Ask HN: What are the most significant man-made creations to date?

Developments without which the modern world would be unrecognizable:

Materials: concrete, petroleum, steel, aluminum, cotton, plastic Music: 12 tone equal temperament Food: Cereal crops, food preservation (canning, pasteurization), fermentation Technology: batteries (lead-acid, lithium-ion, alkaline), circuitry, GPS Transportation: internal combustion engine, asphalt road engineering, flight, rocketry

Lists like this, or “tech trees” as you might find in Civilization-type games, are hard in part because language is insufficient to map technological progress. There’s also no version of modernity that could exist without some form of philosophy, pedagogy, and cultural development, but naming “most significant” ones in a modern context involves going back to very ancient and deeply opinionated texts that include the Bible, Koran, Torah and so on.

Materials science, the working of stone, copper, bronze, iron, and inconel.

Machine tools, a cutting tool following a fixed path

Double entry book keeping, VisiCalc, and Excel

Data management as a science, the index, filing cabinets, and computing.

I would suggest that MS Excel should be replaced by VisiCalc. While MS Excel is more feature complete and capable, VisiCalc was the idea. Further, while you included products that run on the computer, you didn't include the computer itself and key figures like Turing, Von Neumann, This was dependent on the transistor and the folks around Claude Shannon. And the whole digital life we know today derives from things like the Apollo Program in the 1960s, Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, MIT Instrumentation Lab, etc. And none of these electronics breakthroughs would have been possible without Quantum Theory and Relativity bringing us Bohr and Einstein and all their successors. Not to mention James Clerk Maxwell and his equations. And this is just the technology side of the question. Get into biology/medicine, etc. and the list explodes further. the double helix discovery (Crick & co), Harvey and blood circulation. The list is endless. Move into the government/political realm and the significance of things like the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution cannot be overstated. It's all about what context you are positioning those "creations".

The wheel seems like a pretty big one.

If we're talking about big science&technology categories, I'd say:

Controlled fire (if you can consider it a "man-made creation") -> essential for food and a lot of manufacturing

Wheel -> essential for transportation, but also to make flour (millstones), and a lot of other stuff (e.g. turbines are, basically, specialized wheels)

Controlled electricity and electromagnetism -> artificial light, modern communications, not to mention medical advancements like X-rays

Insulin and pecillin -> millions of lives saved

the printing press -> knowledge becomes easier to spread

If we extend this to all kinds of human "inventions", including law, philosophy, religion, and so on, the list is even longer.

There's of course no single correct list, but I would pick: language (symbolic communication), writing, the scientific method, electricity, the computer.

Other highly consequential inventions: the printing press, the wheel, agriculture, money, the internet.

Notice something subtle. Early inventions extend coordination. Middle inventions extend memory. Later inventions extend reasoning. The latest inventions extend agency. This suggests that human history is less about tools and more about outsourcing parts of the mind into the world.

Mine are energy related:

1. The Steam engine and later ICE engines that started and sustained the industrial revolution and the modern world.

2. Electricity (generation, control), this led to the telegraph (our first internet), radio, and of-course electrical switching components that form basis of modern semiconductors.

im surprised that none of the comments have called out haber bosh (or maybe more generically the discovery of the role of nitrogen to plants)

w.o that (and other agri improvements) we wouldnt have enough spare calories as a species to devote to these other non food production related activities, like say poking rocks with electrons until they can become computers that can run excel. its really hard to visualize how much of human effort across history has just been about food production.

There are some natural things than humans have been able to understand and control, like fire, fermentation, and evolution (domestication of animals, various crops), which are all very significant.

The printing press, as you mentioned, cannot be understated. Related to this would be the ballpoint pen, which had a massive impact on democratizing literacy. The humble Bic Cristal being the foundation of much of this.

Don't think it's been mentioned but dynamite is easily one of mankind's most important inventions - it made large scale terraforming and mineral mining possible

Near real-time communication overseas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable

Your list is correct in favoring intangibles. Ideas underpin all technology and are immune to entropy. Not so MS Excel, which is just a rock tricked into doing particularly structured mathematics. Spreadsheets, the concept, are significant; their implementation is incidental.

Without a doubt it is GPS/GNSS systems.

If you look at the dependency chain to accomplish the task, it’s a true yardstick for any modern civilization,economy,nation.

imo it isn’t any tool, it’s institutions: shared rules like property, contracts, and science that let billions of strangers coordinate, because without them none of the other mentioned inventions would scale

Shared fictions.

We’re the only animals that can coordinate by the millions because we all agreed to believe in "invisible" things like money, corporations, and human rights. Without that shared social software, you don't get rockets or transistors; you just get small tribes fighting over berries. We essentially found a way to "patch" human behavior without waiting for evolution, turning abstract ideas into the glue that builds civilizations.

I'd say zero, because counting "things" is natural. But inventing a symbol for "nothing"? That's pretty wild.

Farming. Animal husbandry. Stirrups. Government. Language. Money/credit/bookkeeping/stocks. Gunpowder. Steam engine. Science. Mass production. Transistor. Logistics.

Also mass communication although that hasn’t turned out so well.

And yeah, call it engineering. Started with the wheel. Thanks for the reminder in thread.

Refrigeration is a big one

religion, math, writing, art, engineering, education, monogamy, morality

basically work your way forward from caveman

The demographic impact of medications and vaccines is very significant, it used to take some populations centuries to double their number, now it takes few decades.

Natural languages are barely man-made creations. Because they _naturally_ evolved, was not deliberately made.