Mine is the computer. I continue to be amazed at what we can do with them.
The bicycle.
Hear me out:
Before the invention of the bicycle, the vast majority of the population had no means of personal transport other than their feet, and anything further away than the nearest market might as well have been in China, cause neither a farmer nor a worker with a family can just take more than a day off.
This meant that almost no one ever travelled further than 30km from their home.
With the bicycle, the world that most of humanity got to experience became 20x bigger.
People met other people further away, experienced new ideas, could travel outside of the immediate influence of their landlord or master, could marry someone who isn’t a cousin…No other invention ever before opened up the world of the average person quite like this one.
The bicycle created demand to build a dense network of smooth roads even in the countryside, brought workers to factories, and gave women more freedom. It was one of the main factors that pushed the industrial revolution.
This is really insightful. I’d thought about how trivial travel is in our modern era but this really puts into perspective how isolating it was back then.
Written language. It lets us speak to people across time.
Electricity specifically generating/controlling it.
For the entirety of human existence and before humans even existed, electricity shaped our world and even kicked off the “spark” that allowed dna to propagate and exist from ~2billion years ago until today. But literally only ~200years ago, were we finally able to understand and create it.
I’ve gotta agree, electricity is the base for the majority of technology today.
You’re looking at it.
Font kerning?
Displays?
Plumbing. I could live without almost every modern comfort but a flushable toilet
I was going to say HVAC. It’s cold as all fuck here in the winter, and hotter than donkey balls baking in the sun during summer.
Woa WYA
I was going to say toilets/indoor plumbing. Necessary for survival? Maybe not. Best convenience ever invented? Probably.
I would rank plumbing pretty high to be sure, but without the steam engine to drive the water pumps, plumbing is limited to aqueducts, gravity sewers, and intermittent, low-volume supply from animal or wind-driven pumps.
Even today, the overwhelming majority of our energy passes through a steam phase at some point. Steam power is by far the most important discovery/invention of the modern world.
To expand a hair on this, modern waste disposal. So with plumbing comes sewage. Then the close child is refuse removal. We literally cannot live (healthily) without these things.
Side-bar, the folks that power waste removal are VASTLY under-paid.
Totally. When mechanical systems in sewers and waste tanks break, somebody has to put on a diving suit, go in, and fix it. If any individual human in the world ever deserved $55 billion in compensation, it’s those people.
Waste removal is usually a premo paid job, yeah they could be paid more, but still pretty cushy pay for most of them. It’s not some minimum wage job and the entry barrier is usually high school education.
Depends on where you draw the line. Janitors for instance are usually paid a pittance. As are cleaning crews that vacuum the vast offices spaces around the country.
If you are talking about CDL drivers that collect trash cans then yeah, they tend to be paid well. Without all the pieces of the puzzle though the system breaks down.
Plumbers, as it turns out, are paid quite well since nobody wants to go into the trades currently.
Yeah that’s pretty fair, it’s usually referred to people after point of disposal. I’ve never heard a custodian say they work in waste management for example.
Agreed, custodians (usually) wouldn’t refer to themselves that way. Without them though, trash doesn’t make it to the point of disposal. Which is a break in the chain. We could debate the finer points I’m sure, but it’s about bed time for me and I have an early AM meeting with offshore.
So have a good one, and I do appreciate the discussion!
My dick.
I discovered it when I was twenty-one and it’s been my favourite thing since.
Did you have an innie before 21 or was it detachable and you finally found it?
Late bloomer? I think most people figured it out around puberty
Technically I would say the harnessing and utilization of fire. It arguably changed our evolution requiring less energy to digest food.
Upvoted (and came to say the same)!
The interesting thing about fire is that it is way back in human history, like, AFAIU, before our hominid species even evolved. So it’s likely intertwined with very biological being.
Another similar invention is likely language. Once the evolutionary pieces were there to get language to the ability of syntax, whoever were the people that riffed on communicating with sounds to the point of making up words and making sentences etc, they invented some ridiculously awesome shit. Like there was probably the first sharing between people of a pun, joke, or first abstraction or conceptual musing. The first argument where one person was more convincing. The first person who was naturally good at speaking and impressed others with it.
The microwave.
Can you imagine having to cook every night?
You know you can reheat things other ways, right?
Sliced bread. Before sandwiches what was the point?
Delicious drippings, stews and gravies on hunks of bread.
The sandwich was a downgrade.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’m always blown away by how discoveries like antibiotics changed our lives. And writing too. Mind blowing that we can record, discern, and communicate so much information from marks on a surface
Central air
The Internet.
Computers do a lot of things. But the Internet specifically is the aspect of the computer that revolutionized the world.
Internet porn, specifically. It drove many innovations like payment processing.
I would argue fire. Its arguably the gate technology and higher brain power.
Definitely fire, without it none of the other inventions happen afterwards; though I guess we didn’t really invent it as much as we learned to harness it.
Gotta be vaccines for me.
