On occasion. When I get fed up with loonies on the Internet, I'll play either Civilization or Age of Wonders for a few days.
Refrigeration, we are able to perchase our nutritional requirement at all times due to refrigeration. Before refrigeration we had to consume before spoilage. Or preserve food by chemical or rendering means.
Many inventions listed above are vital to our knowledge, and our current existence. If you were to eliminate any of them our way of life would be drastically different.
Many inventions listed above are vital to our knowledge, and our current existence. If you were to eliminate any of them our way of life would be drastically different.
That's a good point. When it comes to this question, if you imagine a world without one of the key earlier inventions, you might not have had many, many subsequent ones.
That's why dolphins rule the world, oh wait. Not trying to be mean, just pointing out that isn't really true.
- Yes we can and have. We'll have a working traslator inside 2 years.
- Humans have been around for 3 million years, we've been civilized for only 10,000 years.
- We live longer, helther lives so I don't see how they could be called perfect.
No, David, you are not correct in you praise. Indeed, if God made man in His own image to have dominion over all living things, then God must have made a mistake; for of all creatures great and small, man is probably the least perfect. Many species have long since reached a state of perfection in their evolution; whereas Homo sapiens sapiens has been around for a relatively short period of time, and not likely to survive much longer for being hellbent on self-destruction. This is hardly "intelligent design"! Even the lowly cockroach is better suited for survival: it has remained virtually unchanged for millions of years, being perfectly adapted to every terrestrial environment between the polar icecaps, and very likely to be crawling about for millions of years after all traces of man have vanished from the earth.
David is very optimistic when it comes to technological advances. I think he is just so excited for the sci-fi future we see in movies that it makes him think we are really close to every breakthrough that we think might be possible someday, even if we are still decades or centuries away. I wish I was so optimistic. (but I also like being a realist, so maybe not)
I'm optomistic in the other direction. One of my favorite books is by Henry Beston was a naturalist and writer, and his book The Outermost House has become a literary classic. The book is about the author’s sojourn in a small isolated cottage (the "Fo’castle") at the end of the dunes on the great beach of Cape Cod. The book is filled with the most evocative descriptions of nature; and in the first edition published in 1928 there are haunting photographs of shipwrecks and seabirds. Of all writers, I think he comes closest to defining man’s place in the natural world. Here is a quote from this wonderful book:
"We need another and wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."
"We need another and wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken a form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."
Language is an interesting one. Some (most notably renowned linguist Noam Chomsky) might argue that it is intrinsic and not necessarily an invention.
I worked with dogs, working dogs, not pets. But they can communicate with us. Basically put I can understand what dogs are attempting to communicate. Not by some psychic voodoo but through their vocalization. But dog communication is rudimentary. I am hungry, I want attention, I see someone you don't know. All those messages are clearly communicated by dogs. But dolphins are arguably much smarter than dogs. We communicate with apes as well. Perhaps the reason we can't communicate with dolphins is because we don't share much communicable things with them. They live in a marine world. Also we think of them as lower life forms. Perhaps if we treated them as equal they may communicate.
What I mean by that is locking them in a tank and dangling food over their heads isn't necessarily the way to get them chatty. Plus many cultures eat them. We need some evolving before dolphins will communicate.
What I mean by that is locking them in a tank and dangling food over their heads isn't necessarily the way to get them chatty. Plus many cultures eat them. We need some evolving before dolphins will communicate.
So aquaducts, that is a good one if ideas count as inventions I would say agriculture.
But waponry is really valuble, being that man has no adaptation to defend himself.
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