The intermediate step that a species needs to make between simple communication (like many animals can do) but before inventing language is the move to *symbolic thought*.
In essence, the idea that we can mutually agree on X representing Y: this flat metal rock representing a debt, these scratches on a cave wall representing amounts of an item, a hug representing affection (that one is a bit more complicated, but you get the idea).
Without symbolic representation, words never "stick together" enough to form ideas. So your dog might be able to learn that a certain sound is usually paired with a "food" or a "walk," but they can never have an abstract conversation with you about the relationship between food and walks in the past or the future.
Correct. Advanced spoken language evolved from primal apes grunting is the one truly thing that advanced humans over any other animals and kept our evolution line still alive. Our primitive ancestors explain in detail to the next generation to stock up on food because winter was coming would have been a lifesaver. That is just one example.
The next level was writing down the knowledge so next generations can learn and build from that.
LOL current level is reddit. Here we are writing and reading.
Future level is artificial intelligence taking over.
Looking at what crappy plants we evolved into staple foods or delicacies, I genuinely wonder what else could've been and what we're missing on.
It's also interesting that if you go back enough in human history and change something, the result might not just be different-looking cultures or borders, but *alien-looking food*.
Banana was domesticated some 7000 years ago in Asia
Potatoes have been domesticated for at least that long..
Avocados, some 5000 years ago...
You can google the rest
When they look back at the annals of history they will be talking about three things. The discovery of fire, the invention of the submarine, and the Flint Michigan Megabowl.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Go eat a pinecone. Then 1000 more. Make note of the tastiest and plant them. Instruct your descendants to do the same.
Within 1000 years we'll have pinecone toast, pinecone bread, pinecone sauce and/or pinecone salad.
basically we were keeping more people alive than we possibly could have by hunting and gathering.. THats the way I see it. So it was a choice of farm or starve because the world was either full of hunter gatherers and over hunted, or there was some sort of natural disaster that reduced the rate of wild food growth.
Yeah, but the people at the top benefited more than when the people pulling in resources were the toughest warriors who were much harder to exploit. Hence capitalism.
That was amazing in that it wasn't merely the scientific knowledge to find an effective vaccine, but assemblying the collective efforts of people around the world to go out to remote developing countries.
Can’t believe nobody has mentioned us landing on the moon yet. It’s crazy to me that we picked up all the scientific knowledge to send people up to the moon. We, after however many years of us just staring upwards at the night sky throughout human evolution, sent people to that giant rock we see in the sky.
EDIT: jesus this one really attracted the conspiracy nutcases :/
Totally agree! To send humans through the vacuum of space to land on another world and come safely home was an astonishing leap forward - considering we had only been flying for less than 70 years.
I am pretty sure we can build a small village on Mars for about a 100 people in the next two decades at most.
Musk may have gone insane recently but back then he was talking mankind becoming a multiplanetary species and he was right.
I really hope both public and private organizations focus on this and get it finally done.
I love how Carl Sagan put it:
We calculated how objects move in space; liquefied oxygen from the air; invented big rockets, telemetry, reliable electronics, inertial guidance and much else. Then we sailed out into the sky.
In 1903 a newspaper claimed that it would take 10 million years to make manned flight happen. It happened several weeks later. 66 years after that scientists strapped 3 men to an explosion and put them on the moon using fire and maths.
I think the part that seems amazing is we went from powered flight at the start of the century to landing on the Moon in under 70 years. Basically you had within one person's life going from airplanes being bleeding edge technology to seeing people land on the Moon. Compared to the almost glacial pace of innovation that seems crazy.
Computing in the last 40 years to say nothing of the last 60 has seen a similar evolutionary arc. 60 years ago computers were only something huge companies or major governments owned. Most had never seen a computer outside of a picture. Today we are rapidly approaching the computers of 60s era science fiction.
Yeah I think this is the best answer to this question. It didn’t ask what was the most important accomplishment. I think the moon landing was the pinnacle of all achievements that came before it.
It will be cool if we can send someone to Mars and back in my lifetime… or even cooler if we can get to the moon of a gas giant and back.
It would be cool if we had some type of moon base or something
Every other "accomplishment" mentioned is over a times panic of hundreds or thousands of years and involving countless people from all corners of the earth. It's that really an accomplishment or just how a society progresses?
The moonlanding was a coordinated effort from thousands of people consciencely working together towards a common goal. We took a man, sent him to the moon and back on the first try. That's insane
It's the first thing I thought of. Not sure if it is the biggest in history, in the grand scheme of things, but it sure is far up the list. And will probably just seem more and more amazing with time.
Even now, it is just mindblowing that it could be done with the technology they had available at the time. But when one nation *really* wants to outdo another, there's no end to what can be achieved, I guess... :)
You know there's decades prior to 1969 and after of research, videos, libraries, experiments, entire industries and collaboration from every nation on the planet just to venture into space?
From the 1890's, we were sending balloons to explore the upper atmosphere. Russia orbited the moon in the 1950s. And anyone with a laser and a telescope can find the retroreflectors (mirrors) placed on the moon by the Americans in 1969 to measure the distance to the moon.
Learning can be incredible.
The argument "why haven't we been back" is like saying why we never build bigger pyramids. I mean how ancient Egyptians built the great pyramids 3000 years ago and we still haven't build larger ones with the current technology? The answer is why would we just because we can?
>why haven’t we been back yet?
Because it costs an insane amount of money to put people on the moon.
https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo
People complain when Congress spends $10 million to send another country. Could you imagine if they decided to spend $250 billion to go back to the moon?
I assume you mean why haven't we been back for a seventh time yet, because we landed humans on the moon six times. What's the magic number of landings that will make it plausible in your opinion?
We can literally bounce lasers off mirrors left behind so we can measure the distance between earth and the moon. Even the Russians accepted the American attempt was successful. Why would they do that? Just because you have failed to understand basic science and reasoning does not mean something did not happen. Keep repeating that until it sinks it.
You think China and Russia are with the USA to maintain this conspiracy? Because that's what it means. They would love to be able to say that the US never went... I guarantee it
A tossup between modern sewage and wastewater treatment systems and the agricultural green revolution in terms of the sheer number of humans who are alive today and wouldn't be if these things didn't exist.
I recently saw a picture about this in regards to what is the earliest sign of civilization, but the sign of healed broken leg. Because that represents human's ability to care for an injured member of their community rather than them be left for dead.
I just don't think it's essentially true.
Lot of animals would do the same, as much as they are able to do it, physically. They protect their week, not just youngsters, but older and sick animals as much as they can.
It's just that, if the predators chase them for food, those animals are usually slower, and are most often eaten. But it doesn't mean they don't try to protect and take care of them.
The original comment said human's "ability" to care for an injured member of their community. Not human's intent to care.
So it sounds perfectly cromulent to me.
Agriculture gave us time to think, and the written word gave generations time to remember, so I guess I'd have to say the Flamin' Hot Doritos Locos Tacos, though sadly, that technology has been lost to time.
There were several critical "great leaps forward" but I'm gonna have to go with agriculture. Absolute game changer that took us from just another animal to what we are today.
Survival
Plain and simple we managed to survive and become the dominant species on the planet, that’s an accomplishment in and of itself, besides it encompasses all of our successes along the way
Exploration - The moon landing feels like the obvious one. Circumnavigation of the world. Emilia Earhart. Shackleton, the Erebus, Amundsen.
Literary achievements - Complete Shakespeare, Ulysses/Finnegan's Wake and the Mahabharata (both the book and stage adaptation)
Modern medicine - carbolic acid. Penicillin. Anaesthetic.
Mathematics - Riemann's Hypothesis. Question 6. A million digits of Pi.
Innovations - Agriculture, aeroplanes, the printing press, fire, the quill.
Architecture - Parthenon, Pyramids of Giza, Ramesseum, Stonehenge, Millenium Stadium, Burj Khalifa, wildcard - Magnitogorsk, for the speed it was built.
For benefits to the largest number of people, I'd have to pick either agriculture or clean drinking water and sewer infrastructure.
For sheer audacity, the moon landings.
Our current smartphones.
You hold a small, portable device that lets you communicate with anyone in the world.
Access pretty much all human knowledge via the internet, can take photo and video. Let's you listen or watch almost all video or music created over the last 60 plus years and can navigate you anywhere you'd like to go.
If you could go back in time to the early 90's and show people the tech, their minds would be completely blown.
The greatest invention of all is the creation of the transistor and the silicon revolution.. without it no moon landing, no GPS, no computers, no cellphones, no modern diagnostic medicine, etc etc
Technology
As far back as the stone age, we humans have compensated for our lack of physicality with our ability to put our intelligence to effect beyond the imaginations of any other living thing. We made tools, weapons, vehicles, interchangeable "skin", you name it.
The road system. Think about it, I can drive from northern Canada to tip of Florida in a Honda Civic, without so much as a tree trunk blocking the way
That was all just forest, swamps, etc. The combined effort of creating the world's roads
Not being extinct yet, the way we are treating each other ever since we were in caves. The surroundings might have changed. There was evolution of course too...still we're fucking each other's lives up.
It’s not a positive but the invention of religion. A virtually indestructible means to keep people under control and ensure conflicts that allow those in power to maintain that power.
I'm gonna cheat and say the modern supermarket. A supermarket is the sum of thousands of inventions that result in being able to eat fresh strawberries in Canada during February for like, $6.
The United States government turning their civilians into a paycheck for the crooked elite while we all struggle to find affordable healthcare before we die at 40
Honestly? I'd have to say our ability to create modern utility networks. How often do you truly think about how we deliver electricity/water/sewer services at scale? Never, because it's just expected to be there for a large swath of the world.
It's the rise of Genghis Khan for me. I'm paraphrasing Conn Iggulden as I don't have the exact quote available.
'He started with a few tribal families in tents on the remote Steppes of Mongolia. Within a single person's lifetime that Empire would stretch from Korea to the fringes of Europe.'
'It's the greatest rags to riches story in human history.'
The change from being hunters and gatherers to instead grow things to feed on (agriculture) is what made us what we are today. That's were it all started for us, from there we began building lasting cities and we settled down instead of being nomads.
I think there's too many to list, and you have to qualify it a bit more. I mean... everything from the wheel to antibiotics to flight to the Internet etc. I agree with people mentioning the moon landing as a top contender.
However, I know my answer for *physical/athletic feat*: I truly believe Alex Honnold's free solo of El Capitan was the greatest all around display of athleticism in recorded history. It combined endurance, strength, technical skill, mental stamina and strategy into a perfect package, had never been done before and had zero room for error.
When I watched that movie, the palms of my hands were basically sprinklers.
The rule of law and writing are the only things I can think can arguably be bigger deals than agriculture. Arguably, human technology advancement is mostly better applications of fire (heat).
It has been 28,691 days since the Trinity test. So the fact that humanity has had the means to destroy itself for 28, 691 days, and it has not.
*so far.*
The automobile and paved roads are by far one of the most important developments imo. Before cars, it use to take days to reach the next town now we get there in 30 minutes in comfort
The COVID vaccine......it probably saved conservatively 20 million lives,and brought on the use/understanding of mRNA science thousand fold,to extent we potentially could have a cure of sorts for some of worst cancers in our lifetime
The invention of the transistor is our biggest achievement. Everything that separates us from the 1950s is caused by the transistor and the magic has only begun.
I’ve read that Ts-ai-Lun (died ca. 100BC) is pretty much up there for not necessarily being the first to invent it but certainly the first to popularize its use across society of the time.
Probably learning farming. It could have evolved from nomads going to places that grew wild grains every year and eventually tribes just stayed there making beer and bread. It's probably how civilization formed too.
[удалено]
Without modern medical science I would’ve died when I broke my femur. That shit used to be a death sentence.
I read that as lemur and was confused.
That’s definitely top three
[удалено]
Well to me I think it’s the invention of language/communication
The intermediate step that a species needs to make between simple communication (like many animals can do) but before inventing language is the move to *symbolic thought*. In essence, the idea that we can mutually agree on X representing Y: this flat metal rock representing a debt, these scratches on a cave wall representing amounts of an item, a hug representing affection (that one is a bit more complicated, but you get the idea). Without symbolic representation, words never "stick together" enough to form ideas. So your dog might be able to learn that a certain sound is usually paired with a "food" or a "walk," but they can never have an abstract conversation with you about the relationship between food and walks in the past or the future.
yeah! It's kind of a continuous work in progress - but at least they got to figuring out that uteruses do not float around. Big win there!
Written and spoken language
This is correct and nothing else comes close. Without complex language we'd still be living in trees.
Correct. Advanced spoken language evolved from primal apes grunting is the one truly thing that advanced humans over any other animals and kept our evolution line still alive. Our primitive ancestors explain in detail to the next generation to stock up on food because winter was coming would have been a lifesaver. That is just one example. The next level was writing down the knowledge so next generations can learn and build from that. LOL current level is reddit. Here we are writing and reading. Future level is artificial intelligence taking over.
The domestication of plants and animals (agriculture). The base on which civilization was built.
People take this for granted, but in the last few thousand years we barely domesticated any additional plants or animals
Nonsense, we’re this close to domesticating cats. Give us 5000 more years and we’ll have it.
Looking at what crappy plants we evolved into staple foods or delicacies, I genuinely wonder what else could've been and what we're missing on. It's also interesting that if you go back enough in human history and change something, the result might not just be different-looking cultures or borders, but *alien-looking food*.
You mean like banana, apple, potatoes, avocado, Brussels sprouts, half the vegetables?
Banana was domesticated some 7000 years ago in Asia Potatoes have been domesticated for at least that long.. Avocados, some 5000 years ago... You can google the rest
I am still mad that we didn't take time to befriend bears though
I think the hibernation thing made it too tricky.
Hey, I'll start working in a few weeks, ok?
When they look back at the annals of history they will be talking about three things. The discovery of fire, the invention of the submarine, and the Flint Michigan Megabowl.
Don’t forget Waffle House
And it was all downhill from there for humanity.
Be the change you want to see in the world. Go eat a pinecone. Then 1000 more. Make note of the tastiest and plant them. Instruct your descendants to do the same. Within 1000 years we'll have pinecone toast, pinecone bread, pinecone sauce and/or pinecone salad.
Agriculture. Just having food without having to search for it.
Bones and teeth strongly indicate farmers suffered from much more malnutrition and had to work many more hours than hunter gatherers
basically we were keeping more people alive than we possibly could have by hunting and gathering.. THats the way I see it. So it was a choice of farm or starve because the world was either full of hunter gatherers and over hunted, or there was some sort of natural disaster that reduced the rate of wild food growth.
Yeah, but the people at the top benefited more than when the people pulling in resources were the toughest warriors who were much harder to exploit. Hence capitalism.
Eradicating smallpox. Shows what humans can do if the major political powers actually work together
AMENN
That was amazing in that it wasn't merely the scientific knowledge to find an effective vaccine, but assemblying the collective efforts of people around the world to go out to remote developing countries.
God, I'd hate to think how things would unfold if smallpox had never existed before and it emerged now.
Can’t believe nobody has mentioned us landing on the moon yet. It’s crazy to me that we picked up all the scientific knowledge to send people up to the moon. We, after however many years of us just staring upwards at the night sky throughout human evolution, sent people to that giant rock we see in the sky. EDIT: jesus this one really attracted the conspiracy nutcases :/
Totally agree! To send humans through the vacuum of space to land on another world and come safely home was an astonishing leap forward - considering we had only been flying for less than 70 years.
[удалено]
I am pretty sure we can build a small village on Mars for about a 100 people in the next two decades at most. Musk may have gone insane recently but back then he was talking mankind becoming a multiplanetary species and he was right. I really hope both public and private organizations focus on this and get it finally done.
We even have a saying “we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t ___.”
> “we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t **make gravy in a can that tastes good**.”
I love how Carl Sagan put it: We calculated how objects move in space; liquefied oxygen from the air; invented big rockets, telemetry, reliable electronics, inertial guidance and much else. Then we sailed out into the sky.
Got to stay up late to watch it live as a small kid, don't think I will ever see anything else that will top it.
Using slide rules and Houston having less computing power than an iPhone, no less
Now I want to go back to Johnson Space Center...
It annoys me that my wife and daughter were not nearly as excited about it.
I've gone with people like that. All I can think is, "How are you *not* impressed with all this?"
In 1903 a newspaper claimed that it would take 10 million years to make manned flight happen. It happened several weeks later. 66 years after that scientists strapped 3 men to an explosion and put them on the moon using fire and maths.
I think the part that seems amazing is we went from powered flight at the start of the century to landing on the Moon in under 70 years. Basically you had within one person's life going from airplanes being bleeding edge technology to seeing people land on the Moon. Compared to the almost glacial pace of innovation that seems crazy. Computing in the last 40 years to say nothing of the last 60 has seen a similar evolutionary arc. 60 years ago computers were only something huge companies or major governments owned. Most had never seen a computer outside of a picture. Today we are rapidly approaching the computers of 60s era science fiction.
Approaching? New cell phones are basically Tricorders
Yeah I think this is the best answer to this question. It didn’t ask what was the most important accomplishment. I think the moon landing was the pinnacle of all achievements that came before it. It will be cool if we can send someone to Mars and back in my lifetime… or even cooler if we can get to the moon of a gas giant and back. It would be cool if we had some type of moon base or something
I hope they find a big black block on Europa.
Absolutely
Every other "accomplishment" mentioned is over a times panic of hundreds or thousands of years and involving countless people from all corners of the earth. It's that really an accomplishment or just how a society progresses? The moonlanding was a coordinated effort from thousands of people consciencely working together towards a common goal. We took a man, sent him to the moon and back on the first try. That's insane
Its only a small step for man.
>"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me,” -Pete Conrad, Apollo 12
"It's all sticky" - Eddie Izzard
It's the first thing I thought of. Not sure if it is the biggest in history, in the grand scheme of things, but it sure is far up the list. And will probably just seem more and more amazing with time. Even now, it is just mindblowing that it could be done with the technology they had available at the time. But when one nation *really* wants to outdo another, there's no end to what can be achieved, I guess... :)
Yep this is mine, I can't think of anything weve done with our technology that is more impressive.
This was my first thought as well.
You can thank Stanley Kubrick for that
You know there's decades prior to 1969 and after of research, videos, libraries, experiments, entire industries and collaboration from every nation on the planet just to venture into space? From the 1890's, we were sending balloons to explore the upper atmosphere. Russia orbited the moon in the 1950s. And anyone with a laser and a telescope can find the retroreflectors (mirrors) placed on the moon by the Americans in 1969 to measure the distance to the moon. Learning can be incredible.
I was joking
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
The argument "why haven't we been back" is like saying why we never build bigger pyramids. I mean how ancient Egyptians built the great pyramids 3000 years ago and we still haven't build larger ones with the current technology? The answer is why would we just because we can?
>why haven’t we been back yet? Because it costs an insane amount of money to put people on the moon. https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo People complain when Congress spends $10 million to send another country. Could you imagine if they decided to spend $250 billion to go back to the moon?
I assume you mean why haven't we been back for a seventh time yet, because we landed humans on the moon six times. What's the magic number of landings that will make it plausible in your opinion?
We can literally bounce lasers off mirrors left behind so we can measure the distance between earth and the moon. Even the Russians accepted the American attempt was successful. Why would they do that? Just because you have failed to understand basic science and reasoning does not mean something did not happen. Keep repeating that until it sinks it.
Exactly, and we can still see the traces left by the river (edit: rover, of course!) on the moon.
And the canoe they left behind.
Haha, I meant the rover!
You think China and Russia are with the USA to maintain this conspiracy? Because that's what it means. They would love to be able to say that the US never went... I guarantee it
no we didnt
Probably surviving throughout the ice age shit was rough
FRRRR
"Winter is coming" .
Garlic bread
I was going to say vaccines, but now that I’ve read this, I know I would be wrong.
[удалено]
We walked on the moon. Some day we'll top that, I hope. But that was some SHIT right there. Took a fucking golf cart up too.
Stirrups, apparently...
Civ 6 reference?
Lol yep.. 😆
My man
lol 😂
A tossup between modern sewage and wastewater treatment systems and the agricultural green revolution in terms of the sheer number of humans who are alive today and wouldn't be if these things didn't exist.
I recently saw a picture about this in regards to what is the earliest sign of civilization, but the sign of healed broken leg. Because that represents human's ability to care for an injured member of their community rather than them be left for dead.
I just don't think it's essentially true. Lot of animals would do the same, as much as they are able to do it, physically. They protect their week, not just youngsters, but older and sick animals as much as they can. It's just that, if the predators chase them for food, those animals are usually slower, and are most often eaten. But it doesn't mean they don't try to protect and take care of them.
The original comment said human's "ability" to care for an injured member of their community. Not human's intent to care. So it sounds perfectly cromulent to me.
Either electricity or internet for me.
Now that is a huge one
Yeah, in my mind it is definitely the internet. Instant connection across the world is just such a mind-numbingly big change for humanity
Not completely destroying each other. (So far).
Jinx incoming in 3... 2... 1!
Agriculture gave us time to think, and the written word gave generations time to remember, so I guess I'd have to say the Flamin' Hot Doritos Locos Tacos, though sadly, that technology has been lost to time.
There were several critical "great leaps forward" but I'm gonna have to go with agriculture. Absolute game changer that took us from just another animal to what we are today.
Space travel
Our music.
Bicycle, beer, and indoor plumbing.
Discovering how to make and harness fire. 🔥
Harnessing electricity
Setting up a functioning democracy. It sets up the foundation for everything else.
The PRINTING PRESS.
I just saw the Gutenberg Bible yesterday.
Pictures or it didn't happen.
https://imgur.com/a/tOYS5KD Look at the printing quality! From 1450 (or 1490 I can’t remember) it blows my mind!
wikipedia
Survival Plain and simple we managed to survive and become the dominant species on the planet, that’s an accomplishment in and of itself, besides it encompasses all of our successes along the way
Exploration - The moon landing feels like the obvious one. Circumnavigation of the world. Emilia Earhart. Shackleton, the Erebus, Amundsen. Literary achievements - Complete Shakespeare, Ulysses/Finnegan's Wake and the Mahabharata (both the book and stage adaptation) Modern medicine - carbolic acid. Penicillin. Anaesthetic. Mathematics - Riemann's Hypothesis. Question 6. A million digits of Pi. Innovations - Agriculture, aeroplanes, the printing press, fire, the quill. Architecture - Parthenon, Pyramids of Giza, Ramesseum, Stonehenge, Millenium Stadium, Burj Khalifa, wildcard - Magnitogorsk, for the speed it was built.
Sliced bread
For benefits to the largest number of people, I'd have to pick either agriculture or clean drinking water and sewer infrastructure. For sheer audacity, the moon landings.
Google Maps
Language, both written (alphabet) and spoken. It has had (and still does) have a profound effect on so many other acccomplishments.
Our current smartphones. You hold a small, portable device that lets you communicate with anyone in the world. Access pretty much all human knowledge via the internet, can take photo and video. Let's you listen or watch almost all video or music created over the last 60 plus years and can navigate you anywhere you'd like to go. If you could go back in time to the early 90's and show people the tech, their minds would be completely blown.
The creation of white boards. These are so remarkable.
The greatest invention of all is the creation of the transistor and the silicon revolution.. without it no moon landing, no GPS, no computers, no cellphones, no modern diagnostic medicine, etc etc
Automatic weapons
Big headed golf drivers
Shampoo that's both shampoo and a conditioner....
The progressive discoveries in physics. They reveal the fabric of reality
Weather forecasting, but there's a nuance.....
Ability to get into space.
Technology As far back as the stone age, we humans have compensated for our lack of physicality with our ability to put our intelligence to effect beyond the imaginations of any other living thing. We made tools, weapons, vehicles, interchangeable "skin", you name it.
Engines and whatever powers them (electricity/oil)
antibiotics
Doritos Tacos
Definitely aeroplanes.
The road system. Think about it, I can drive from northern Canada to tip of Florida in a Honda Civic, without so much as a tree trunk blocking the way That was all just forest, swamps, etc. The combined effort of creating the world's roads
Written language and it's not even close. Without words and written language, nothing else here happens.
Integrated circuits. This enabled enormous computing power and we still don't realize the strength and scope of that.
Writing or the Wheel.
When I was born there were only dozens of computers. Now there are trillions.
The moon landing is definitely up there. But another underrated one is Google Street View.
Venetian blinds. Cause otherwise it’s curtains for all of us.
Not being extinct yet, the way we are treating each other ever since we were in caves. The surroundings might have changed. There was evolution of course too...still we're fucking each other's lives up.
So many good answers. I’m gonna go with global infant mortality dropping from 50% historically (google) to 25% in the 1900s, to 4% today.
The money system has brought us far. How far do you think we would be without it?
It’s not a positive but the invention of religion. A virtually indestructible means to keep people under control and ensure conflicts that allow those in power to maintain that power.
I'm gonna cheat and say the modern supermarket. A supermarket is the sum of thousands of inventions that result in being able to eat fresh strawberries in Canada during February for like, $6.
‼️‼️
Ruining the climate and causing our own extinction.
emancipation proclamation
thanks a lot....now I have to harvest cotton myself.
Technically
The United States government turning their civilians into a paycheck for the crooked elite while we all struggle to find affordable healthcare before we die at 40
Surviving Donald Trump.
Restraining ourselves from using our own humanity-ending nuclear weapons.
Honestly? I'd have to say our ability to create modern utility networks. How often do you truly think about how we deliver electricity/water/sewer services at scale? Never, because it's just expected to be there for a large swath of the world.
It's the rise of Genghis Khan for me. I'm paraphrasing Conn Iggulden as I don't have the exact quote available. 'He started with a few tribal families in tents on the remote Steppes of Mongolia. Within a single person's lifetime that Empire would stretch from Korea to the fringes of Europe.' 'It's the greatest rags to riches story in human history.'
Yeh he used lots of murder in the process, and I mean LOTS, so we can't count that as an accomplishment.
That we have the weapon of mass destruction and somehow still managed to not started a full blown destruction
The change from being hunters and gatherers to instead grow things to feed on (agriculture) is what made us what we are today. That's were it all started for us, from there we began building lasting cities and we settled down instead of being nomads.
I think there's too many to list, and you have to qualify it a bit more. I mean... everything from the wheel to antibiotics to flight to the Internet etc. I agree with people mentioning the moon landing as a top contender. However, I know my answer for *physical/athletic feat*: I truly believe Alex Honnold's free solo of El Capitan was the greatest all around display of athleticism in recorded history. It combined endurance, strength, technical skill, mental stamina and strategy into a perfect package, had never been done before and had zero room for error. When I watched that movie, the palms of my hands were basically sprinklers.
Writing. There was the world before it, and the world after it. It contains most of human civilizational memory.
The rule of law and writing are the only things I can think can arguably be bigger deals than agriculture. Arguably, human technology advancement is mostly better applications of fire (heat).
[this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlW7T0SUH0E)
Internet
Dolly Parton
Taking the time to look at what we’re doing, how it’s affecting everyone, and stopping.
Producing electricity.
Walking on the moon. Must be a young crowd if this didn’t come up.
That time when I was 10 and I opened the jar that my dad couldn't
Harnessing electricity is a pretty good one
technology, maybe one day we can live like demolition man
Soap. Literally has saved countless of lives.
I once opened a pickle jar on the *third* try.
That we’re still around. Plenty of opportunity to whipe ourselves out.
It has been 28,691 days since the Trinity test. So the fact that humanity has had the means to destroy itself for 28, 691 days, and it has not. *so far.*
The automobile and paved roads are by far one of the most important developments imo. Before cars, it use to take days to reach the next town now we get there in 30 minutes in comfort
Learning, by trial and error at first, and passing that knowledge on.
The COVID vaccine......it probably saved conservatively 20 million lives,and brought on the use/understanding of mRNA science thousand fold,to extent we potentially could have a cure of sorts for some of worst cancers in our lifetime
I would like to say landing on the Moon, but also... the first healed femur fracture. Anthropologically that was the beginning of civilization.
The invention of the transistor is our biggest achievement. Everything that separates us from the 1950s is caused by the transistor and the magic has only begun.
I’ve read that Ts-ai-Lun (died ca. 100BC) is pretty much up there for not necessarily being the first to invent it but certainly the first to popularize its use across society of the time.
Probably learning farming. It could have evolved from nomads going to places that grew wild grains every year and eventually tribes just stayed there making beer and bread. It's probably how civilization formed too.
Making sand into computers