guyrocketTo date, what do you think is the greatest invention or discovery and why?
As asked....
Call me Lenny/LeniYou’re looking at it.
well5H1T3Displays?
xmunkFont kerning?
The GNOME Desktop Environment?
I hate GNOME
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?
Altima NEOLate bloomer? I think most people figured it out around puberty
Mister NeonTechnically I would say the harnessing and utilization of fire. It arguably changed our evolution requiring less energy to digest food.
maegul (he/they)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.
Plumbing. I could live without almost every modern comfort but a flushable toilet
0110010001100010To 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.
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!
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.
Track_ShovelI 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
The Mid-West? The center of a large continent gets really hot and really cold depending on the season
I was going to say toilets/indoor plumbing. Necessary for survival? Maybe not. Best convenience ever invented? Probably.
RivalarrivalI 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.
The microwave.
Can you imagine having to cook every night?
Central air
Daryl76679Glasses. The ability to see so much better than I otherwise could leaves me astonished every time I put them on.
I wouldn't have survived childhood without glasses in a pre-modern era.
Same. I would be a ditch digger or something if I had survived.
Lenses also gave us telescopes and microscopes. Pretty amazing discovery.
Antibiotics. Turned so many lethal wounds into minor cuts.
JackFrostNColaAnd now people use them for minor cuts and soon we will no longer have (effective) antibiotics.
I don’t know if this counts, but I’d say the Enlightenment. It was a discovery in that we discovered a new way to interpret the world.
I think there is kind of a glass ceiling when you talk about fire, plumbing, electricity and so on. Each one was a necessary stepping stone to get us where we are, but without any one of them, we wouldn’t be here.
The Enlightenment gave us a brand new sense of autonomy as a species, which in turn has given us a greater amount of control over “Destiny.”
🇦🇺𝕄𝕦𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕕𝕔𝕣𝕠𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕚𝕝𝕖I would argue fire. Its arguably the gate technology and higher brain power.
Nate CoxDefinitely 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.
I suppose u could argue the same for any technology tho.
Gotta be vaccines for me.
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.
tetris11its also the reason Blender innovated so much in the last ten years, being the main choice for digital perverts
SeraphSliced bread. Before sandwiches what was the point?
Delicious drippings, stews and gravies on hunks of bread.
The sandwich was a downgrade.
HereToLurkI’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
It’s a toss up: either chalkboards or dry erase boards. Both are remarkable.
::groan::
I think you mean “dyaaadddddd…”
wagesj45
colonialIt’s hard to choose, but I would say the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production. 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!
CountVonThe plow. It allowed early river valley peoples to move from subsistence farming to semi-reliable food surpluses, and those food surpluses triggered everything that came after. I can’t take credit for this argument, I first encountered it in this episode from the first season of Connections.
James Burke Connections, Ep. 1 "The Trigger Effect"
Vaccines
This is the answer I was looking for. Every other comfort can be worked around. Not having half your children die had no workaround.
There’s a cemetery a few blocks from where I live that I walk around in sometimes. The years on the older gravestones tell some very sad stories.
Soap easily. God the lives it saved and continues to save easily makes it the best invention imo
moe93The 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.
AsidonhopoCordage/string. Way more useful than fire and arguably predates it.
In Electronics world? Bipolar junctionTransistors. Easily.
This led into having portable devices we have today.
Back then people used vacuum tubes for switching and amplification; of which were very expensive to run (used a lot of power when idle).
Its crazy that we’re now approaching 200 million transistors in a single square millimetre.
I was thinking the photolithography process might be almost as important as the transistor itself. Without the ability to miniaturize transistors and create integrated circuits, we wouldn’t have anywhere near the level of technology we can build now. A computer made of discrete transistors would be way more efficient, reliable, and cheaper than one made with vacuum tubes, but would still be very limited. There are things you fundamentally couldn’t do with even thousands of discrete transistors that became possible once we were able to scale to millions and now billions.
Very true
MxM111Fire. 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.
… alternatively, I can just make this comment, and hope people chime in with things they already know and save me some effort.
redcalciumI wonder which one came first, clothing or hairless skin?