Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

12mo ago

To date, what do you think is the greatest invention or discovery and why?

Mine is the computer. I continue to be amazed at what we can do with them.

126 comments

Plumbing. I could live without almost every modern comfort but a flushable toilet
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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

It’s a toss up: either chalkboards or dry erase boards. Both are remarkable.
- ::groan::
  
  I think you mean "dyaaadddddd......"

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.

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 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):
  this episode
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Glasses. The ability to see so much better than I otherwise could leaves me astonished every time I put them on.
- Lenses also gave us telescopes and microscopes. Pretty amazing discovery.
- 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.

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.

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

One I didn't see yet: Radio.
Less than 150 years old, and has vitally changed how we communicate, and has downstream effects on every other human activity.
Kind of magical having streams of information travelling all around us.
- Yep, I was talking to my grandpa about what invention his parents thought was the most significant in their lifetime, and they had said the radio. They had lived through both world wars which had brought about many many inventions and that was the one they thought was most significant.
  Up to that time news was incredibly slow and you couldn't put what was going on on the other side of the country without a massive delay, let alone the world.

Writing, it allowed for knowledge to travel across vast distances. And for that knowledge to remain available and accurate for far longer than any oral tradition would be capable of.

It's pretty damn hard to pick just one thing, so my best-of list
There's really basic foundational things like the wheel, cutting tools, fire (if we want to count it as an invention,) string/rope/cordage, writing, clothing, cooking, agriculture, metalworking, etc. the sort of things that are absolutely basic building blocks of civilization.
Moving a few milenia up, and in no particular order,
the Haber Process to synthesize ammonia, which allowed for the creation of synthetic fertilizers. If you've eaten any commercially grown food in the last century, you probably owe it to the Haber Process.
Antibiotics are another big one, as are vaccines.
Vaucason's lathe arguably laid the foundation for a whole lot of fabrication techniques that led to the industrial revolution
Refrigeration
Steam engines and later internal combustion engines
Clocks
Compasses
Printing press
The telephone
Airplanes
Computers and the internet
Cameras
- I think soap deserves an honorable mention.

Antibiotics. Turned so many lethal wounds into minor cuts.
- And now people use them for minor cuts and soon we will no longer have (effective) antibiotics.

This was the topic of discussion between an historian, a mathematician and a mystic.
The historian said, "writing. The ability to put words on paper to be communicated to people who never even met the 'speaker', is the single greatest achievement of mankind."
The mathematician said, "no, numbers. The ability to express and develop truly abstract concepts, which in turn leads to Incredible real applications. Numbers are the single greatest invention of mankind."
The mystic said, "the Thermos flask."
"The Thermos flask?"
"The Thermos flask. It keeps hot drinks hot in the winter, and cold drinks cold in the summer. But think - that little flask - how does it know?"
- I was having lunch at work and this Geordie I work with pointed at my flask and said "What's that mate?"
  I said "It's a thermos. It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold"
  Next day he comes in and he's got a brand new thermos. I asked him what he had in it.
  He said "Two choc ices, a sausage roll and a cup of tea"

The Fast Fourier Transform.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  The Fast Fourier Transform.
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

In Electronics world? Bipolar junction Transistors. 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, while having a very short lifespan of less than 48 hrs).
I mean, vacuum tubes where phenomenal when they came, allowed first long distance calls in 1915.
Look at my phone now, fits on my hands, and has billions of transistors!
Post script: lately I've been thinking, what if we remove cell towers as middle men? Because nowadays privacy is somewhat dead. People have been using radio frequency for walkie-talkies even before 1st generation communication (1G) was a thing.
This video enlightened my day 😊
It's just a matter of time now
- 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
- Its crazy that we're now approaching 200 million transistors in a single square millimetre. Boggles the mind.

HANDS DOWN CAPSLOCK
- THAT’S THE WAY SHE
  WHOOP WHOOP

Soap easily. God the lives it saved and continues to save easily makes it the best invention imo

The atomic theory of matter, because It is so foundational to the technology of the modern world. It allowed the development of modern chemistry, and with it pharmaceuticals, chemical engineering (e.g. the Haber-Bosch process), electronics/semiconductors, genomics, medical science, and more. It's been an enormous force-multiplier to improve technologies we already had by providing prospective insight into how they work, so we can do better than iterative trial and error. Virtually everything that we touch or use in a day, from coffee to clothing to computers, was enabled or improved through knowledge of the system of atomic elements.

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.
  
  I suppose u could argue the same for any technology tho.

Probably the steam engine as far as actual innovation and all but my answer is air conditioning

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

Anesthetics. Yeah, vaccines are cool, but given the choice of a world without vaccines and a world without anesthetic I'm ditching vaccines every time.

Bread.
I love bread.
- But did you hear about SLICED bread!??
  
  Yes and i hate it

Either fire or the wheel. Not sure which I would place higher. But both really are the two greatest inventions/discoveries. Without either you basically don't have future discoveries or inventions.
- fire makes sense given many evolutionary biologists think cooked food influenced the ability of early hominids to evolve complex reasoning and symbolic logic, simply because proteins partially digested by fire make more nutrients available for brain growth
  this theory is beginning to be contested, however: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4842772/
- My vote is definitely for fire. Learning to first contain and sustain, then how to create fire. Everything else follows on from that.
  Cooking food probably started us down a path to become as intelligent as we are today.
  And the light allowed us to have free time at night to try new ideas.
  And the warmth allowed us to spread out of Africa.

Gotta be vaccines for me.

Didn't see it in the thread, but aqueduct are pretty fire. They allowed empires to grow large and far away from a source of drinking water. Also improved sanitation allowing people to live longer and healthier.

Language. The ability to communicate advanced concepts is what has enabled us invent/discover a lot of things, including the computer.

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.
- what about horse carriages??? road networks were built for those way before bikes existed

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.
  
  its also the reason Blender innovated so much in the last ten years, being the main choice for digital perverts

Photography! I'm not even into it, but when I look at an old picture it always amazes me we're able to freeze moments in time.

Printing Press

I have a list of things that transcend invention and are actually some of humans greatest achievements:
The bicycle
The piano
The internet
Saturn V

Soap

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!

Cordage/string. Way more useful than fire and arguably predates it.

Gutenberg Printing Press.
No question. That or anti-biotics
- While antibiotics are a very important discovery in medicine, I believe the biggest reason medicine was able to develop like it has is the printing press.

At first I thought you were talking about dating lmao
Hmm I definitely agree that computers, and especially smartphones, are pretty damn amazing inventions.
But I agree with another poster when it comes to the greatest invention. When we invented the printing press, it allowed our species to develop much quicker because we were able to share information/education much better.

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."

Sliced bread. Before sandwiches what was the point?
- Delicious drippings, stews and gravies on hunks of bread.
  The sandwich was a downgrade.

Not the just important invention, but definitely the best invention: plumbing.
Y'all try going a week without running water and wiping with leaves or newspaper and you'll quickly see that while other things are definitely important, plumbing is the best to have

Written language. It lets us speak to people across time.

Screw the running water and antibiotics. I don't need no machinery or amenities, give me cheese!
Computers are cool though

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?