56
Chemical fertilizer. World population would probably be half the size without it and starvation rates much higher.
One of the guys who invented the process for large scale production was Fritz Haber, to make explosives and chemical weapons. He's also responsible for using chlorine gas on the battlefield in WW1. His wife was a chemist and an activist, who shot herself in the heart after learning about his involvement. Haber left within days for the Eastern Front to oversee gas release against the Russian Army.
He ended up saving more lives than he destroyed, but what a story.
There's a really good section on him in the book, How to hide an empire - a history of the greater united states.
I don't believe this, is there a convincing argument to be made or does it hinge on destroying the environment to reduce cost to the consumer?
What a wild question.
Why? They are extremely damaging. The runoff destroys entire ecosystems like the wetlands where I used to live. Now filled with toxic microorganisms feeding on the fertiliser accumulating there
You are making a red-herring argument.
The post's question is: "What technology made the most impact in modern times?"
A poster says "Chemical fertilizers" and detailed the reasons.
And then you come in and say "NU-UH, IT DESTROYS THE PLANET!!!" an argument that has nothing to do with the question.
If your interpretation is that "impact" includes negative sentiment and mine did not then sure
My interpretation of impact includes both positive and negative sentiments.
Whereas you are saying that a negative thing doesn't count as impact.
Impact
noun
a marked effect or influence.
This should not be down voted.
Those of you that are down voting this comment just because this skepticism doesn't match your worldview or what you were taught from a textbook (which never tell the whole story) should stop and do a bit of research on your own. There is plenty of accessible evidence that points to nitrogenous fertilizers harming the environment and contributing to global warming without even digging into primary scientific publications.
It doesn't mean that the comment about chemical fertilizers are wrong, that's a more difficult claim to check (fertilizers increase crop yields, but could we support our populations without them if we didn't focus on overproduction). That said, it's what's driving much of the recent research into alternative fertilization methods right now. Chemical fertilizers are damaging and we need alternatives.
Transistors. Invented somewhere along the 50s.
Transistors is the defacto answer. We wouldn't have anything we have now without them.
Oh you say but what about (this thing) that doesn't have any in it? The factory it was mass produced in runs on transistors.
Going down the list of comments in this post:
Telephones. Always had transistors.
Internet. Obvious.
Coal. Everything from the trucks to the converors, to the systems that track production, and all the transportation involved after uses them.
Washing machines also use them even if they're not the stupid "smart" machines people buy for some reason.
Edit. If you're in anyway curious about transistors here's a new video from Asianometry about them:
https://youtu.be/k8cdByDa3oA?si=5B4tgJjP7X7jIuhT
Something worth repeating is that transistors are a direct application of quantum mechanics. Quantum physics isn't a metaphysical thing about half dead cats and working only on a few ultra cold atoms. If you want to explain how a piece of silicium can be conductive or insulating depending on it's polarisation you need... Quantum physics.
Holes and dots.
its* polarization (or polarisation, in your part of the world.)
semiconductor
It depends on what you mean by piece of technology I guess, since what we have now is a culmination of thousands of awesome tech over the last few hundred years.
If I were to choose one thing, I'd say the telephone. It's the predecessor to the internet, and suddenly communication between people was instant rather than messages that'd take forever (or morse for the places that had it).
It probably changed the world forever, being able to talk to someone in a completely different country and share something quickly.
I can't call in 2024 the era when telephones came out "modern" anymore
To be fair, you didn't say it had to be a modern technological invention, just that it impacted the modern world
Tobefaaaaair
Ancient Egypt would disagree.
In the last century? The diode, aka the P/N junction and every variant that has been created ever since.
Recently? Capacitive touch screens are by far the most significant change.
Burning black rocks.
The Industrial Revolution absolutely exploded the world, good call.
I read that washing machines had a big impact, manual washing of clothes could take a full day of work.
Glad to see someone has mentioned this. Huge gains in time in the day for a huge part of the population.
I would say the Internet as well. It has dramatically shaped how we interact with the world and has made a lot of information more accessible.
There are probably better overall answers like farming, the printing press, vaccines, transistors, and fertilizer but I feel like a lot of them are if we didn't have X we wouldn't have Y situations.
Antibiotics.
Their discovery and development is what has directly enabled our sudden rise from 2B to 8B humans in only about a century. Without antibiotics, we would likely still be under 3B humans world-wide. Yes, disease really did kill off a lot of humans back in the day.
Graph out the human population over the last two centuries, and you can even see the very decade when Penicillin use became widespread, along with doctors washing their hands and other basic hygiene tasks.
The most?
Fire.
The best guesses right now is that our ability to use fire--and eventually create fire--allowed us to evolve the brains that we have now, because cooking food significantly decreases the energy needed to process it, which allows more energy to be used by your brain. And our brain burns a lot of calories. Cooking food is essentially a preliminary digestion process. Without our brain, the modern world as we know it never exists. Hell, we never even evolve past troops of apes.
Cars shaped city planning, housing and by consequence our lifestyle, making us more dependent on them to get through your day. You can see it expecially in European cities that were built in medieval/reinassance times: if you live and work in the older parts you can totally do without a car. If you move a few kilometers out, not having one becomes a real handicap
You can see this in the U.S. as well.
In many parts of the world, though, I wouldn't say cars per se, but definitely public transportation. A lot of people can't afford cars in the world, and they still benefit from the invention of the internal combustion engine.
Electricity. And electromagnetic radiations.
Social media. And not in a good way
I agree.
OPs answer of saying that WiFi and phone Internet changed the world is correct, but it's not specific enough or the full truth of the matter.
If we had the Internet and modern phones but the only sites that existed were those from 2002, we'd be living in a very different world.
Mobile Internet is the enabling technology, but if social media didn't exist we'd probably leave our phones in our pockets most of the time.
Facebook existed way before mobile internet was everywhere.
Sure, I was there then. I was on Facebook right in the beginning, when you needed a university email address to even sign up.
So that's true, but it's also true to say that early Facebook wasn't the same as modern Facebook. Early Facebook was - as the name suggested, a place to connect with friends, share pictures and plan events. You'd probably check it once a day to see what was happening, but that was it. And your home feed would be a direct and unfiltered view of what all your friends posted, in the order they posted it, without bias. And you could easily catch up on everything that had happened and then you were finished.
It's the birth of the algorithm and infinitely scrollable tailored content feeds that really defines what social media has become.
This and mobile Internet have really gone hand-in-hand. The algorithm has made us want to be scrolling all the time, and mobile Internet has made it possible .
And your home feed would be a direct and unfiltered view of what all your friends posted
And it was a feature added later when they wanted to compete with Twitter. Prior to that, no home feed. Just profile pages, a la MySpace. And it was glorious! It was so much fun to leave wall messages to friends, and see whatever others have posted in them too.
When the newsfeed came about, I remember thinking "I don't like it. It's stupid!" mainly because I knew it was a reaction to Twitter. Of course, I got used to it eventually.
But yup. Facebook back then was a neat tool. Not the cesspool that's been for the past 10 years.
The ubiquity of smart phones and mobile data.
Nikola Tesla's alternative current.
The nuclear bomb. Even before we nuke ourselves into extinction, it has had a profound impact on geopolitics. Imagine the huge conventional wars we could have had!
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
56 points (92.4% liked)
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