10 of the Most Important Things That Happened To Mankind By analise.dubner  [218 more lists]

I bet that, at first, one might not think this is important. One would be wrong. Writing was more than just scratchings on a stone tablet. It was more than just some flunky writing down the history of whatever Awesome Guy (who was totally standing over him waiting for him to come up with another glowing adjective) on a wall in little birds, dogs and wavy lines. It gave people the ability to keep track of inventories, to pass on magic recipies and secret stuff that only rich, influential people wanted other rich, influential people to know. At first it was mostly the purview of priests... wanting to keep all their important knowledge to themselves. Can't have the rabble passing each other mini stone tablets with "U R GR8! LOL XD" written on them. And the printing press was a loooong ways away, so everything was transcribed by hand for a long time. Of course, the Sumerians figured out a way to make stamps for each letter which they pressed into semi-hard clay... and that was kind of like a really slow tedious typewriter, but smart! No hand cramps from tapping little wedges into rock. Being able to pass around information - ritual knowledge, tax information, population records... believe it or not, being organized really made one powerful.

Now if I could only be bothered to sync my stupid contact list out of my phone once in while.

Hey! Religion! This isn't a touchy subject or anything, so I should be able to make as many blanket statements here as I want. I know there's this little rumor flying around that religion was invented to control the masses. A...heh. So, I'm not actually going to say that, not just because it's kind of inflammatory, but because it's not entirely true. No priest set out to control the masses, it just kind of turned out that way, and everyone... kind of... stayed on board with it because it worked so well.

Think about it for a second, before you get your panties in a bundle. In the beginning there was polytheism. Lots of gods to explain lots of things in the world we didn't understand. Saying that the god of rain was punishing/blessing us for washing away our village was a lot easier to swallow than the concept that a random act of nature just wrecked everything you held dear for no reason at all. Say you were a guy who thought about it more than someone else and for whatever reason - maybe your dad, maybe a fortune cookie - you figured you knew more about the gods than anyone else. So, fast forward, and there are priests. Man, these guys are important throughout human history. These are the guys in the know, the guys with the money, the guys who don't have to work and have soft, white hands. If anyone wants to tell me that they would EVER give that up. The power of being the voice of the gods/god. Of making the rules and telling people whatever they felt like saying.... and I'm not suggesting that every priest in the history of man was a corrupt a*****e in it for the power. I bet the majority of them believed in the gods/god they worshiped. They augered their bones and intestines and sacrifices and they used the knowledge that had been passed to them to tell them how to interrpret the will of their deities.

But I am saying that these priests, they had a HUGE hand in how we got here from there. Organized religion is unspeakably powerful. Priests can wield more power than kings because a king can only hurt you in this life, not the next. And if a priest tells a king to go to war. The odds are pretty high he's gonna go.

And we all know what this was used for.

Fireworks.

I could have just said the horse (which was pretty f-ing important), but if you recall from a few items ago, the horse has already done its part to change the world. Pay attention. Before the stirrup, saddles were just a way to keep your butt from getting sore. I'm not saying that guys weren't good at riding horses before the stirrup, but imagine if you will - close your eyes - a man on a horse. The man has a sword and he looks mad. He swings his sword out at you because he doesn't like your haircut. And he promptly falls off. Putting stirrups on a saddle allowed a guy to stand steady and fixed on horseback, and, like so many of mankinds' advances, they are about war. If you can kill more efficiently, odds are you are going to advance. You're going to overwhelm your enemy, kill the infantry and take all their cool stuff.

At last we come up to the point we're at now. The Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the Rennaissance, basically the evolution of the scientfic method and the develpment of scientific theory has ensured our almost complete domination as a species on our sad, little, browning, still-somewhat-blue ball. Observation began early on and developed hand in hand with almost everything else on this list. While we were fighting and killing, we were learning better ways to do it. While we were dying from plagues, we were learning why and how not to die the next time. We would watch the planets and stars and stare and stare and stare until someone asked us what we were looking at and we would go: "Huh?" We would make the nerdy guy eat the weird blue berry and when he died a few minutes later, we crossed that off our list of things to eat. We would try to turn lead into gold and while were doing that, we found out all kinds of other awesome stuff about chemistry.

And not too long ago some guys thought it might be cool to get a machine to do math for us. Turns out that was kind of a good idea, although the extent to which it has changed the world has yet to be realized.

Maybe.... just maybe the entire purpose of humanity to this point has been to bring the computer into being.

How else are the robots going to take over?