# Greatest invention/discovery in the last 500 years? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 23, 2021, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804 "2021-11-23T13:10:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Napier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ce73a5/32.png) [@Napier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Napier)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2021, 7:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/61 "2021-11-25T19:48:26Z")
> [@PhillyGuy](#): > > But human parents evolved, long ago, to be ambivalent about having children, considering minuses as much as pluses. Is this remarkable? Is there any species in history that isn’t ambivalent about having children? That is, species reproduce because they had sex, and it’s the sex they wanted, not the reproduction. Even our own species only seems to have been aware that sex and reproduction were related for an evolutionary brief time. I’ve heard there are, or recently were, some societies the still have not accepted sex and reproduction are related, or that sex is a requirement for reproduction. And it makes sense – people go through various changes in adolescence, including size, secondary sex characteristics, shifting family alliances, having sex, and in the case of females, bearing young. It’s by no means obvious which of those are necessary for which other ones. Especially, in the many societies that have taboos about having sex, no doubt many of the people having young are also saying they didn’t have sex. ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2021, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/62 "2021-11-25T19:58:03Z")
My answer to all of these sorts of questions is always “the mute button”. ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2021, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/63 "2021-11-26T00:15:07Z")
> [@Napier](#): > > Is this remarkable? Is there any species in history that isn’t ambivalent about having children? That is, species reproduce because they had sex, and it’s the sex they wanted, not the reproduction. Even our own species only seems to have been aware that sex and reproduction were related for an evolutionary brief time. I’ve heard there are, or recently were, some societies the still have not accepted sex and reproduction are related, or that sex is a requirement for reproduction. If you are even partially correct here, that part of my post is wrong. But the point that evolution towards baby-craving will be slower than development of improved no-side-effects contraception still holds, making development of birth control the likely most consequential invention. Looking into the specific question of whether awareness of the link between sex and reproduction has been known for an evolutionary brief time, I am now unsure. [This claims at least 50,000 years of awareness](https://slate.com/technology/2013/01/when-did-humans-realize-sex-makes-babies-evolution-of-reproductive-consciousness-of-the-cause-of-pregnancy.html), but the Neolithic art it references (Çatalhöyϋk archeological site) is from only 9,000 years ago. That’s brief. It looks like the real answer to when such awareness arose is unknown. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2021, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/64 "2021-11-26T02:08:55Z")
> [@PhillyGuy](#): > > the point that evolution towards baby-craving will be slower than development of improved no-side-effects contraception still holds Your posts read as though you think that baby-craving hasn’t already evolved. But there are quite a lot of people who do want to have children; many of them badly enough that they feel like their lives are failures if they can’t pull it off. There are enough people who want to have children very badly that the relatively small percentage who are unable to easily conceive is enough to support an entire industry and a whole lot of medical work built around helping those who don’t readily conceive to have children. Yes, there are some humans who don’t want to have any children; but they appear to be very much in the minority. What’s going on isn’t that people don’t want to have kids. What’s going on is that most people don’t want to have more children than they think they can readily support: support financially, support in terms of available time, and support emotionally. Provide the support, and there’ll be plenty of children. You’re right that in the current state of affairs governments aren’t about to step up and do this. But that’s where the problem is. It’s not in the existence of birth control, but in the fact that too much of society doesn’t support caring for children. ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2021, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/65 "2021-11-26T02:55:57Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > You’re right that in the current state of affairs governments aren’t about to step up and do this. But that’s where the problem is. It’s not in the existence of birth control, but in the fact that too much of society doesn’t support caring for children. If I understand correctly, you are thinking there is a potential problem here that can realistically be solved, You could be correct. And if you are, while contraception is an important invention, it’s not the most important. I’m thinking that: A. Safe easy effective birth control is not a problem to be solved, but an individual human right (not necessarily a right that has to be free — just affordable), B. Birth control is likely to, long after I and my kids are gone, lead to the terrible tragedy of the human species withering. This Jonathan V. Last [quotation](https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/failure-and-thanksgiving) may give an idea where I am coming from: > [@](#): > > When people ask me if/why I’m conservative, my stock explanation is that my policy preferences have never been especially conservative, but my temperament is _super-duper ultra_ conservative. > > At heart, a liberal looks at the world and sees all the ways it can be better. > > I look at the world and see all the ways it can get worse. So my first thought with this thread was — which invention will lead to the greatest tragedy? ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2021, 3:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/66 "2021-11-26T03:04:55Z")
Kind of off from the question of what’s the greatest invention/discovery, but in reply to this: > [@PhillyGuy](#): > > Looking into the specific question of whether awareness of the link between sex and reproduction has been known for an evolutionary brief time, I am now unsure. Probably not generally in a conscious sense, but some sense of paternity appears to be much older than the origin of humans, or even of primates. In a number of species, including primate species, adult males sometimes kill infants – infants who have other fathers. But they don’t generally kill infants who they fathered themselves. [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-infanticide/infanticide-common-among-adult-males-in-many-mammal-species-idUSKCN0IX2BA20141113](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-infanticide/infanticide-common-among-adult-males-in-many-mammal-species-idUSKCN0IX2BA20141113) . > males kill babies fathered by others to make the dead infant’s mother available for mating. Huchard estimated infanticide occurs in about 25 percent of mammals. > [. . .] > Infanticide was found to be widespread, occurring in rodents including mice and squirrels, carnivores including lions and bears as well as in hippos, horses and even the white-throated round-eared bat. Many primates practice infanticide including chimpanzees, gorillas, baboons and langurs while others do not, including orangutans, bonobos and mouse lemurs. > > The researchers said females of some species use strategic promiscuity to stop males from killing their babies. By mating with as many males as possible in a short time, they make it hard to discern infant paternity. > > “Males stop killing offspring if there is a risk that the offspring might be their own,” Lukas said. DNA evidence that the males are correct about whether they’re the fathers: [DNA analyses support the hypothesis that infanticide is adaptive in langur monkeys. - PMC](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1689922/) . > Based on DNA analyses of wild Hanuman langurs (Presbytis entellus) we present the first evidence that male attackers were not related to their infant victims. (They must mean the first DNA evidence; there appears to be quite a bit of earlier observational evidence.) – so some sort of knowledge that an infant’s existence has to do with specific male(s) who its mother previously had sex with appears to be very ancient. If it weren’t, males would be just as likely to kill infants if they’d had sex with the mother as if they hadn’t. ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2021, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/67 "2021-11-27T18:53:53Z")
Is it too far from the topic to suggest the greatest invention/discovery of this year? [A Cure for Type 1 Diabetes? For One Man, It Seems to Have Worked.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/health/diabetes-cure-stem-cells.html) > [@](#): > > “It is a remarkable result,” Dr. Butler said. “To be able to reverse diabetes by giving them back the cells they are missing is comparable to the miracle when insulin was first available 100 years ago.” . . . > > For Dr. Melton and Ms. O’Keefe, caring for an infant with the disease was terrifying. Ms. O’Keefe had to prick Sam’s fingers and feet to check his blood sugar four times a day. Then she had to inject him with insulin. For a baby that young, insulin was not even sold in the proper dose. His parents had to dilute it. > > “Gail said to me, ‘If I’m doing this you have to figure out this damn disease,’” Dr. Melton recalled. In time, their daughter Emma, four years older than Sam, would develop the disease too, when she was 14. > > Dr. Melton had been studying frog development but abandoned that work, determined to find a cure for diabetes. He turned to embryonic stem cells, which have the potential to become any cell in the body. His goal was to turn them into islet cells to treat patients. > > One problem was the source of the cells — they came from unused fertilized eggs from a fertility clinic. But in August 2001, President George W. Bush barred using federal money for research with human embryos. Dr. Melton had to sever his stem cell lab from everything else at Harvard. He got private funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard and philanthropists to set up a completely separate lab with an accountant who kept all its expenses separate, down to the light bulbs. > > Over the 20 years it took the lab of 15 or so people to successfully convert stem cells into islet cells, Dr. Melton estimates the project cost about $50 million. ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_was\_in\_Saudi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b77776/32.png) [@Paul\_was\_in\_Saudi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_was_in_Saudi)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2021, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/68 "2021-11-27T19:02:02Z")
The widespread acceptance of the moral equality of everyone. This allowed us to increase our intellectual and economic horsepower by including everyone in society. ---
**Author:** ![Crafter\_Man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crafter_man/32/458_2.png) [@Crafter\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crafter_Man)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2021, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/69 "2021-11-27T19:45:59Z")
> [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](#): > > Vaccines/antibiotics are one of the main reasons that half the population doesn’t die before their 25th birthday anymore Yea, my first thought was **vaccines**. Along the same lines is the invention or modernization of sanitation & sewage systems. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Winston\_OBoogie](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.winston_oboogie/32/2945_2.png) [@Dr.Winston\_OBoogie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Winston_OBoogie)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2021, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/70 "2021-12-02T16:57:37Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > Your posts read as though you think that baby-craving hasn’t already evolved. But there are quite a lot of people who do want to have children; many of them badly enough that they feel like their lives are failures if they can’t pull it off. But is this an evolution of the physical human being, or a manifestation of the changes in society? ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2021, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/71 "2021-12-02T17:12:12Z")
Sorting out for any human behavior to what extent it’s evolved behavior and to what extent it’s got to do with a specific society is not an easy thing to do. I do have to admit that this article seems to support @PhillyGuy’s argument better than it does mine: > **[More Americans say they’re not planning to have a child, new poll says, as...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/11/21/americans-childless-pew-us-population/)** > > The Pew survey points to a long-term evolution in parenthood trends in the United States. ---
**Author:** ![Slytherin24](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Slytherin24](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slytherin24)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2021, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/72 "2021-12-02T21:05:05Z")
Don’t forget epidural anesthesia. Childbirth was less scary after that. ---
**Author:** ![dougrb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/76d3ee/32.png) [@dougrb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dougrb)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2022, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/73 "2022-11-26T03:43:50Z")
Headband lights About 20 years ago I had a colleague at work that had a headband light and I thought “I need one of those”. 20 years later I finally got one. Greatest invention ever. ---
**Author:** ![dougrb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/76d3ee/32.png) [@dougrb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dougrb)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2024, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/74 "2024-08-05T23:06:54Z")
[Inspired by this thread.](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/giving-roadkill-to-food-banks-how-is-this-a-thing/1005298/12) I’m going with Refrigeration. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2024, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/75 "2024-08-05T23:12:36Z")
Anesthesia. Sure, computers may have done more good overall, but when it’s time to remove that tumor from deep inside your organs… ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2024, 11:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/76 "2024-08-05T23:21:26Z")
I think that all of the top contenders are communications technologies, and that no non-communication technology comes anywhere close. Communication is what allows all other ideas to spread, and it’s mostly the increase in ease of spread of new ideas that results in the exponential growth of technology as a whole. ---
**Author:** ![MortSahlFan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3bc359/32.png) [@MortSahlFan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MortSahlFan)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2024, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/77 "2024-08-06T20:35:40Z")
internet ---
**Author:** ![Gatopescado](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gatopescado/32/5711_2.png) [@Gatopescado](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gatopescado)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2024, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/78 "2024-08-07T02:27:38Z")
This thread is an Eye-Opener. My whole life I’ve been laboring under the illusion it was Sliced Bread. ---
**Author:** ![dougrb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/76d3ee/32.png) [@dougrb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dougrb)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2024, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/79 "2024-08-07T03:03:03Z")
> [@Greatest invention/discovery in the last 500 years?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/21): > > Everyone is forgetting the true, objective answer that has been the benchmark for greatness ever since its invention: Sliced Bread ---
**Author:** ![outlierrn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/outlierrn/32/3005_2.png) [@outlierrn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/outlierrn)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2024, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/80 "2024-08-08T17:44:52Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > It’s a bit over 500 years ago now, but Gutenberg’s **printing press** produced a revolution in the way information was passed along, and probably vastly improved literacy. I’ve been saying, for some time, that books are probably the greatest of human inventions (with mountain bikes a close second), so I’m going to have to go with the printing press. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804.md?page=5)