If you ask me? Mobile/WiFi internet… The way and amount of time we use our phones had changed A LOT since their diffusion. I guess the release of the iPhone changed our idea of what a phone is too
Edit: when I say modern world I’m referring to the last 50 years. So stuff like “the electricity” or “the telephone” doesn’t count.
Chemical fertilizer. World population would probably be half the size without it and starvation rates much higher.
One of the guys who invented the process for large scale production was Fritz Haber, to make explosives and chemical weapons. He’s also responsible for using chlorine gas on the battlefield in WW1. His wife was a chemist and an activist, who shot herself in the heart after learning about his involvement. Haber left within days for the Eastern Front to oversee gas release against the Russian Army.
He ended up saving more lives than he destroyed, but what a story.
There’s a really good section on him in the book, How to hide an empire - a history of the greater united states.
Transistors. Invented somewhere along the 50s.
Transistors is the defacto answer. We wouldn’t have anything we have now without them.
Oh you say but what about (this thing) that doesn’t have any in it? The factory it was mass produced in runs on transistors.
Going down the list of comments in this post:
Telephones. Always had transistors.
Internet. Obvious.
Coal. Everything from the trucks to the converors, to the systems that track production, and all the transportation involved after uses them.
Washing machines also use them even if they’re not the stupid “smart” machines people buy for some reason.Edit. If you’re in anyway curious about transistors here’s a new video from Asianometry about them:
https://youtu.be/k8cdByDa3oA?si=5B4tgJjP7X7jIuhTSomething worth repeating is that transistors are a direct application of quantum mechanics. Quantum physics isn’t a metaphysical thing about half dead cats and working only on a few ultra cold atoms. If you want to explain how a piece of silicium can be conductive or insulating depending on it’s polarisation you need… Quantum physics.
its* polarization (or polarisation, in your part of the world.)
Holes and dots.
semiconductor
In the last century? The diode, aka the P/N junction and every variant that has been created ever since.
Recently? Capacitive touch screens are by far the most significant change.
Burning black rocks.
The Industrial Revolution absolutely exploded the world, good call.
Antibiotics.
Their discovery and development is what has directly enabled our sudden rise from 2B to 8B humans in only about a century. Without antibiotics, we would likely still be under 3B humans world-wide. Yes, disease really did kill off a lot of humans back in the day.
Graph out the human population over the last two centuries, and you can even see the very decade when Penicillin use became widespread, along with doctors washing their hands and other basic hygiene tasks.
I read that washing machines had a big impact, manual washing of clothes could take a full day of work.
Glad to see someone has mentioned this. Huge gains in time in the day for a huge part of the population.
Cars shaped city planning, housing and by consequence our lifestyle, making us more dependent on them to get through your day. You can see it expecially in European cities that were built in medieval/reinassance times: if you live and work in the older parts you can totally do without a car. If you move a few kilometers out, not having one becomes a real handicap
You can see this in the U.S. as well.
In many parts of the world, though, I wouldn’t say cars per se, but definitely public transportation. A lot of people can’t afford cars in the world, and they still benefit from the invention of the internal combustion engine.
I would say the Internet as well. It has dramatically shaped how we interact with the world and has made a lot of information more accessible.
There are probably better overall answers like farming, the printing press, vaccines, transistors, and fertilizer but I feel like a lot of them are if we didn’t have X we wouldn’t have Y situations.
Electricity. And electromagnetic radiations.
Social media. And not in a good way
I agree.
OPs answer of saying that WiFi and phone Internet changed the world is correct, but it’s not specific enough or the full truth of the matter.
If we had the Internet and modern phones but the only sites that existed were those from 2002, we’d be living in a very different world.
Mobile Internet is the enabling technology, but if social media didn’t exist we’d probably leave our phones in our pockets most of the time.
Facebook existed way before mobile internet was everywhere.
Sure, I was there then. I was on Facebook right in the beginning, when you needed a university email address to even sign up.
So that’s true, but it’s also true to say that early Facebook wasn’t the same as modern Facebook. Early Facebook was - as the name suggested, a place to connect with friends, share pictures and plan events. You’d probably check it once a day to see what was happening, but that was it. And your home feed would be a direct and unfiltered view of what all your friends posted, in the order they posted it, without bias. And you could easily catch up on everything that had happened and then you were finished.
It’s the birth of the algorithm and infinitely scrollable tailored content feeds that really defines what social media has become.
This and mobile Internet have really gone hand-in-hand. The algorithm has made us want to be scrolling all the time, and mobile Internet has made it possible .
And your home feed would be a direct and unfiltered view of what all your friends posted
And it was a feature added later when they wanted to compete with Twitter. Prior to that, no home feed. Just profile pages, a la MySpace. And it was glorious! It was so much fun to leave wall messages to friends, and see whatever others have posted in them too.
When the newsfeed came about, I remember thinking “I don’t like it. It’s stupid!” mainly because I knew it was a reaction to Twitter. Of course, I got used to it eventually.
But yup. Facebook back then was a neat tool. Not the cesspool that’s been for the past 10 years.
The ubiquity of smart phones and mobile data.
The nuclear bomb. Even before we nuke ourselves into extinction, it has had a profound impact on geopolitics. Imagine the huge conventional wars we could have had!
