Poll of the Day > What do you think is the greatest invention ever?

(+) Yeah! (+)

air conditioners
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XlaxJynx007 posted...

Are we talking about actual items or cultural advancements? I'd say the greatest advancement was agriculture. Being able to grow our own food brought us out of the hunter-gatherer phase and into the phase of cities and the beginning of technology.

The thing about it is farming isn't easy. It's much easier being a hunter-gatherer than it is to set up in one area and grow crops. It's a question that anthropologist often wonder. Why we went from hunter-gatherer to growing crops.
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sliced bread
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Printing Press. Ended the Middle Ages and brought the Renaissance.

Last 50 years, Internet.
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Feel like we should break these down by century and/or recent decade.

Two inventions that seriously need some revolutionizing are the combustion engine and the battery. Both of these haven been around for a century and have only been tweaked a bit but are still essentially the same.
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the q-tip
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Probably clothes. I don't want to see gross people naked unless I absolutely have no choice.
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Of some of the first: Fire. Overall, its the crucible that spawned so much else in multiple ways. The Wheel is somewhat overrated for early civilization (frankly, a domesticated beast of burden was generally better .

However, aside from fire, Writing is actually perhaps the greatest invention, though it was more an invention of mankind rather than any single individual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyjLt_RGEww



Early Civilization:
Lets see. Maybe whatever the name is for the earliest unpowered mechanical weaving loom. Textiles and clothing were very important to the spread of civilization.

Joke Entry: The Roman Chariot. Whose design characteristics are based upon the width of a horse butt, and whose dimensions have lived on to this day through wagons being made to fit their ruts, and early trains being made to the same specifications... Long story short, even a lot of modern technology is designed, and sometimes even constrained by, the width of a horse's ass. No, really. The SPACE SHUTTLE had parts whose sizes were constrained by the size of railroad cars. So really, we can blame the roman chariots for that. And the chariots can blame horse asses. The space shuttle was (very indirectly) designed by a horse's bum!


Later on:

Gunpowder can work too, if you are considering "greatest" as things that were important to history, rather than actually being very "good" from a moral standpoint or some such. While firearms came about rather slowly and a fair bit later, gunpowder itself was invented in China in the 9th century.




More Modern:

While not so much an invention as it is people deciding they are finally sick of all the literal crap in the streets... Sewers, Indoor Plumbing, and other things we take for granted about pipes today that we've actually had for 100-150 years.



The Future:

Fusion Reactors. It is all but certain that we will have them within the next decade or two. They are basically the way we will get out of our fossil fuel rut.




eating4fun posted...

wwinterj25 posted...

Toilets. Even more so ones with heated seating.

Toilets are the reason for the ecological disaster known as the Great Stink

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

It beats the alternative. Which was actually the norm much more recently then you would think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cba7di0eL8I

Actually, that movement may have helped gotten steam because of things like the Great Stink, now that I think about it.

But seriously, the Sanitation Movement gets remarkably little praise considering it was among the largest engineering projects ever attempted in any single city, let alone it being done in pretty much EVERY EXISTING CITY AT THE TIME in what is now the modern world.

Its impressive even if we exclude some of the more insane outliers like Chicago, which put a huge number of buildings up on jacks so they could build their sewers above (what was then) ground level. They even just put some of the smaller buildings on wheels so they could rearrange them or move them to another part of the city.

Seriously Chicago. You used to be cool. So stop electing governors who are apt to retire from their jobs to make license plates.
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Sephiroth C Ryu posted...

It is all but certain that we will have them within the next decade or two.

We've been saying that since at least the 70s.
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Deez nutz
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Writing.
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Birth control? :x
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Miroku_of_Nite1 posted...

Sephiroth C Ryu posted...

It is all but certain that we will have them within the next decade or two.

We've been saying that since at least the 70s.

No. People who either believe in "Cold Fusion" or who simply don't understand what we are actually accomplishing in the field have been saying that since the 70s. Well, them, and maybe the occasional few hopefuls who were hopeful that some unusual technology based on something like rapidly imploding bubbles discovered in lobster claws would provide a useful loophole to get around the whole containment problem.

But we have several ongoing, fully legitimate fusion projects now that are expected to be power-positive. The furthest off is ITER, which is basically the biggest takomak (sp?) type reactor yet and one which the calculations indicate will produce net positive power (previous ones were built pretty much just to research fusion and learn enough to actually build an actual power plant). It will probably be fully constructed and then fully operational... surprisingly close to Sim City 2000's prediction for when we will have fusion power. I don't think it will be U-shaped though.

Some other designs are set to have smaller fusion reactors available sooner. Lockheed Martin of all companies is actually working on one themselves. Being Lockheed, they have been somewhat stingy on what data they actually give out, but are up to their 4th prototype which may be pretty close to the break-even point.
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Metallurgy.

Hash, kush, wax.
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solid_kush posted...

Hash, kush, wax.

Also edibles, those things creep up on me and get me so fucking high I swear lol
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