Developments without which the modern world would be unrecognizable:

Materials: concrete, petroleum, steel, aluminum, cotton, plastic Music: 12 tone equal temperament Food: Cereal crops, food preservation (canning, pasteurization), fermentation Technology: batteries (lead-acid, lithium-ion, alkaline), circuitry, GPS Transportation: internal combustion engine, asphalt road engineering, flight, rocketry

Lists like this, or “tech trees” as you might find in Civilization-type games, are hard in part because language is insufficient to map technological progress. There’s also no version of modernity that could exist without some form of philosophy, pedagogy, and cultural development, but naming “most significant” ones in a modern context involves going back to very ancient and deeply opinionated texts that include the Bible, Koran, Torah and so on.

If we're talking about big science&technology categories, I'd say:

Controlled fire (if you can consider it a "man-made creation") -> essential for food and a lot of manufacturing

Wheel -> essential for transportation, but also to make flour (millstones), and a lot of other stuff (e.g. turbines are, basically, specialized wheels)

Controlled electricity and electromagnetism -> artificial light, modern communications, not to mention medical advancements like X-rays

Insulin and pecillin -> millions of lives saved

the printing press -> knowledge becomes easier to spread

If we extend this to all kinds of human "inventions", including law, philosophy, religion, and so on, the list is even longer.

There's of course no single correct list, but I would pick: language (symbolic communication), writing, the scientific method, electricity, the computer.

Other highly consequential inventions: the printing press, the wheel, agriculture, money, the internet.

Notice something subtle. Early inventions extend coordination. Middle inventions extend memory. Later inventions extend reasoning. The latest inventions extend agency. This suggests that human history is less about tools and more about outsourcing parts of the mind into the world.

Near real-time communication overseas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable

imo it isn’t any tool, it’s institutions: shared rules like property, contracts, and science that let billions of strangers coordinate, because without them none of the other mentioned inventions would scale

religion, math, writing, art, engineering, education, monogamy, morality

basically work your way forward from caveman

I'd say zero, because counting "things" is natural. But inventing a symbol for "nothing"? That's pretty wild.

Farming. Animal husbandry. Stirrups. Government. Language. Money/credit/bookkeeping/stocks. Gunpowder. Steam engine. Science. Mass production. Transistor. Logistics.

Also mass communication although that hasn’t turned out so well.

And yeah, call it engineering. Started with the wheel. Thanks for the reminder in thread.

Refrigeration is a big one

The demographic impact of medications and vaccines is very significant, it used to take some populations centuries to double their number, now it takes few decades.

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