Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat Is The Most Important Invention In Human History? (ft. Ryan North)
We discuss the most fundamentally important inventions in human history. Featuring Ryan North.
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So sometimes when I look around me, I'm amazed at how many tech devices I have in my life. I mean, of course I have a laptop, I have a telephone, you know, I have a TV, this kind of stuff. But just all around me in my kitchen is a bunch of stuff that my grandparents and their grandparents wouldn't even recognize.
Your grandparents didn't have the George Foreman grill.
What do you mean that's right? The panini maker. I mean, it's a fundamental element if human society. Now, how did people live so long without paninies?
It would be without panines.
It's baffling to me, is baffling, you know. I just feel like so many elements of my life rely on inventions that have appeared fairly recently, which means that my life is completely different from the life from my grandparents and their grandparents.
Yeah. I guess maybe one way to think about it is look around you and think which technology, if it wasn't there, would make my life totally different.
Yeah, And I think the most important invention might not be something that you notice when you just look around you. Might not be something that throws itself in your face every single day of your life.
It could be something you use every day and not even think about it.
Are you talking about the toilet?
Maybe I'm using it right now.
Please this podcast out of the studio and into the toilet.
Hi am Warhey, and I'm Daniel and this is our podcast, the greatest invention in the Universe.
The podcast called Daniel and Jorge Invent the Universe.
Invent a new title for the podcast on the spot now the podcast is called Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.
In which we take everything in the universe, we explain to you how it was invented or discovered or at least understood in a way that you can possibly understand it and explain it to somebody else, and then you could tell them about the awesome podcast.
You heard it on and maybe using this knowledge, you can go out there and invent new things.
That's right, and give us one percent of all your royalties.
That's right. By listening, you are implicitly signing a contract, that's right.
Is there any terms and conditions on this podcast? Yeah, so welcome to our podcast, every one, And the topic today is what is the most important invention in human history?
Yeah? Of all the things that have been invented to make life easier, more fun, maybe more violent, what do you think is the one invention that has had the most impact on human civilization or the human condition?
That's right. And you might be tempted to think about something which is very immediate, like well, I use my phone every day, and so the iPhone is a very impactful invention. But think a little deeper. I mean, think about the thing which if we didn't have it would change human history. And so I think that's I'm tipping my hand here. That's my definition for what's the most important invention is the invention with without which human history would be markedly different. And I love thinking about the way that history could have been different.
Yeah, I mean, let's talk about that when you say, what's the most important invention? What do you mean? And so for you, it's about changing history, like the invention that marked the point in time at which humanity could have gone left or right exactly.
And some of these inventions they really come from like moments of inspiration or or you know, just accidents. You know, somebody accidentally to invent something in the lab. They're trying to make a better peanut butter sandwich, but they actually invent a laser gun or something, right, And this kind of thing happens all the time, and it changes the course of human history. And so I wonder sometimes, like if that person had been sick that day, or gotten a car accident, or decided to become an artist instead of an engineer, how human history could have been different. And so there are these moments, these pivot points in history where I feel like, if things hadn't gotten a certain way, the whole future could have been dramatically different. And inventions are one of those. And so I like to think about if you had deleted one person from history or distracted them in the right moment, things could have been very different.
Yeah, like talk about a butterfly fick, Like if a butterfly had flown in front of Einstein just as he was about to come up with, you know, the idea of relativity or quantum physics. He could have been distracted and not come up with.
It, that's right, Yeah, absolutely, And there's there's lots of real examples, you know. For example, Isaac Newton, genius in human history, right, changed the way we think, invented lots of important stuff, physics, gravity, calculus, all this stuff. His family was sheep herders, right, And the only reason he actually got an education was because his father died and his mother remarried somebody who insisted he go and get an education, maybe just to get young Isaac out of the house, right. And so if Isaac hadn't been sent to school, he never would have become this staggering genius in human history.
Yeah, or even more sort of crazy is supposedly he came up with the idea of universal gravitation when the an apple hit him, right.
I think that's probably ninety nine point ninety nine percent mythology. But let's go, let me go that's true.
Yeah, but you know what would have happened if instead of an apple had been an orange. You know, we could have had a totally different science.
Because the theory of universal juice instead, right Orange You glad it was an Apple who invented the first punk And anyway, somebody's got to get credit for that one. Yeah, that definitely changes.
That is the most important for the worst. Yeah.
So I'm not an expert in history of technology, and I'm guessing that major you are not either, And so for this particular topic, we decided to reach out to somebody we know who is an expert who has thought really deeply about these topics.
So this is a good friend of mine. His name is Ryan North. So Ryan, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me great. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself.
Sure. My name is Ryan North. I write a webcomic called Dinosaur Comics. We're doing that for fifteen years. And on top of that, I do nonfiction writing. I write The Imbatable Squirrel Girl for Marvel Comics. And my new book is called How to Invent Everything, a survival Guide for the stranded time traveler. And it's procedure and premise that if you are in the future, you've rented a time machine, you go back in time and your time machine breaks, here's how you fix things. There's how you rebuild civilization from scratch in any time period in ourse history. So it's sort of a nonfiction book with a fictional candy coding on the outside, which is the time travel part of it. I get to call it my nonfiction time travel book, which I'm very happy about.
Yeah. And was it inspired because you met a stranded time traveler and thought, how am I going to help this person?
I have no comment on that.
You are totally Yes.
I always thought of you as a man from the future, right, So is that true? Maybe maybe that's your secret. This is your way of disclosing it to the world.
Again, I don't want to confirm it about anything. It's a mystery, right, keep guessing.
I was really interested in the book because it reminded me of when I was a kid. I was totally enamored by that game Civilization, which I also played, right, And in Civilization, for those of you who haven't played, you have to basically reinvent civilization and you have to do it in order. And for me, it was the first education where somebody had taken out down a lot of humanity's throughs, you know, and said, well, what would you need to reinvent the combustion engine? What you need this, and for that you need this, and for that you need this, all the way back to numbers and writing and this kind of stuff. So it was really fun to see this sort of detailed breakdown and what made me think about, like, which are the inventions in human history that most catalyzed technological progress, from which most changed the future. So that's what we wanted to sort of focus on in today's podcast episode, is this sort of broader question, what is the most important invention in human history? And before we talk to you about it, since obviously you've thought deeply about this to write your book, we went and asked a bunch of people on the street who hadn't had a chance to think about it at all, and asked them what they thought was the most important invention in human history, just from the top of their heads. Here's what they had to say, fire fire.
If I call the wheel an invention, I would say that, all right.
Thanks, light bulb. No, the wheel, the wheel.
The wheel, the concept of evolution?
Is that what you're happening to be studying right now.
I was surprised how often fire showed up.
Yeah, fire was a popular one. Fire in the wheel. Yeah, so that surprised you. How come?
Yeah, and I see why they went for fire, but I feel like it it kind of dodges a question a little bit because it's a pre human invention. Yeah.
Wow, so fire predates humanity.
My Homo erectus was using human was using fire, and they're not us. I mean they're humans, they're homo, but they're not Homo sapiens.
They're not Wait, we can't. We can't claim credit for fire.
We can't claim credit. Homo sapiens did not invent fire. They might have stolen it or reinvented it, but they didn't first invent it. It was Homo erectus.
I think you've just undermined like a core tenant in the belief a lot of people have about their own species. And yeah, a lot of people went to fires like this is the defining thing about humanity. This was maxus who we are, This is what makes Yeah, you just decuted it from the list. That's pretty tough, man.
Okay, So we eliminate fire then from the list of important to mentions because we didn't invent it. Yeah.
So yeah, so people said, fire also tend to go with for the wheel, right, the wheels are a pretty common one.
Yeah, the wheels also embarrassing.
Though the wheel is embarrassing.
Was that, well, we had the wheel for thousands of thousands of years, but we used it for pottery on this side as a pottery wheel. So it's again like, if you want for transportation, it took us thousands of years to flip it over on its side. And that's what we think. We think about the whel we think about movement transportation, but we use it to make pottery for a really long time.
No, is that true?
Yes, yes, the wheel for transport comes well after the wheel for pottery.
Nobody thought to put it on the side.
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If you love iPhone, you'll love Apple Card. It's the credit card designed for iPhone. It gives you unlimited daily cash back that can earn four point four zero percent annual percentage yield. When you open a high yield savings account through Applecard, apply for Applecard in the wallet app, subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Apple Card and Savings by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch member, FDIC terms and more at applecard dot com. So this is something you come back to a lot in the book, is that you say we had everything we needed, and if you just knew what to do, you could skip a thousand years or one hundred thousand years, you could accomplish something in an afternoon, right, And I get that that's like a really fun fantasy to imagine fast forwarding human progress. But I wonder sometimes how true that is. Like, let's take the question of language. Right in your book, you lay down language is like a pretty critical cornerstone of human technology, and I completely agree. But do you think that going back like fifty thousand years to skeletonally identical humans, that if you went back that you could teach English, for example, to a group of two year old, you know, modern humans from fifty thousand years ago, and that they would learn it and develop and turn into you know, English speakers.
I do.
And the reason sort of have that loophole there is that you said two year olds, which is great because it's very hard, maybe impossible, for humans to learn a language after puberty. It's also really innefficult to test to run experiments on it. But in cases of feral children, people spend their lives trying to teach them to talk, and maybe they learn it a little bit, but they're never communicative, they don't really use it. And so if you're traveling back, you know, one hundred thousand years, fifty thousand years, and you want to start rebuilding civilization, I would recommend don't necessarily chat up the cave men the cave women, but maybe talk to their kids. Maybe steal some babies if you're going to do it that way.
So you're going on record for baby stealing right here.
I don't want to go on record for fully endorsing baby stealing. But in terms of just pure efficiency of civilization building, directing your efforts towards the cave babies will get you much better results. And there is there's a huge question mark here right because you mentioned how we have these skeletally identical humans, like anatomically modern humans, So people whose skeletons look like ours, and those show up around two hundred thousand BCE, and then behaviorally modern humans show up, humans that act like us, that behave like us, that decorate their bodies, bury the dead, that sort of thing shop around fifty thousand BCE. You know, there's there's this huge gap of what took us along, what made us finally take that leap from anatomically modern to behaviory modern, And we don't for sure know because it's very hard to DestinE one these things fossilize or are preserved. But one of the theories I want to go with in the book is it was the mention of language. It was the mention of talking to each other that that let us make that leap forward, let us finally become fully human. And so that's the technology I would say it's the most important one for us, language because it allows us to have not just to talk to each other, but to like have ideas that can survive the death of the host.
That's so importantly. Language is definitely definitely important. But the supposition there is that somehow we had the capacity for it but didn't invent it for one hundred and fifty thousand years, right, Yeah, But there are other ways you might imagine it could have gone. Right, It could be that most of us didn't have the capacity for it, and then a few brains, you know, mutated, evolved whatever to develop an additional capacity which allowed for the creation of it and then and then of course it would be a rapid selection effect. So you can imagine that after the capacity for language evolved, it might have been developed and then spread very rapidly.
Sure, but that requires a change to the brain to sort of evolve in us and without needing to suppose that, we can just suppose someone invented language, and then the question is, well, why did it take us so long? And language is a really hard thing to invent because imagine you're trying to you have to be sort of this in my head to Calum Cavemaninstein, who has to not only come up with the idea of language, the idea of expressing thoughts in words, but instantiate that idea and it's still completely useless unless you're also smart enough to teach someone else how to use it all within a single lifetime. Like, it's not easy to be that first person who's coming up with the technology of language, who is inventing language. And I think you can point to that and say, yeah, that might take a long time to have all those things line up as they would need to be for this to have any practical.
Use, right, And I think it touches on this other issue, which is a lot of these foundational inventions. People who are listening might think, what, that's crazy, it's just so obvious, and oh yeah, a lot of these things are so foundational. They've you know, they're deeply embedded in the way we think that it's impossible to imagine life without them, which is why, frankly, they're so difficult to invent, right, I mean, because they completely transform the way you think and then become deeply ingrained in your thought process. It's hard to imagine how to get there when you don't have it.
I've spent years trying to picture thinking without words, like, how do you.
Well, I'm talking to two cartoonists here, right, you guys are experts at thinking without words, right.
But we're taking words and putting them into pictures. But it's still you're The process seems very very language based. But one of the examples I love touching on that is the idea of if you have a time machine, you could take one of those children born fifty thousand BCE, take them to the modern world, adopt them, raise them as a modern child, and they'll be like any other human on the planet. They'll be as smart and creative and clever and fun and loving as any other human because they're, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants. They're having fifty thousand years worth of technological process for free. They get to have language, they get to learn how to read and write, they get to be in a community. And it seems almost like you're breaking a rule right to have this you know, literal cave person and have them be indistinguished from modern person just by changing the environment in which they're raised. But that's what that's what these inventions do. First, they change the nature of who what we are in a way that makes it hard to imagine what it's like without it.
And that's the kind of thing that makes me wonder what's in the future, Like if there were in the past these sort of trivial but transformational inventions math, language, et cetera. Are there ones that remain, you know, will in one hundred thousand years people look back and think, how come Ryan North didn't think of you know, blah blah blah, some transformational but basic way of living and thinking that exploded our capacity for technology and life I mean, do you think that there are those sort of transformations left.
Yeah, I hope so, I mean I believe so. The punchline of this is, you know, we could mend all this stuff, and we did, and look how blind we were not to see that. How could we have been so stupid? But if there are all these inventions and all these points in history we can point out and say, yeah, we didn't see this until later, it stands the reason that there may be that right now there's probably still some of this. I call it the low hanging fruit of civilization that we could invent and aren't and just aren't seen it. And I think that's really optimistic. I don't think that makes us feel stupid, that makes us That makes me feel excited, like that's what are we missing this out there right now? There's still really cool stuff that we can all come up with.
So is that your choice, Brian, for the most important invention in human history? Language?
Yeah? I think it's foundational. I think it's consequential. I think it's transformational. And also I'm kind of cheating because it's actually two inventions. I'm rolling reading and writing together into one there just calling it language.
But how do you define language, you mean, like the the idea of words or just communicating because people I'm sure communicated with grunts or hand signals, right, Yeah, but.
That's not language. So the example I would give is, let's say I draw three pictures. I draw a picture of a cool dog and a picture of a skateboard, and a picture of a thumbs up, and those symbols can be interpreted you think, oh, you're saying a cool dog in a skateboard is good. Or maybe I'm saying I saw a cool dog and a skateboard and I gave it a thumbs up because I love cool dogs on skateboards. But there's ambiguity there. And what language is is something that works to eliminate ambiguity. So when we're communicating now, because I'm using words with precise meanings, they're not perfect, but they try to be precise so that we can communicate quickly and clear with they're having to go back and clarify all the time. And so, yeah, you can communicate with grunts, you can communicate with hugs, you can communicate with long end glances across the dance floor, but for precision communication, you need language, and that's what I'm calling the technology.
So it's kind of like the idea of somebody at some point saying that, hey, guys, this is crazy. We should have rules that define what.
Those glances across the dance floors are.
Yeah, yeah, okay, So it's the invention of rules that everyone would agree to communicate ideas.
Yes with an asterisk because one of the craziest proofs I read when I was doing computation linguistics was this person was making the argument that one of the neat things about language that is almost unique is that it evolves so quickly. You look, but the way English was spoken one hundred years ago, it already it sounds ancient, or at least odd. You go back two, three, four, you go back to Shakespeare four hundred years ago, and it's hard to understand, right, So why is it changed so quickly? Why is why? It's based on rules, rules what make language work? Clearly? Why these rules seem to change so often that seems like a failure. And the argument this paper was making, which I love, was that the reason language evolves so quickly is because language is really hard to learn, which is true, but actually it's impossible to learn, and we never actually learned the language our parents are speaking. We learn an approximation of it that allows us to communicate, but all the edges are fuzzy, and so since we have all these places where we don't actually know what the rule is that allows language to change so quickly and to evolve generationally so fast, which I love. I love you to that you know language not just hard, it's impossible, and you will never learn the language your parents are speaking. Just can't be done well.
It's certainly true that parents just don't understand. So maybe that's the reason.
That's right, I forgot you're a computationalinguist, right that was your education?
Yeah, I did a master's in competition linguistics.
So that's a bit suspicious that a computation of linguist thinks language is the greatest invention ever, you know, exactly, cartoons are the most important invention ever.
It's only a tiny bit self centered. But also it's a bit of a dark view because it suggests that the greatest accomplishment in human history is thousands of years ago and we haven't really done anything since, which matches up.
But we're still using it right, like it's allowed us to do everything else. So that's that's why I say it's so it's so foundational, is that it is what unlocks everything, because you can be the smartest person in the world. Without language, you're trapped in your own head and you're having these amazing, world changing thoughts and can't communicate them in a way that's clear. You're not going to communicate, you know, relativity through grunts and glances. You need language that I need mathematics for that.
So I think it's fascinating what you're saying, because I was going to make exactly the same argument to make a different point. I was going to use the same argument to suggest that math and science are the most important inventions in the industry, but for exactly the same reasons.
And this is from the scientist too. I feel like you guys are maybe a little biased in your selections here.
I feel like until we had mathematics, all we had was language, which is frankly kind of clumsy when you want to communicate very clearly and precisely. And I remember learning math and learning logic and feeling like, finally, here we have effectively a language for very clearly and precisely communicating ideas ideas which are too fuzzy in English to communicate clearly.
But is mathematical language just another language? Do you know what I mean?
Like?
Is that a subinvention of language?
In the book? I cheat because I'm saying now language is the most important mention in the book. I actually give five. I say written language, spoken language, scientific method, calorie surplus, so again having extra food so you can worry about other things and where next meal is coming from. And the last one I call non sucky numbers, which is basically a number system that permits mathematics to happen in a productive way. So one of the reasons the ancient Romans didn't get that far with math is they had these Roman numerals, which are just incredibly clumsy to operate with. You have to do math. We know what number you're looking at. So I'm not gonna sit here and argue that math isn't important, because I I have it on paper. I think it is important. But I will say this is maybe dodgy, But I, personally Ryan North think that mathematics and correct me if I'm wrong. But I feel like mathematics can be a creative expression in the same way that language can only with more rules. Is that wrong? Is that romanticizing it?
Or am I the romanticization of mathematics? Well, I'm not sure it's possible to romanticize math. No, I think that's fair. But I would also make a similar argument, you know, for science, like in terms of helping us develop technologies, or helping us understand the world, or communicating clearly with each other, or what we know and what we don't know. It's always amazing to me that took so long for people to come up with a scientific method, you know, or even to come up with the idea of empiricism, Like you have an idea, let's actually check if it works before we accept it in the canon of ideas, right, Yeah, you know. One of my favorite examples when I teach introductory of physics is the comparison between Aristotelian physics and Galilean physics. You know, like Aristotle thousands of years ago said, oh, things just move because it's in the way of things to move, and Galilea was like, let's check, and turns out in an afternoon he disproved all of Aristotle. Right, And there's an example of somebody actually making huge progress in an afternoon based on a single simple idea. But why did it take thousands of years before people realized, Wow, science is actually only useful when you compare it to what's actually happening in the real world. I mean, you know, once you have that idea, of course, then that you have this enormous flowering of technology and advancement. So it seems to me like, yeah, language is important, math is important, but in some sense science is a really strong contender for the most important because we've had it the shortest amount of time, but it's led to perhaps the greatest transformations in the way we live.
Well, here's an interesting question. So you Ryan think language is the greatest invention ever, and Danny you think math and science are the greatest inventions ever. Do you think that we're done? Like, can you foresee a possibility that there's an invention in our future that could maybe overtake these two things to be the greatest invention ever.
So one of the reasons my book has structured the way it is where it has this invention of time machines and then you go back and you're doing time tourism and you get trapped in the past, is that I feel like, if you invented time travel, then you're done. That's the last invention that ever needs to be invented, because any problem you encounter, you go to the future, see how they solve it, bring the solution back with you. The second you invent time travel, you've invented all other inventions. It's possible for humans to invent.
Boom, which proves the time travel is impossible.
Or it proves that that could be that would surpass language and science in my estimation, all other inventions en mass beats everything else for sure.
What do you think, Daniel?
I think that for that to work, you'd have to invent time travel, which would violate causality, which is what you need in order to be able to steal inventions from the future that haven't been made yet, which is basically just science fiction and so, and we already invented that. So that's what I think about that.
Wow, what do you think, Daniel, would be? What do you think could be something we might invent in the future that could totally revolutionize things even more?
That's impossible to comprehend, Like I you know, if I knew that, then I would invent it, right, all these inventions that really the transformational ones that And I love the way Ryan pointed this out in this book. All these inventions, if you just knew what the invention was, then you have invented it, right. It's like having the password right. All you need to know is the password and the door is open. Some of these inventions, like you know, steal, how do you even if you went back and told somebody how to smelt steel. It's not like they could do that that afternoon. They have to build a whole industrial base, et cetera, et cetera. But these really transformational ones, it's just knowing the idea is the invention. So all right. It's not like I have the next human transformational invention already in my head and just haven't shared it with anybody. And I was waiting for this podcast to reveal it. But if I did, I would totally roll it out right now.
Can you imagine, let's take a quick break.
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I also wonder, like if you could go back in time and you're talking to fifty thousand year old dude and you're like excited to share with them the ideas you have and the technology that you can use to transform is in her world. I wonder if they might think, you know what, we're good, Like, uh, you know, I got I got my roving mammals I can eat, you know. Yeah, a hunter, I gather you know, car sticks. Every once in a while, we bang rocks together around the campfire. Life's not bad, you know.
Yeah, that's it.
That's the thing that we kind of forget is that in times of plenty, the hunting and gathering lifestyle is a fabulous lifestyle. Like you're lazing around. It doesn't take all day to hunt and gather. You have lots of free time, just chill out, do whatever you want. Foods plenty. Who would give that up? Farming sucks. Farming is back breaking labor in a field, like it's it's a lot of work, but what it gets you is reliable foods that when the times of plenty run out for the hunting gathering, you don't starve and suffer catastrophic population collapse. Because you have resources, you're in one place, you can build infrastructure. You can start building buildings that you don't have to pick up and carry with you.
Like it.
It's where civilization begins when you stop moving around. Every time things get hot, it gets hard. So yeah, I can see if you arrive in a time where it's very easy to find food, it's gonna hard to vince people to join the farm and work for you or work with you. But one of the arguments for that that I found was someone was pointing out that it's very hard to produce alcohol in a hunting and gathering lifestyle, moving all the time, and so if you want to have a beer, you need a civilization for that, and that might be one of the things that induces people to come and help out on the farm.
Yeah. My other fear for time traveling Ryan is that you go back in time with all these crazy ideas, you're just going to get branded a witch and killed. Like you know, this is sort of a social barrier to convincing people to join your let's transform humanity movement. But you're right, maybe beer is the answer to that problem. All right, only have one more question for you, which is sort of a multi diverse question. To me, the history of human invention seems sort of chaotic. You know, somebody had this idea, somebody had that idea sort of came together here and there. Have you thought about sort of the one thousand parallel universes where you run the human experiment in how many of them? Do you think we would end up after this amount of time at roughly the same place? Like do we always end up stumbling into the same things and roughly the same order, or are there these moments when human technology could have shifted dramatically and gone down a different path and become, you know, done things more rapidly. Do you think those thousand different parallel universes have similarities? Are all totally different?
I think that's similaris I think they're markedly different. Like when you have these huge expands of time which we could have met something and didn't I need is that one person to invent it? You remove Isaac Newton from our history and we have a very different history of thought of mathematics, right.
Perhaps, but you know, maybe Leibnitz would have invented everything Isaac Newton didn't think of right there could have just been like it could have been an idea of the time that somebody was going to invent because the pieces were there, And.
That does show up. You look at the mention of radio, and there are a bunch of people independently coming with radio at about the same time because the pieces were in place. There are certainly moments where sort of things are in the air and everyone's moving towards this one invention, and radio's example of that. But there's other examples where it didn't have to be that way. The stethoscope is a fun one. That's that's the first stethoscope was just a rolled up tube of paper to listen, to isolate and listen to a sound, and we had paper since three hundred BCE. It was invented in eighteen sixteen CE by a male heterosexual doctor who had a busty female patient and didn't want to press his ear to her chest, so that was too erotic an experience for him, so he rolled up a tube of paper to leave some room for Jesus and listened through that and accidentally discovered that this isolates and clarifies a sound. So that's one of the few examples I could find where someone actually progressed science by being too horny to do their job properly, and that guy could have shown up at any point in history, right, Like that's.
And also proves that that boobs are useful for something.
All right, Ryan, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you very much, Ryan for entertaining all of our amateurish thoughts on a topic in which you are an expert.
Thank you. I think they're great questions. I love talking about the stuff. I wrote a book about it. I love talking about it so much. It's called how to Invent Everything, a survival guide for the stranded time traveler, and you can get it at how to Invent Everything dot com.
Well, I think that Ryan, who has a history of studying language, thinks that language is the most important thing invented human history, and me, as a scientist, I think math and science is the most important thing invented in human history.
Yeah, I find that a little suspicious. Like you guys said all these great reasons why your team should win.
That's right. And you know there's a trend there, because when I was asking people on the street what they thought the greatest invention in human history was most of them talked about what they happened to have been reading. You know, so student studying evolution said evolution. A student studying the atomic theory said atomic theory. A student on a scooter said the wheel. I think it's it's it's a hard question to answer because it's so broad, and so people freeze up a little bit and then they think about it from their perspective, and there's a lesson there, you know, that we all see the world from our own perspective.
Well, you know, it sort of happened to me too when I was asked this question. When I had to think about it, I just kind of looked around me, you know, like I didn't think internally through the history of human civilization. I just kind of looked around me, and I thought, try to think banana. What would be.
You thought banana? But I could not live without bananas.
Yeah, it's what makes everything else possible. Come on, it's what got monkey's out of the trees. We're onto trees, up into the trees exactly. But yeah, you sort of have that instinct to look around you and to try to gauge impact that way, like what all around me would not be here without if it hadn't been invented.
That's right, And I think the lessons there is that we could all see only a tiny bit of the fabric of human history, right, And so it's very difficult to say anything general because human history is this incredible mosaic of billions of people's experiences, and all we can do is speak for ourselves. I mean, I know historians try their best to weave these broader stories about what has happened in humanity, but I always feel like so much of actual human experience it's just brushed under the rug when they try to do that. And so I think none of us can really speak for all of humanity. We can only speak for ourselves. What is the most important invention that is affecting your life? I think that's really the question of the podcast.
Or you know, maybe points to the idea that the more you know about something, the more fascinating it becomes, do you know what I mean? Like Ryan has studied linguistics for a long time and so he just knows so much about it and how it's connected to everything. So from his point of view, it's like the most important things. It's the hub of all things, And like you've studied science and physics for a long time, and so you've seen how it's kind sort of connected to everything else, and how it's nothing would be possible without it, and so you see it as the most fascinating, most important thing. And so maybe it's just all sort of connected to itself. And it's just that the the more you know about something, the more you think it's crucial to the structure of human history.
So why didn't you argue for comics to be the most important? Do you spend twenty years studying it?
Right?
I totally agree that things as you study them, anything can become interesting. You can find a puzzle anywhere.
Right, Like you could go into a deep dive about like a cup. You know, like if humans hadn't invented the cup, what would happen?
There'd be a lot more injuries in baseball. Oh wait, no, you're talking about a different co Sorry.
But you don't, do you know what I mean? Like, you're going to deep dive on anything and see how it's all connected to the greatest moments in history and civilization. Right Like, without a cup or any kind of vessel to hold water, maybe we wouldn't you know, been able to, you know, leave the watering hole and start building villagers and things like that.
All right, so maybe we should leave that as a challenge to our listeners. Choose some trivial item in human life and challenge us to spend an entire podcast drilling down and discovering what's fascinating about toenail clippers or glad wrap or whatever it is in your life. Send it to us at feedback at Danielanjorge.
Dot com, or write at jockstrap at Daniel dot com.
That's rap, and thank you everyone for listening to this episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. If you enjoyed it, tune in next time or check out our book called We Have No Idea, An illustrated guide to the Unknown Universe.
See you next time.
Thanks for listening. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at feedback at Danielanhorge dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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