Which Invention Marks Your Pivotal Existence?

pivitol to my existence? well i can think of several that on this earth haven't happened yet.

 

sprague's multiple unit control of electro-mechanical propulsion, as applied to minimal form factor fixed guidway transport infrastructure
also of course the photo-voltaic collection of incident solar radiation to provide propulsive force

 

microprocessors

 

I would live now, and I want a drug that can change the status of my brain, so that I can be a dog or an elephant...anything with a smaller brain, I guess. I'd probably also need a cage, but they're pretty easy to come by.

 

Electric guitar. Then, knowing what I know now, I can change the course of music history! And maybe make Justin Bieber's parents sterile in the process

In all seriousness, I'm quite happy now. I probably wouldn't have survived if I'd been born pre-1900's, and the further back into even 1900-2000 the more you're stretching it.

 

I remember this quote from the start of a Bukowski novel:

"All men need four things - food, shelter, pussy, and strange pussy"

I would at least add glasses to that list, as I'm blind without them

 

Anesthetics. Simply the best invention ever made. Anesthetics allowed me to be numbed up enough to have surgery to where I could watch the doctors cutting deep into me and giving me stitches. I watched a live surgery on my hands, and even my genitals, and didn't feel a thing. I can't imagine what the horrors of an anesthetic-free surgery would feel like.

 

if you are gonna say toilet....i would say toilet paper. that is way more important for taking dumps in my opinion.


it all depends on how far back in the past we are going though..of course i could choose to go back only so far, to a time when they already had toilets and TP, and in that case.....i would take something else with me.

 

What invention is pivotal to your existence?

 

What if one has a bidet or even a high pressure jet (for example )? Toilet paper does not seem as pivotal as the sewer system to me.

 

The automobile

 

agriculture beats the hell out of spending every waking moment looking for something to eat. of course you could do pretty much anything else you felt like WHILE looking for something to eat.
so agriculture also introduced the first organized impostion of restrictions on personal freedom. everything gained has been at some tradeoff to that.

the invention of non-hierarchal forms of social organization is something many people still do not understand the value and need of.

to see the whole picture we really need to look at climbing down out of trees and crawling out of the first caves and participating in organized hunts.

maybe the most basic invention of all, is that of sharing. and helping along those who get injured for some other reason, can do some things, maybe even some of them exceptionally well, but not everything everyone else can.

so sharing and community are really basic. it was our cooperative intellegence, more then as individuals, that enabled our species to survive and flourish.

the next i would have to say is art. permitting your self to enjoy creative synthisis for the sole sake of the enjoyment of doing so.

so all these things are the beginning of community.

there are a lot of things i love which are the result of infrastructure, even the technologies of infrastructure itself. and the price of them, whatever any ideology tries to pretend, has always been some tradeoff in personal freedom. likewise the price of their abscense is doing without some or nearly all, of the things today's world has come to take for grated.

but there is no absolute, set in concrete, how much freedom has to be traded off, nor in what way.

social organization, sufficient to create and maintain such infrastructure, as we would not wish to eliminate the bennifits of, can be attained in other ways then the tyrannical arbitraryness of hierarchy.

many, so called "primative" tribal societies came to realize this early on. modern dominant society tends to forget and ignore this. many genocides have been committed, simply and primarily to keep a large majority ignorant of this simple fact.

so along with agriculture, community and art, i would have to also include, non-hierarchal social organization.

from THIS basis, can then grow, all of the infrastructure and infrastructure technologies, the bennifits of, and the technologies themselves, i so know and love.

another thing "primative" societies discovered, was the dependence of their own lives, like the life of all species, on the well being of the interaction of the lives all species, which today we call environment.

today we have the engineering capability, to design infrastructure and its technologies, in such a way, both to maximize their bennifits, and, as importantly at the same time, to do so in such ways, as to reduce their impact on evironment and individual freedoms.

today we have incentives that are at odds with these basic realities. these are a mistake. we have been flattered, enamoured and blinded by them.

when environment breaks down, economics breaks down too. no goose, no golden eggs, no us.

every invention that ignores or denies these realities, was and remains, a big mistake.

we invented the idea that something greater then ourselves would wish to be worshipped. why would it? this has nothing to do with whether such a thing or things might exist.

an even bigger mistake, is to equate 'getting away with' thoughlessness, with freedom. getting away with thoughtlessness toward each other, is a roll of the dice. loaded slightly against us, but still a roll of the dice. but the natural reality of environment, is far more absolute, then anything we can get away with from each other.

it has tremendous capacity, we do not absolutely know the limits of, but we do absolutely know they exist, and that we are already pushing those limits, with both our population, and needlessly unwise ways of doing things.

so back, to sumarize: agriculture, community, art, and non-hierarchal social organization. and lets not forget science, which is, or has become, the creating of methodologies for insuring the honesty of observation, of natural and physical reality. and that goes back a lot further then is often given credit for too. even to so called 'primative' societies, learning from the land they live on, how to live in sufficient harmony with it, to continue doing so, for many more generations, then the lifetimes of their individual members.\