Mankind's greatest achievement?

Lynton

Lynton

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Given Neil Armstrong's recent death and what he accomplished in his life..... we were discussing (arguing) the other day as to what was mankinds overall greatest achievement.....

Thinking about it more now, there are many incomparable fields for this eg science / technology/ engineering... and do you define it as "greatest impact on humankind" or "The most ridiculous thing to attempt given the technology of the day"

In no particular order we came up with quite a few things.... (and had a healthy debate about it.. )


Invention of the wheel
Fly to the moon
Powered flight / invention of the jet engine / supersonic flight
Transplant surgery
Invention of the internal combustion engine
Personal computing / the internet
Vaccinations against malaria / polio / tuberculosis etc

So, interested to hear your thoughts as to "mankind's greatest achievement and why?"

Obviously there is no right or wrong answer.....
 
The printing press. Written language was previously limited to being copied by hand. With the printing press you can make multiple copies and they become far more accurate. This increases the speed of distribution of those ideas.

Without good recording it makes it far harder to spread good ideas and develop them.
 
I think the entire Apollo program tops them all. From the incredibly brave Apollo 8 moonshot in 1968, through Apollo 11's first landing in 1969, to the 3 "J missions" that featured extended stays, excursions in the lunar rover and even more science in 1971 and 1972.

Totally staggering.
 
Greatest impact from the least effort would have to be penicillin, the most efficacious life-saving drug in the world.

On 3 September 1928, Fleming returned to his laboratory having spent August on holiday with his family. Before leaving, he had stacked all his cultures of staphylococci on a bench in a corner of his laboratory.
On returning, Fleming noticed that one culture was contaminated with a fungus, and that the colonies of staphylococci that had immediately surrounded it had been destroyed, whereas other colonies farther away were normal.
Fleming showed the contaminated culture to his former assistant Merlin Price, who reminded him, "That's how you discovered lysozyme."
Fleming grew the mould in a pure culture and found that it produced a substance that killed a number of disease-causing bacteria. He identified the mould as being from the Penicillium genus, and, after some months of calling it "mould juice", named the substance it released penicillin on 7 March 1929.
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Fire
Canon 7D
No need to give a reason :D
 
Great thread...

The Internet has to rank up there for what it's done to allow people to interact and learn. Like the printing press allowed the written word to be reproduced and spread around, the Internet has empowered people in many ways and is a dominant force in how many people lead their lives, be it work or pleasure.

Personally, deep sea exploration blows my mind - the pressures involved and the unknown world down there. But I wouldn't say it's an achievement that's influenced as many people as space exploration, simply because space really is the unknown in terms of the theorising involved.

I've just read a load of books about high-altitude mountaineering, primarily relating to Everest and K2, how these mountains were first found by westerners, how they were attempted on many occasions (and conquered), and how they've maintained their allure to climbers and Joe Public ever since. Relating to Everest, the fact that people trekked into (relatively) unknown places like Tibet and Nepal and scaled the mountain with such rudimentary equipment beggars belief... much in the same way the Apollo missions had (by today's standards) very basic computing equipment, the high-altitude climbers relied on equipment that was cannibalised from other fields and relied ultimately on the human body to get them to the top. For me, it's made even more poignant when you take into account the way that decades later on when huge advances had been made in mountaineering, there were still massive numbers of fatalities - the 1996 disaster is the most talked about - and that's just one mountain. K2 had a similar disaster and numerous climbers have lost their lives on other peaks.

Probably the craziest part of the whole Everest story was the one relating to the two snowboarders - Stefan Gatt and Marco Siffredi - who ascended the mountain within a few days of each other to claim a worlds' first. Gatt laid first tracks but had to climb down some of the route because of poor snow. Fair play to the guy, he'd carted all his own equipment up unaided by sherpas and without supplemental oxygen. Siffredi on the other hand used bottled oxygen and sherpas to carry his gear and made it from the top to 6,400m in one go, a massive achievement. Sadly, Siffredi vanished a year later attempting the descent via the more difficult Hornbeim Couloir route.

Anyway, I digress..... :)

Face transplants have gotta be one of the oddest achievements. The ballpoint pen also pretty neat.

Oh yeah....

Brewing. Where would we be without beer? ;)
 
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Fire
The Wheel
Printing
Aircraft
The Moon Landings
The Internet
but on a Sunday morning, after a long walk, it has to be....the bacon butty :)
 
Shift from hunter gatherer to agrarian societies, that led to urbanisation?
 
A fascinating thread.

My suggestion would be plumbing! Yes, it sounds boring, but think of the impact the distribution of fresh running water and sewage systems has had on the world. Making these two services available to all has has probably saved more lives than anything else.

Everything we do depends on having fresh water and a toilet!

Chris
 
While many inventions are mere incremental progression that doesn't mean they ought to be discounted.

With that, I'd suggest computer virus & malware to be one of these amazing creation of mankind. A new form of war has opened up. No longer do we see soldiers on battle fields killing one another. Now nations attack one another in a cyber world. Financial casualties mount, but so far not a single loss of life.

I'd also suggest Facebook and Twitter. We've witnessed nations crumble, leaders fall because of the empowerment these two social media tools have put into the hands of people in the street.
 
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The cracking and understanding of the Human Genome has tremendous implications for the future, which we've hardly started to take advantage of yet. Or abused which we surely will. :(
 
Electricity would have to be top for me. One because without it I wouldn't have a job, but nearly everything we do uses it in some form.
 
The Iron Age and The Industrial Revolution.

History began at some point during the Iron Age if I recall correctly, and the Industrial Revolution, which would have been impossible had we not discovered Iron, has basically acted as a catalyst for just about everything we rely on today. Without it we'd have no transport (obviously), no or very limited "technology" and nowhere near the quality of life that many of us are fortunate to live.
 
Birth control.
 
Voyager 1.
About to pass into inter stellar space and still going strong 35 years and 11 billion miles after launch.

Should bump into a pesky alien any day now.:)
 
specialman said:
Brewing. Where would we be without beer? ;)
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MartynK said:
Shift from hunter gatherer to agrarian societies, that led to urbanisation?
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There's a strong sociological theory that the principal reason why hunter gatherers stopped moving around and settled in one place or cave was because they needed time for the yeasts to ferment their heavy buckets of beer!

:beer:
 
chips
 
TV remote, imagine going back too the dark times of having to get up and change channel :D
 
Neil B said:
TV remote, imagine going back too the dark times of having to get up and change channel :D
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The man who invented the TV remote died recently. He was buried down the back of the sofa :D
 
To go off on a slightly different tangent from Science and Tech...

...Music. And I don't mean the latest bunch of lobotomised monkeys off the X-Factor, I mean real music. I'm on a John Williams film score kick at the minute, as well as Polovtsian Dances by Borodin. Maybe I'm slightly biased; although I'm in the forces my job is a military musician. Music's always been a huge part of my life, and without electricity, the wheel and so on we'd have found other ways of achieving the same ends, but a world without music? I shudder to even think about it.
 
NASA scientists have said the skills needed to build a supersonic airliner were greater than those needed to put a man on the moon so maybe we need to include Concorde
 
CaptainPenguin said:
NASA scientists have said the skills needed to build a supersonic airliner were greater than those needed to put a man on the moon so maybe we need to include Concorde
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Yeah, just not the French bit of it :naughty:
 
Blu-Tack
 
TIME of course! we're all ruled by it and never have enough of it! :lol:

only eclipsed by chocolate... mmmmmmm :love:

great thread!
 
Is the answer not obvious? The Bread Slicer of course!
 
Jamie Lee Curtis' fruppnies!!! (a la Trading Places)
 
tiler65 said:
Jamie Lee Curtis' fruppnies!!! (a la Trading Places)
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good shout:D

i'd rather they had used the budget for the moon missions on
something useful like cancer treatments/cures
 
Lynton said:
Invention of the wheel This was most likely a discovery, not an invention, and was probably by accident. Therefore not really an achievement, Neil Oliver or some such tv expert commented recently that the wheel probably didn't have that much of an impact for thousands of years
Fly to the moon Estimated number of people involved over a million according to Nat Geo. I'd probably put this near the top of the pile
Powered flight / invention of the jet engine / supersonic flight Three totally different things!
Transplant surgery Near the top
Invention of the internal combustion engineIt's how Newcomen kicked of the industrial revolution, none of the other things would have happened without this (well apart from the wheel)
Personal computing / the internet Hmmm, well it's important to mankind granted and it has changed the world totally, yeah alright
Vaccinations against malaria / polio / tuberculosis etc What about WHO's mammoth campaign to eradicate smallpox :gag:

So, interested to hear your thoughts as to "mankind's greatest achievement and why?"

Obviously there is no right or wrong answer.....
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Number one on my list would be the development of agriculture. This was the necessary step before any civilization could happen. You could argue finding the way out of Africa seventy odd thousand years ago was more important even than that - it was our first step to the rest of our history.
 
WD40 and Viz comic. End of :thumbs:
 
We were asked this when I was at school. I'll give the same answer I gave then (and expect the same completely indifferent response I got then, too!):

Accurate timekeeping (allowing accurate long-distance navigation among many other things.)
 
DavidMartin said:
Electricity would have to be top for me. One because without it I wouldn't have a job, but nearly everything we do uses it in some form.
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I would have to agree with you there, it's pretty fundamental to most of the other suggestions in this thread.
 
reading and writing. Without those none of the other things in this thread could of happened
 
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