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Developments without which the modern world would be unrecognizable: Materials: concrete, petroleum, steel, aluminum, cotton, plastic
Music: 12 tone equal temperament
Food: Cereal crops, food preservation (canning, pasteurization), fermentation
Technology: batteries (lead-acid, lithium-ion, alkaline), circuitry, GPS
Transportation: internal combustion engine, asphalt road engineering, flight, rocketry Lists like this, or “tech trees” as you might find in Civilization-type games, are hard in part because language is insufficient to map technological progress. There’s also no version of modernity that could exist without some form of philosophy, pedagogy, and cultural development, but naming “most significant” ones in a modern context involves going back to very ancient and deeply opinionated texts that include the Bible, Koran, Torah and so on. |