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aurareturntoday at 5:29 PM5 repliesview on HN

Fire, agriculture, electricity, AI.

Rank these inventions in terms of importance to humanity.


Replies

vitally3643today at 6:07 PM

That's the fun thing, since we have only observed a single advanced civilization, and that one only indirectly through archaeological evidence, there's no hard facts to be had! We can only make guesses. We don't know what is and is not required to make an advanced technological species, and we won't have any answers until we meet another one to compare with.

anonymousiamtoday at 5:53 PM

It looks like you've already done so with the order of the sequence that you used.

cmrdporcupinetoday at 6:11 PM

Arguably they're all fire -- requiring/involving forms of combustion.

(Well, debatable about agriculture, slash'n'burn wasn't the only form of it, but it was common for land clearing at least... all we have now is one that involves combustion engines, though...)

vkoutoday at 5:59 PM

Nuclear weapons and the control structure around their use and fossil fuels and the C-corporation and what it optimizes for will probably turn out to be more important to the long-term future of humanity and it's civilization.

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aozametoday at 5:58 PM

AI is not important at all. Just make things more convenient, but is completely unnecessary.

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