[kragen]

breakthroughs since fire more important than the transistor probably include cooking, agriculture, the wheel, metallurgy, glass, ceramics, the heat engine, mechanisms in general (with things like pulleys, hydraulics, screws, and gears), construction cement (originally lime), math, writing, optics, electricity, chemistry (including things like distillation, the atomic theory, and recrystallization), plumbing, carpentry, weaving, sewing, automatic digital computation, and possibly language, depending on when that happened

it seems like maybe you haven't thought much about the history of technology

[anshumankmr]

The mass-energy equivalence and how it led to the discovery of nuclear fission/fusion and how to control/cause explosive atomic chain reactions was probably one of the most impactful technologies of all time, in a literal sense.

[kragen]

maybe, but it's not yet in the same league as math, writing, cooking, sewing, and electricity, in terms of its effects on human life

i mean all five of those were probably prerequisites for it?

maybe if the humans build torchships or nuclear-powered starships, or convert the electric grid to mostly nuclear, i'd agree, but those all seem far in the future

[akkartik]

I'm curious: why sewing in particular? As opposed to say spinning or weaving or knitting?

[kragen]

it's surely debatable, but my thought was that sewing seems to have predated weaving (of cloth), nålbinding, especially knit and crochet, and probably even spinning, and it was sewing that enabled the humans to live outside the tropics

sewing without spinning or weaving still gives you tents and jackets (of hide or felt, at least). i think weaving without sewing only gives you floor mats. spinning without sewing gives you rope, which makes longer fibers than natural sinews, and thus lassos and lashing, but i think these are less transformative technologies than tents and jackets

i think the humans probably could have developed the fission chain reaction without spinning but probably not without sewing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_needle#Prehistoric_sewi... sewing: 50–61 kya or possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_clothing_and_textil... 170 kya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_spinning#History spinning: 41–52 kya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving#Archaeology weaving: 27 kya (cloth doesn't survive but its clay impressions do)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding#History nålbinding: 8 kya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting knitting: .9 kya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crochet#Origins crochet: .2 kya

[anshumankmr]

Yes, I did mention "one of"

[dharmab]

Don't forget: Soap/handwashing, antibiotics, the smallpox vaccine, the Haber-Bosch process, blood transfusion, anesthetic and PCR!

[kragen]

soap is a good one for sure; the others might turn out to be less important than the transistor

time will tell

[dharmab]

Haber-Bosch is the reason there are over 7 billion humans on Earth instead of closer to 2 billion. It's very difficult for any digital technology to compete with that.

[kragen]

agriculture is the reason there were 2 billion instead of 20 million, which is a much bigger difference

it seems likely that digital technology will be crucial in enabling there to be far more humans off earth than on earth; o'neill cylinders could enable many orders of magnitude more physical humans even within this solar system

to say nothing of the possibility of backing up your mind with a brain scan and thus becoming immortal, and possibly forking into more copies of your mind than there are humans alive today

(nitpick, transistors aren't digital)