OK, we’ve got the most important animal thread, and the most important invention thread, now this:
Tomorrow afternoon, when the Great Meteorite hits the Earth, and all life is snuffed out, what would you consider to be the one great legacy that humanity has left behind? (Or rather, the one that was destroyed?) What was humanity’s proudest moment or greatest contribution?
In my small, sleep-deprived mind, having not yet thought this through, I must say that it is hands-down Apollo 11.
Thoughts?
The discovery of the structure of DNA.
Or twinkies. Those will survive the meteors, right?
Agriculture.
Antibiotics?
While I agree that this would be one of mankind’s greatest achievements in pulling himself out of the animal world and into his own, I was thinking more along the lines of higher persuits, ill-defined as that may be. Not that I’m saying your answer is “wrong”, but I was thinking more like:
The symphony orchestra
“We hold these truths to be self-evident”
Sky scrapers
Space travel
Religion
Genetic engineering
Random access memory
Girl-on-girl porn
TV dinners
Apollo Program.
And since there are still traces of it on the moon (landers and flags and such), evidence would persist even if Earth got meteor-creamed.
I was thinking that, too, but then if the Earth got creamed, the Moon might not have much of a future. In which case, the Miss Congeniality Award would go to Voyager, I suppose.
To bring about a level of existence for a significant portion of itself such that the wonder and nature of the universe can be contemplated in place of animalistic worries over hunger, disease and imminent death.
digital watches
::ducks and runs away:::
The development of logic and the slow progress of philosophy and mathmatics leading towards what we see as the modern scientific method.
Put me in with Epimetheus.
Science. All else pales beside the achievements of science. It ranks with fire in the real world as an intellectual accomplishment.
Written language. It gave us the ability to communicate ideas farther in a lasting way.
Air conditioning, most definitely.
fried chicken.
or science yeah.
humour and music.
Two possibilities:
Mankind’s greatest achievement will be the destruction of the Great Meteorite before it hits.
OR:
Our greatest achievement will be that the Great Meteorite killed us, not our own self-destructive tendencies.
Our prose, it defines us more than anything else. The creation of words.
Arguably leisure time and time for cultural pursuits is our greatest pursuit, but apparently hunter-gatherers spent a lot of time lying around doing nothing, and it was the advent of agriculture that made things seriously horrible in terms of human labour.
Before I saw the mentions of uplifting cultural occurrences, I was thinking sewerage. I saw a television program (What The Victorians Did For Us) which said that London’s sewage system was the greatest engineering project of Victorian England, which possibly makes it the greatest engineering project in British history. Similar achievements were made in other cities around the second half of the nineteenth century.
All those tunnels, pumping stations, filtration plants, etc. An incredible system constructed largely for public health reasons (although also to stop the smell), rather than for commercial or military purposes.
Returning to the OP, the great medieval cathedrals still strike me as the greatest constructions of the human race. Built over decades or even centuries with very limited tools, with the principal purpose of showing people “Wow this is amazing! You should worship God because if we’re prepared to do something so wonderful for Him, he must be really special.”
Im going to have to go with the Internet or the Apollo Program…
Nothing before the internet has allowed such widespread communication across the borders without regulation, and without censorship, and nothing may ever change the world so quickly as the internet has. A generation went from using the phone to typing over IM. We now have the power to reach out and touch somebody thousands of miles away, through a medium which was previously inconceivable. Muchless what the internet has to offer us in years to come… Its definitely one of the greatest accomplishments for mankind…
Yea Apollo program because well… yea… Look at what it brought, and it will at least leave a trace of us for thousands of years, unless the moon gets smashed by the meteorite whcih then launches the moon into the earth… at which point id rather not be alive…
So we survived long enough to die from an external source…that’s actually quite the achievement 
If nothing is left of earth, then Apollo missions and deep space probes will be the only tangible achievements. I guess, based on longevity, I’d be forced to go with the space program.