Re:Yemen has lost internet after Saudi-led airstrikes
by rakejake on Friday January 21, 2022 @09:01AM
(#30023555)
While I understand the heft of your argument, I don't think food production and electricity generation can be categorized as simple innovations. Everything starts off when a small number of people work on something, and later spreads around through consensus. But crops are a basic necessity for survival so I feel it is unfair to bring it into this debate.
If anything, I would classify antibiotics, standardization of drug manufacturing, and scaling of energy (oil, nuclear power) as humanity's greatest achievements because all other achievements are made possible by (1) people being alive and well and (2) having the energy budget to carry out research and development.
Those are innovations, not achievements. They happened largely by small groups in parallel around the world, with some small improvements shared between people when they met over hundreds or thousands of years. They're amazing things, but they're all examples of slow, incremental developments.
The internet is a truly global communications network that works ubiquitously everywhere that's been in development for less than 50 years. Humans have never achieved as much to do something so useful in such a short time ever before.