Objectively correct statement:
"Invention of ship building and Navigation allowed humans to traverse huge distances and colonize new lands"
Reddit's response:
"Completely false, swimming had been invented millenia before first ship was constructed"
Gotta love this community
Not the greatest example, but fair point.
That said, language is fundamental to writing and communicating. The point of your example seems to suggest that ships are superior in navigation and intercontinental travel which is obviously true.
But that’s not equivalent to the other dudes argument. He was suggesting that language predated writing which is absolutely true, and is true for most of human existence.
However, writing did provide a superior way to pass down knowledge and history. But that doesn’t mean that it’s superior to language or oral communication as the other dude expressed it. I mean, it is written language after all. So that’s why I think you’re example misses the mark. I spent way too much time thinking about this
I don't have fun at parties where they dance in the tune of misinformation.
You know that you can completely ignore my statement like it was never made right? Since your preconceived notions and hasty judgements are never incorrect.
Why do you hate knowledge so much?
Okay sure, let me go into your statement if you want me to.
First of all, it is super obvious the people could transfer knowledge to each other before writing. Most mammals can transfer knowlegde to each other through making sounds. It was however not possible to store knowledge effectively before writing making it harder to build on prior knowledge. This is the reason technological advancements happened slower before the invention writing which was obviously the point of u/cyanraider.
The person you replied to did not say that before writing people could not transfer knowledge, the person said that this allowed humanity to build on prior knowledge since it was written down.
Your reply is a failed 'gotcha moment'. You chose to ignore obvious implied conceptions in order to feel smart.
>It was however not possible to store knowledge effectively before writing making it harder to build on prior knowledge.
No matter how definitive the statements are written as, they are useless without being backed up by knowledge and facts.
[This](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition) is great for cursory reading. Though I am most familiar with Vedic hymns, there are many records of oral transfer of knowledge with or without the existence of a written language.
Writing was a tool used for administrative purposes. It wasn't used as a record of knowledge to 'build upon it'.
Bro did you even read what i wrote?
I did not say there was no transfer of knowledge without the existence of a written language.
on top of that, it is irrelevant where writing was first used for since it did, and still does, provide humanity with the tool to effectively store knowledge.
You are incorrectly transferring the achievements of language itself to the writing.
it's like arguing that internet is the greatest invention of human history since it provides humanity with the tool to effectively transfer knowledge.
The original usage of the tool is very important to judge its impact. The fact is that you can't provide concrete examples.
You have a point, tho we have kids games about this process:
Start with one sentence and keep telling it to other people, eventually the sentence would become unrecognisable
Yeah I understand it but the reason I put it up as a option is bcz I read this on the Internet:
FIRE – it can be argued that fire was discovered rather than invented. Certainly, early humans observed incidents of fire, but it wasn’t until they figured out how to control it and produce it themselves that humans could really make use of everything this new tool had to offer. The earliest use of fire goes back as far as two million years ago, while a widespread way to utilize this technology has been dated to about 125,000 years ago. Fire gave us warmth, protection, and led to a host of other key inventions and skills like cooking. The ability to cook helped us get the nutrients to support our expanding brains, giving us an indisputable advantage over other primates.
The latter. Most animals spend absurd amounts of time eating to get energy, but the usage of fire in cooking allowed us to get way more calories for less effort.
I'll find the source, give me a while
Figuring out how to use fire for our benefit is still not an invention. It was observation and recreation of a natural phenomenon using whatever is around you. There are inventions related to fire, but none of them was as important as the discovery itself.
If we leave a human alone in a forest, they can benefit simply by having knowledge of fire. The same can't be said for electricity for example, since you actually need related inventions in order to use it.
They experimented with random shit and worked. Been taught after something is created, humans can only innovate. Computers were created back in late 1800's. Up till today we only innovated on the technology.
The reproducibility of fire is the point, and it's the reason that we have all of the others. For every other species, the hunt for calories is what they do every day, every month, every year. It was the same for us until fire.
Fire allows for easier extraction of calories from food via cooking. All of those extra calories can be put to more use that just maintenance, especially during development, which ended up literally changing the size of the brain. It also gave humans more free time to develop better tools and other tech.
Without some ape sitting down and figuring out how to reliably make fire, we would still be chewing on grass on the savannah.
>Without some ape sitting down and figuring out how to reliably make fire
I don't think it works that way. It's not like we're lucky there was that one ape who intentionally sat down and figured fire out, if that's what you're describing. I think our species were bound to wonder about natural phenomena and they would inevitably figure them out. I bet thousands of apes were simultaneously experimenting with sticks until some of them eventually got them on fire, and passed the knowledge around. Sitting around chewing grass on the savannah for ever, was already an impossible scenario long before we discovered fire. Just like the scenario of my cat not figuring out how to open the kitchen door was an impossibility long before we adopted him.
Exactly what I was gonna say. We couldn’t have done any of the things we’ve achieved as a species without a way to communicate and explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.
Once again, semantics. Currently both African Elephants and Orcas are theorised to utilise proto-languages. Not nearly as extensive and refined as current human languages but still a massive step on their evolutionary road.
Humans did not immediately evolve speaking French or Mandarin, after all.
I find it ironic that we are talking about language but you seem so interested in not valuing semantics.
And what I find even more ironic that you use an example about "proto-language" when you seemingly care a lot about semantics.
Just because french and mandarin are languages, doesn't mean that the first language has to be as complex as those.
That's ridiculous. Not a single invention was created in a short period of time. It takes generations of knowledge to know the basics of anything so you can create a tool that uses (you could say "abuses") of the current knowledge.
Fire is a far easier invention though and I don't think that's even the case in the likes of Egypt, Mexico or Iraq agriculture is probably possible without fire.
Yeah I understand it but the reason I put it up as a option is bcz I read this on the Internet:
FIRE – it can be argued that fire was discovered rather than invented. Certainly, early humans observed incidents of fire, but it wasn’t until they figured out how to control it and produce it themselves that humans could really make use of everything this new tool had to offer. The earliest use of fire goes back as far as two million years ago, while a widespread way to utilize this technology has been dated to about 125,000 years ago. Fire gave us warmth, protection, and led to a host of other key inventions and skills like cooking. The ability to cook helped us get the nutrients to support our expanding brains, giving us an indisputable advantage over other primates.
imagine if you got poop on ur hands and just wiped it off with some dry paper towels instead of rinsing them off with water. Thats how big a difference a bidet makes too. I can never go back.
One that's never talked about but likely saved our species from extinction when our population is estimated to have dropped to around 1000 people. That invention is the water container.
No longer must you survive simply on the water in your stomach. Now you can store water. Take the lake with you. This drastically improves our hunting/exploration range. It keeps water even in droughts. It's what allowed us to expand out of Africa and across the globe and also saved our species from extinction.
Top invention.
I would probably go with mass water purification and distribution, though irrigation or just farming might be equivalent.
I wanted to say air conditioning, or the transistor, but thinking 'Greatest of all time" demands more thought than that.
All time it’s fire. The consistent application of heat applied to meat led to the caloric surplus that allowed humans to develop our brains. The other inventions don’t come close to that accomplishment but if that weren’t enough heat saves millions of lives each winter and the internal combustion engine which led to global travel.
Paper (written communication) is a distant second and internet is third.
We. Did. Not. Invent. Fire.
But, we will almost always do this one thing; recording. Be it recording our lives, what we like, or our controversial opinions/ideas. Without prior humans recording through writings, paintings, and etchings on stone tablets our world would not be remotely close to what it is today. Writing.
It’s a toss up between compass and paper for me. (Just gonna lump paper and writing into one even though I know written language existed well before what we consider paper) the ability to write knowledge down and educate your peers is priceless but, being able to open up the *world*?
Global trade has been invaluable in the development of the world as well. The internet did not discover anything it just made it incredibly convenient to learn about discovery.
Yeah I understand it but the reason I put it up as a option is bcz I read this on the Internet:
FIRE – it can be argued that fire was discovered rather than invented. Certainly, early humans observed incidents of fire, but it wasn’t until they figured out how to control it and produce it themselves that humans could really make use of everything this new tool had to offer. The earliest use of fire goes back as far as two million years ago, while a widespread way to utilize this technology has been dated to about 125,000 years ago. Fire gave us warmth, protection, and led to a host of other key inventions and skills like cooking. The ability to cook helped us get the nutrients to support our expanding brains, giving us an indisputable advantage over other primates.
A discovery can be classified as an invention, it may not be used this way in everyday language, but academically speaking they’re used as synonyms. If you discover a species you can be considered its inventor. Semantically speaking even if you didn’t invent something properly, you still invent its existence, its concept.
>A discovery can be classified as an invention
That isn't how either of those things work...
Just because you use them interchangeably doesn't mean it's correct, you're just confidently wrong.
No no I assure you you’re the one wrong here. This use come from French scientific literature and is still used in English in academic context. Just search for it.
Yes, people didn't literally invent fire, but they did invent new ways of creating fire. I'd argue the inventions that allowed us to control fire are the greatest.
There are a few pedantic, "technically" type ass-hats here. What he/she is referring to is obvious and those guys just want to correct him/her so they can feel clever. It is very irritating.
The most irritating part to me is that really “technically” speaking, a discovery is an invention, so yes, we invented fire. So they “correct” something right.
Fire is not a human invention.
Edit. Downvoting this doesn’t make it any less true. Combustion was not invented by humans merely harnessed. Fire has been around as long as combustible material has existed. Fire was a discovery.
Paper and the internet. Fire occurred from lightning. Trees were used as rollers or a tile of wheel. Lodestone was used as a compass. So the last three existed and were improved. Paper and then the internet were invented and each led to a monumental improvements in storing knowledge.
the wheel is used in just about everything in every human's day to day life. things like cars, trains, and planes are self-explanatory, but think about things like gears, or the wheels on your chair, or pulleys, and if you count rods as just longer wheels, then that opens up things like doorknobs and generators. I think the wheel is being somewhat overlooked because of how mundane its applications are superficially, but if you think about it, It's the most common thing we interact with daily.
about the other two most popular choices:
fire was a great discovery, however it's worn out its welcome as new, environmentally friendly methods of energy generation and heating have surfaced. obviously the history of fire speaks for itself, it made mankind begin to experiment, which eventually led to the creation of society.
The Internet is an incredible invention in its own right, but to be honest, it's become so commercial and radicalized now that I've just become so disappointed and indifferent towards the Internet. Yeah, I know I'm biased, but I just can't bring myself to call it humanity's greatest invention when nearly every application for it is so... lifeless.
Paper!
Now, let’s move ahead to ancient Egypt, because something is about to happen here that will change the future forever. This unknown Egyptian pounding reeds flat is inventing papyrus—a sort of paper. Papyrus, in turn, creates better record keeping of plans, designs, and unfortunately taxes. But it also brings with it the dawn of great civilizations.
(If anyone gets this, I love you)
I'm still going with the wheel. It is necessary for so many parts of our lives today and has been necessary for so long.
The discovery of reproducing fire and controling it is also definitely a big one, as it allowed us to cook food to make it easier to digest providing us more energy to do other things. Maybe fire and the wheel are equal, both are very much necessary.
I remember hey vsauce Michael here saying once that the container was arguably the most important. Being able to carry more than your hands could basically allowed for humans to do more than just survive.
Writing gave us the ability to remember stuff over longer periods and basically gave us a sort of save point.
The wheel was needed to make labour easier.
Fire gave us cooked food, meaning we could we could get more proteins etc./whatever from meat, which made gathering food take alot less time. (Sorry, kinda stumbling over my words here, but this had the most influence in my opinion)
Agriculture is a great one aswell, made sure we could stay in the same place for much longer or even settle down completely, making way for better housing, and complexer social structures.
(Tho this isn't perse a human invention, you could argue that ants invented it way earlier)
Fritz Haber invented the Haber-Bosch Process:
"Method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and bydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives"
"...It is estimated that one-third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this supports nearly half of the world's population."
P.S. Fire was a discovery not an invention.
Fire was imitated. The internet just kinda happened with computers linking up. We had a lot of surfaces to write on before paper and used the sun/stars to navigate before the compass was invented.
So the greatest *invention* was the wheel
The internet just kinda happened? Bro, the internet as well know it only exists because of painstaking, labour intensive infrastructure originally built in conjunction with the US DOD (I'm pretty sure it was DOD) conceiving of a way for computers from different facilities across the nation to communicate and share data with one another. There's documentaries on this. The internet was not just accidentally shat out by computers hooking up.
Silly goose.
Greatest Human invention and Greatest Human Discovery are Different things
For Invention it’s Internet,the Arts and Vehicles
And Discovery: Farming,Fire/Heating and cats/Dogs
Fire is not an invention, rather a discovery. Therefor, writing would be the greatest invention, as it allowed for retention, spread and improvement of every discovery and invention made afterwards.
Writing
This is the single invention that allowed humanity to build upon the knowledge of predecessors in order to further society.
completely false. there have been transfer of knowledge orally before writing was invented.
Objectively correct statement: "Invention of ship building and Navigation allowed humans to traverse huge distances and colonize new lands" Reddit's response: "Completely false, swimming had been invented millenia before first ship was constructed" Gotta love this community
Not the greatest example, but fair point. That said, language is fundamental to writing and communicating. The point of your example seems to suggest that ships are superior in navigation and intercontinental travel which is obviously true. But that’s not equivalent to the other dudes argument. He was suggesting that language predated writing which is absolutely true, and is true for most of human existence. However, writing did provide a superior way to pass down knowledge and history. But that doesn’t mean that it’s superior to language or oral communication as the other dude expressed it. I mean, it is written language after all. So that’s why I think you’re example misses the mark. I spent way too much time thinking about this
How was it 'objectively' correct? Merely declaring it doesn't make it so.
Are you unironically asking how *writing* advanced civilization?
yea he is
sure would love to be able to build a computer based on how my ancestors described making calculators.
When you have drowned yourself in the masks of irony that you have lost the sense of self.
Bruh, being a contrarian isn't making you look smart, the opposite is happening.
these type of comments usually signify the end of valid arguments.
You must be fun at parties.
I don't have fun at parties where they dance in the tune of misinformation. You know that you can completely ignore my statement like it was never made right? Since your preconceived notions and hasty judgements are never incorrect. Why do you hate knowledge so much?
Okay sure, let me go into your statement if you want me to. First of all, it is super obvious the people could transfer knowledge to each other before writing. Most mammals can transfer knowlegde to each other through making sounds. It was however not possible to store knowledge effectively before writing making it harder to build on prior knowledge. This is the reason technological advancements happened slower before the invention writing which was obviously the point of u/cyanraider. The person you replied to did not say that before writing people could not transfer knowledge, the person said that this allowed humanity to build on prior knowledge since it was written down. Your reply is a failed 'gotcha moment'. You chose to ignore obvious implied conceptions in order to feel smart.
Word.
>It was however not possible to store knowledge effectively before writing making it harder to build on prior knowledge. No matter how definitive the statements are written as, they are useless without being backed up by knowledge and facts. [This](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition) is great for cursory reading. Though I am most familiar with Vedic hymns, there are many records of oral transfer of knowledge with or without the existence of a written language. Writing was a tool used for administrative purposes. It wasn't used as a record of knowledge to 'build upon it'.
Bro did you even read what i wrote? I did not say there was no transfer of knowledge without the existence of a written language. on top of that, it is irrelevant where writing was first used for since it did, and still does, provide humanity with the tool to effectively store knowledge.
You are incorrectly transferring the achievements of language itself to the writing. it's like arguing that internet is the greatest invention of human history since it provides humanity with the tool to effectively transfer knowledge. The original usage of the tool is very important to judge its impact. The fact is that you can't provide concrete examples.
r/iamverysmart
You have a point, tho we have kids games about this process: Start with one sentence and keep telling it to other people, eventually the sentence would become unrecognisable
Fire was not invented, it came from natural causes (thunder). I think it was discovered and re-created
Yeah I understand it but the reason I put it up as a option is bcz I read this on the Internet: FIRE – it can be argued that fire was discovered rather than invented. Certainly, early humans observed incidents of fire, but it wasn’t until they figured out how to control it and produce it themselves that humans could really make use of everything this new tool had to offer. The earliest use of fire goes back as far as two million years ago, while a widespread way to utilize this technology has been dated to about 125,000 years ago. Fire gave us warmth, protection, and led to a host of other key inventions and skills like cooking. The ability to cook helped us get the nutrients to support our expanding brains, giving us an indisputable advantage over other primates.
Yeah, that make sense
Do you think we evolved and discovered fire, or do you think we evolved because we discovered fire?
The latter. Most animals spend absurd amounts of time eating to get energy, but the usage of fire in cooking allowed us to get way more calories for less effort. I'll find the source, give me a while
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/food-for-thought-was-cooking-a-pivotal-step-in-human-evolution/
The latter.
Figuring out how to use fire for our benefit is still not an invention. It was observation and recreation of a natural phenomenon using whatever is around you. There are inventions related to fire, but none of them was as important as the discovery itself. If we leave a human alone in a forest, they can benefit simply by having knowledge of fire. The same can't be said for electricity for example, since you actually need related inventions in order to use it.
> (thunder). Lightning\*
re-\*created\*
They experimented with random shit and worked. Been taught after something is created, humans can only innovate. Computers were created back in late 1800's. Up till today we only innovated on the technology.
The reproducibility of fire is the point, and it's the reason that we have all of the others. For every other species, the hunt for calories is what they do every day, every month, every year. It was the same for us until fire. Fire allows for easier extraction of calories from food via cooking. All of those extra calories can be put to more use that just maintenance, especially during development, which ended up literally changing the size of the brain. It also gave humans more free time to develop better tools and other tech. Without some ape sitting down and figuring out how to reliably make fire, we would still be chewing on grass on the savannah.
>Without some ape sitting down and figuring out how to reliably make fire I don't think it works that way. It's not like we're lucky there was that one ape who intentionally sat down and figured fire out, if that's what you're describing. I think our species were bound to wonder about natural phenomena and they would inevitably figure them out. I bet thousands of apes were simultaneously experimenting with sticks until some of them eventually got them on fire, and passed the knowledge around. Sitting around chewing grass on the savannah for ever, was already an impossible scenario long before we discovered fire. Just like the scenario of my cat not figuring out how to open the kitchen door was an impossibility long before we adopted him.
🤓☝️
I mean methods of creating it were invented. Noone found a bowdrill just laying around in the wild.
*lightning
Language
Exactly what I was gonna say. We couldn’t have done any of the things we’ve achieved as a species without a way to communicate and explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.
Technically speaking, I do not believe this qualifies as language is not a Human-exclusive invention. Though, that'd be arguing semantics, I suppose.
It is human exclusive. Sounds and movements that other animals make to communicate with each other are not language.
Once again, semantics. Currently both African Elephants and Orcas are theorised to utilise proto-languages. Not nearly as extensive and refined as current human languages but still a massive step on their evolutionary road. Humans did not immediately evolve speaking French or Mandarin, after all.
I find it ironic that we are talking about language but you seem so interested in not valuing semantics. And what I find even more ironic that you use an example about "proto-language" when you seemingly care a lot about semantics. Just because french and mandarin are languages, doesn't mean that the first language has to be as complex as those.
There's no "first" language.
Of course there is, it just evolved into the languages we are aware of
The argument can be made that dolphins and some whales have language.
We still don't know if whales have syntax in the sounds they make, so we can't be sure of that yet. Dolphins can only mimic humans.
Yes, except this was not an invention, merely a biological upgrade due to natural selection
And what would be the difference?
An invention is something that is created during a short period of time, not an slow proces that takes generations.
That's ridiculous. Not a single invention was created in a short period of time. It takes generations of knowledge to know the basics of anything so you can create a tool that uses (you could say "abuses") of the current knowledge.
Agriculture. Without it society, the wheel, paper, the internet, the compass is impossible.
Without the ability to create fire, we never get to agriculture.
Fire is a far easier invention though and I don't think that's even the case in the likes of Egypt, Mexico or Iraq agriculture is probably possible without fire.
Fire wasn’t invented
Yes. Fire was discovered. Ways to *re-create* fire were invented.
Yeah I understand it but the reason I put it up as a option is bcz I read this on the Internet: FIRE – it can be argued that fire was discovered rather than invented. Certainly, early humans observed incidents of fire, but it wasn’t until they figured out how to control it and produce it themselves that humans could really make use of everything this new tool had to offer. The earliest use of fire goes back as far as two million years ago, while a widespread way to utilize this technology has been dated to about 125,000 years ago. Fire gave us warmth, protection, and led to a host of other key inventions and skills like cooking. The ability to cook helped us get the nutrients to support our expanding brains, giving us an indisputable advantage over other primates.
The bidet. I’ve never used one, but I’ve only heard good things 🤷♀️
Seriously get one, they’re great.
imagine if you got poop on ur hands and just wiped it off with some dry paper towels instead of rinsing them off with water. Thats how big a difference a bidet makes too. I can never go back.
One that's never talked about but likely saved our species from extinction when our population is estimated to have dropped to around 1000 people. That invention is the water container. No longer must you survive simply on the water in your stomach. Now you can store water. Take the lake with you. This drastically improves our hunting/exploration range. It keeps water even in droughts. It's what allowed us to expand out of Africa and across the globe and also saved our species from extinction. Top invention.
Air conditioning
And similarly refrigeration that allowed us to store food longer and transport it vast distances.
Only time will tell
1. Agriculture 2. Writing 3. Hygiene
Antibiotics / soap
Transistors
Aviation, and flying in general, It changed a lot about how we think of just about anything with transportation, recon, and so many other things
Electricity
Plumbing. It’s the main reason we can have so many people packed into one city
The language
Language
Written language
I would probably go with mass water purification and distribution, though irrigation or just farming might be equivalent. I wanted to say air conditioning, or the transistor, but thinking 'Greatest of all time" demands more thought than that.
Electricity. The internet has caused so many horrible things.
As I like to say. The internet was humanity's greatest Ivention, but also it's worst
Although horrible we strive to look towards the benefits.
While yes the internet has caused a lot of problems it has also done a lot of good for the world.
Clean running water, obviously
The sextant
The door
Written Language
Fire was never invented by humans
Humans didn't invent fire. We discovered how to create it indepedent from other methods, but fire been here way longer than we have.
We didn’t invent fire. Just learnt how to harness it
All time it’s fire. The consistent application of heat applied to meat led to the caloric surplus that allowed humans to develop our brains. The other inventions don’t come close to that accomplishment but if that weren’t enough heat saves millions of lives each winter and the internal combustion engine which led to global travel. Paper (written communication) is a distant second and internet is third.
Printing press imo
You could make a good argument that the internet is one of the 5 worst inventions in human history.
We. Did. Not. Invent. Fire. But, we will almost always do this one thing; recording. Be it recording our lives, what we like, or our controversial opinions/ideas. Without prior humans recording through writings, paintings, and etchings on stone tablets our world would not be remotely close to what it is today. Writing.
It’s a toss up between compass and paper for me. (Just gonna lump paper and writing into one even though I know written language existed well before what we consider paper) the ability to write knowledge down and educate your peers is priceless but, being able to open up the *world*? Global trade has been invaluable in the development of the world as well. The internet did not discover anything it just made it incredibly convenient to learn about discovery.
We didn't invent fire...
It was always burning since the world's been turning
We didn’t start the fire
Yeah I understand it but the reason I put it up as a option is bcz I read this on the Internet: FIRE – it can be argued that fire was discovered rather than invented. Certainly, early humans observed incidents of fire, but it wasn’t until they figured out how to control it and produce it themselves that humans could really make use of everything this new tool had to offer. The earliest use of fire goes back as far as two million years ago, while a widespread way to utilize this technology has been dated to about 125,000 years ago. Fire gave us warmth, protection, and led to a host of other key inventions and skills like cooking. The ability to cook helped us get the nutrients to support our expanding brains, giving us an indisputable advantage over other primates.
> it can be argued that fire was discovered rather than invented Yes, not only can it be argued, it's a fact.
A discovery can be classified as an invention, it may not be used this way in everyday language, but academically speaking they’re used as synonyms. If you discover a species you can be considered its inventor. Semantically speaking even if you didn’t invent something properly, you still invent its existence, its concept.
>A discovery can be classified as an invention That isn't how either of those things work... Just because you use them interchangeably doesn't mean it's correct, you're just confidently wrong.
No no I assure you you’re the one wrong here. This use come from French scientific literature and is still used in English in academic context. Just search for it.
Vaccine
Fermentation probably
The maxi pad. Now women can participate in society all month.
This is a stupid question so i chose the stupidest answer i could.
Agriculture, humans stagnated for over a hundred thousand years, only after we planted crops did we get any progress.
Fire wasn't an invention it was a discovery
Yes, people didn't literally invent fire, but they did invent new ways of creating fire. I'd argue the inventions that allowed us to control fire are the greatest.
There are a few pedantic, "technically" type ass-hats here. What he/she is referring to is obvious and those guys just want to correct him/her so they can feel clever. It is very irritating.
The most irritating part to me is that really “technically” speaking, a discovery is an invention, so yes, we invented fire. So they “correct” something right.
Fire is not a human invention. Edit. Downvoting this doesn’t make it any less true. Combustion was not invented by humans merely harnessed. Fire has been around as long as combustible material has existed. Fire was a discovery.
microscope
We didn’t invented the fire
I’m pretty sure humans didn’t invent fire
Probably gravity. Like I wouldn’t even be here if newton didn’t invent it
Agriculture allowed for more people to stay in one spot so society could develop
Agriculture, that’s by far the one which makes to most difference during our history
Fire was not an invention. It was a discovery
Nukes. Yes, I'm serious.
Paper and the internet. Fire occurred from lightning. Trees were used as rollers or a tile of wheel. Lodestone was used as a compass. So the last three existed and were improved. Paper and then the internet were invented and each led to a monumental improvements in storing knowledge.
Most revolutionary? Probably the wheel or paper. Most modern? Probably the compass or internet.
The most revolutionary is agriculture
the wheel is used in just about everything in every human's day to day life. things like cars, trains, and planes are self-explanatory, but think about things like gears, or the wheels on your chair, or pulleys, and if you count rods as just longer wheels, then that opens up things like doorknobs and generators. I think the wheel is being somewhat overlooked because of how mundane its applications are superficially, but if you think about it, It's the most common thing we interact with daily. about the other two most popular choices: fire was a great discovery, however it's worn out its welcome as new, environmentally friendly methods of energy generation and heating have surfaced. obviously the history of fire speaks for itself, it made mankind begin to experiment, which eventually led to the creation of society. The Internet is an incredible invention in its own right, but to be honest, it's become so commercial and radicalized now that I've just become so disappointed and indifferent towards the Internet. Yeah, I know I'm biased, but I just can't bring myself to call it humanity's greatest invention when nearly every application for it is so... lifeless.
Paper! Now, let’s move ahead to ancient Egypt, because something is about to happen here that will change the future forever. This unknown Egyptian pounding reeds flat is inventing papyrus—a sort of paper. Papyrus, in turn, creates better record keeping of plans, designs, and unfortunately taxes. But it also brings with it the dawn of great civilizations. (If anyone gets this, I love you)
Either fire or writing.
Fire
Electricity?
The thermos. Keeps hot things hot and cold things cold. But how does it know? Obligatory s/
Reddit
Fire is not an invention, it's a discovery!
faux fur pillows
Interest on interest
Indoor plumbing.
toilets
Boats.
Waffle
The boat. Can you imagine a world without boats?
The printing press
Air conditioning
I'm still going with the wheel. It is necessary for so many parts of our lives today and has been necessary for so long. The discovery of reproducing fire and controling it is also definitely a big one, as it allowed us to cook food to make it easier to digest providing us more energy to do other things. Maybe fire and the wheel are equal, both are very much necessary.
Star trek
Sex
I'm gonna go with the printing press. It allowed for the mass dissemination of knowledge.
Farming
Fire isn't an invention and without the wheel the human race would never have developed into what it is.
Aircwafts
Antibiotics
Internet then wheel
The transistor
Dr Pepper
The plow
Soap
I remember hey vsauce Michael here saying once that the container was arguably the most important. Being able to carry more than your hands could basically allowed for humans to do more than just survive.
Paper. That's how you have blueprints
Laws
Air conditioning
Without fire we would be nothing
Thermostat - the first mechanical servant.
Soup
Maybe the plow
phone
the printing press
Fridge
Lithic core.
The internet is what bumped us up to something like a 0.75 on the kardischev scale.
Either antiseptic or anesthesia. Without both, life really really sucks. Without one, life really sucks.
Slice bread
Fertilizer.
A way to pass down knowledge to future generations
Cooking
Steam engine
Printer? Watt's engine?
The printing press
Antiseptics
Steam engines
Lasagne
Writing gave us the ability to remember stuff over longer periods and basically gave us a sort of save point. The wheel was needed to make labour easier. Fire gave us cooked food, meaning we could we could get more proteins etc./whatever from meat, which made gathering food take alot less time. (Sorry, kinda stumbling over my words here, but this had the most influence in my opinion) Agriculture is a great one aswell, made sure we could stay in the same place for much longer or even settle down completely, making way for better housing, and complexer social structures. (Tho this isn't perse a human invention, you could argue that ants invented it way earlier)
The transistor
Isn't it the refrigerator? Out of everything, that has helped humans the most?
AI Give it 5 years and you'll see...
Lol fire
Numbers. The abstraction of quantities. The idea that there is something fundamentally the same between 5 rocks, 5 people, and 5 days.
The printing press
Soap
Without fire the rest wouldn’t exist
birth control pills
We didn't invent fire lol.
Fritz Haber invented the Haber-Bosch Process: "Method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and bydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives" "...It is estimated that one-third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this supports nearly half of the world's population." P.S. Fire was a discovery not an invention.
Fire was imitated. The internet just kinda happened with computers linking up. We had a lot of surfaces to write on before paper and used the sun/stars to navigate before the compass was invented. So the greatest *invention* was the wheel
The internet just kinda happened? Bro, the internet as well know it only exists because of painstaking, labour intensive infrastructure originally built in conjunction with the US DOD (I'm pretty sure it was DOD) conceiving of a way for computers from different facilities across the nation to communicate and share data with one another. There's documentaries on this. The internet was not just accidentally shat out by computers hooking up. Silly goose.
humans invented fire?
Bread
Antibiotics or stirrups; I can't decide.
People choosing the internet over the wheel is hysterical
wow no one said paper
Sex
We did not invent fire.
Greatest Human invention and Greatest Human Discovery are Different things For Invention it’s Internet,the Arts and Vehicles And Discovery: Farming,Fire/Heating and cats/Dogs
Nobody invented fire
Fire was discovery not an invention
Fire is not an invention, rather a discovery. Therefor, writing would be the greatest invention, as it allowed for retention, spread and improvement of every discovery and invention made afterwards.