If You're reading this on your desktop/laptop/tablet/phone, possibly in a sustainable building, wearing insulated clothing (I hope), perhaps eating some refrigerated food. Plus, many other technological wonders work to keep you safe/comfortable/happy/healthy, and it all makes it clear that in the field in which humanity reigns, the invention is supreme.
We're not the fastest, strongest, toughest, or hottest species, but we are the best at dreaming of making life easier. In 10,000 years—in the blink of a planetary time—we've gone from chasing down mammals with drones delivering cookies. As hard as it is to believe, human inventions are even more important than the distributed cookies, which have changed us and our world tremendously, and here are inventions 10.
1. TIME
Technically, time is both a discovery and an invention. As the fourth coordinate of an event (along with length, width, and height), Time is a natural feature of the universe. But time as a standardized unit of measurement based on human value is an invention and an important invention.
As we know it today, our standardized timekeeping system, with 24 hours of 60 minutes, and that in turn of 60 seconds, dates to a complex mixture of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek systems and has been important in our emergence. Modern, production-based society.
Before time was standardized, any process that took time—for example, cooking, fermentation, heating, cooling, etc.—was biological, based on solar position and other phenomena left to general intuition. Timekeeping allowed it to be done properly, in the end.
This is the greatest gift of time to society: accuracy. Now agriculture, medicine, engineering, computing, and every other process critical to our lives can be repeated repeatedly, all with the same level of accuracy.
2. Mathematics
Mathematics has brought many benefits to humanity, and it is difficult to exaggerate. There is almost no major segment of society where mathematics has neither improved nor completely rebuilt. Without mathematics, there is no measurement, engineering, or physics. And that means no medicine, architecture, advanced technology, or computation.
Like time, mathematics is another discovery/invention hybrid, as it is a series of universal constants and relations and has a uniquely human interpretation. Its universal nature may be at the heart of its ultimate use: communication with alien life. As far-fetched as it may sound, joining a larger cosmic society could be humanity's ultimate destiny. If so, then English, Spanish, and Mandarin would not be our language of choice; It would be mathematics, the universal language. Although no alien species would know Shakespeare, they would certainly know E=mc2, and that's a good place to start.
3. The Printing Machine
Although the printing press is the most cliche item on this list, we can't ignore it. Gutenberg's printing press wasn't the first automatic book-making machine (that honor went to an unnamed Chinese inventor centuries ago), but it was the easiest, most adaptable, and cheapest. The printing press made it useful and popular to mass-produce written works, and with it, we were able to lift ourselves out of the Dark Ages.
The printing press allowed information to reach a larger audience and promoted an expansion in literacy rates among the lower classes, which helped prop up the hands-free knowledge of the elite and, in turn, fueled political reform and revolution. This allowed scientists and mathematicians to record their ideas and spread them widely among peers, leading to an unprecedented amount of collaboration and competition, which launched the European Renaissance.
4. Internet
If knowledge is power, then humanity is more powerful than ever—at least in terms of accessibility. The Internet took the information dissemination of the printing press and cranked it up rapidly. Now, 50-70% of the world's population can learn as much or as little as they want, at any time, with Internet access.
Although five minutes in any comment section will show how often internet users don't want to learn, the opportunity is still there, and it's a modern marvel. I currently have tabs open for articles on the Boltzmann mind, Tir na nog, and chiaroscuro techniques. Don't know what some or all of them are? Thanks to the Internet, you can do it in a matter of seconds.
5. Space Travel
So far, space travel has provided humanity with two great gifts: scientific information about our solar neighborhood and symbolic triumph. But any astrophysicist, futurist, or cosmologist will tell you that space travel will give us more. So much so, in fact, that it is likely to go down in history as the greatest step our species has ever taken.
From the history of our species' expansion, evolution, and energy use, it is easy to figure out that we are growing rapidly and will soon demand the resources and energy that our home planet can provide. The answer to that problem is our nearest neighbor planets. Talk of colonizing Mars increases every year, and others have entered the conversation—Venus, Mercury, and our Moon are the other big three. Soon, all four of those bodies will be needed as new homes for humanity if we continue to expand our numbers and energy demands at our current rate.
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