around the Internet trying to understand the history of both, which came first, and speculate about which made a bigger impact on our species.
edit:
Yep, it was fire. By like a lot. Both have pretty big ranges, but fire seems to be in the hundreds of thousands of years ago range, and clothing seems to be in the dozens of thousands of years.
I wonder which one came first, clothing or hairless skin?
