admittedly, one problem i had when we were talking over the "fire" thing was, i'm actually not sure if that's a Singular Event that happened once and then changed civilization forever, or if multiple subpopulations of humans figured it out independently at different times, which makes it less of an event and more a... idk... a progression?
in defense of a bias towards a bias toward recent history, though, i think there's a decent argument that we're in a bit of an exponential age in terms of how human societies are formed, shaped, etc. like, we did basic-bitch hunter gathering for a long time, and basic-bitch agriculture for a long time, and those aren't insignificant periods but they're also hard to pick individual events out of, beyond like, "agriculture happened," which is just one thing.
irrigation is a solid pick.
something like "industrial revolution" had occurred to us, but we discarded it from our list since it seemed like a natural outgrowth / outcome of the scientific progress we made in the enlightenment/renaissance/whatever. i had not considered the global warming slant, though, which i think bolsters its importance.
i think we all already had germ theory / etc? the only difference is picking an actual event to be representative of "germ theory got gud" (penicillin or one of the early holyshit vaccines) or whether you just call "germ theory got gud" an event in and of itself
re: computers: i asked a friend this question this weekend and he picked shannon's formalization of entropy, arguing that it gave people who'd previously been fumbling around an actual target to shoot for in terms of "how compactly can we store information," and arguably kicked off the whole infotech boom, foundation of modern computing, blah blah. i liked it for its "concrete event representing the larger trend"-ness
i... didn't think of your answers as "bashing" on me until you claimed yourself they were bashing on me xp
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Date: 2017-08-23 09:36 pm (UTC)in defense of a bias towards a bias toward recent history, though, i think there's a decent argument that we're in a bit of an exponential age in terms of how human societies are formed, shaped, etc. like, we did basic-bitch hunter gathering for a long time, and basic-bitch agriculture for a long time, and those aren't insignificant periods but they're also hard to pick individual events out of, beyond like, "agriculture happened," which is just one thing.
irrigation is a solid pick.
something like "industrial revolution" had occurred to us, but we discarded it from our list since it seemed like a natural outgrowth / outcome of the scientific progress we made in the enlightenment/renaissance/whatever. i had not considered the global warming slant, though, which i think bolsters its importance.
i think we all already had germ theory / etc? the only difference is picking an actual event to be representative of "germ theory got gud" (penicillin or one of the early holyshit vaccines) or whether you just call "germ theory got gud" an event in and of itself
re: computers: i asked a friend this question this weekend and he picked shannon's formalization of entropy, arguing that it gave people who'd previously been fumbling around an actual target to shoot for in terms of "how compactly can we store information," and arguably kicked off the whole infotech boom, foundation of modern computing, blah blah. i liked it for its "concrete event representing the larger trend"-ness
i... didn't think of your answers as "bashing" on me until you claimed yourself they were bashing on me xp