What's the piece of technology that has impacted the modern world the most?
What's the piece of technology that has impacted the modern world the most?
If you ask me? Mobile/WiFi internet... The way and amount of time we use our phones had changed A LOT since their diffusion. I guess the release of the iPhone changed our idea of what a phone is too
Edit: when I say modern world I'm referring to the last 50 years. So stuff like "the electricity" or "the telephone" doesn't count.
Nikola Tesla's alternative current.
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?
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=5B4tgJjP7X7jIuhTSomething 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The ubiquity of smart phones and mobile data.
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!