I think this is another of those things that were inevitable. European technology had reached the point where such a voyage was no longer enormously difficult. If Columbus had not done it, someone else would have within a few years. Also, he does not seem to have been the first to make this voyage, just the first to get a lot of attention.
Wow, thanks, Bosda! That’s great.
The death of Kubla Khan.
The Mongol hordes had swept across Western Asia and Eastern Europe, destroying pretty much all resistance, They were deep into Western Europe, with only some Germanic Tribes and the remnants of the now defunct Roman Empire left to oppose them. Let’s face it, no one in Europe was going to so much as slow the Mongols march to the North Sea and Atlantic. The renaissance was about to be snuffed out before it began.
And then Kubla Khan died. One important feature of the Mongol’s religious monarchy (the Khan was a living God, in effect) was that all good Mongols had to return to mourn the passing of the Khan. Which they did, leaving Western Europe untouched. They never again expanded to the same degree as they had under Kubla, and Western Europe was left alone to be reborn in the Renaissance and renew its world wide imperialism.
I still say the creation of computers and the internet because:
Allows anyone any amount of data or information they want.
Allows global, very fast communication.
Allows very fast computation of anything immaginable.
It is Gutenberg times 1000.
It is quickly becomming the Sum of All Human Knowlege.
It is the beggining of a new age of man.
While computers/Internet may not seem very earth shattering yet, it caused the beginning of the information age, and will help all the advances yet to come. It is estimated that more advances in technology/science/etc will occur in the first 20 years of the new millenium than occured in the last 2 centuries, and more advances in the next 2 centuries than in the last 2000 years. (Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines) Computers and the internet will help this happen, as well as increase the speed advances take place.
There’s plenty of Mosts, but I’ll cast a Yea for the invention of the optical lens. It allowed us to look beyond ourselves in micro and macro cosmic worlds, and has enabled us to record , reflect, and communicate our observations. Without that bent glass, the world would be much poorer.
The development of the Scientific Method. Without it, none of the recent great technological leaps forward would be possible.