As asked.
Mine would be the computer. I continue to be amazed at what we can do with them.
The time machine.
Plumbing. I could live without almost every modern comfort but a flushable toilet
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.
I was going to say toilets/indoor plumbing. Necessary for survival? Maybe not. Best convenience ever invented? Probably.
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!
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
My dick.
I discovered it when I was twenty-one and it’s been my favourite thing since.
Late bloomer? I think most people figured it out around puberty
Did you have an innie before 21 or was it detachable and you finally found it?
The plow. It allowed early river valley peoples to generate 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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a toss up: either chalkboards or dry erase boards. Both are remarkable.
::groan::
I think you mean “dyaaadddddd…”
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!
Soap easily. God the lives it saved and continues to save easily makes it the best invention imo
Sliced bread. Before sandwiches what was the point?
Delicious drippings, stews and gravies on hunks of bread.
The sandwich was a downgrade.
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.
Cordage/string. Way more useful than fire and arguably predates it.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I mean, vacuum tubes where phenomenal when they came, allowed first long distance calls in 1915, but look at my phone now, fits on my hands, and has billions of transistors!
Its crazy that we’re now approaching 200 million transistors in a single square millimetre. Boggles the mind.
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.
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?
