Topic: Events that changed the world... (Read 4840 times)

If we look from the beginning of human history, I think that following events changed the world:
- the invention of fire
- invention of the wheel
- iron and gunpowder
- The discovery of new continents-America and Australia
- The invention of cars and planes
- world wars
- space exploration
- The victory of the democratic social order in the'' cold'' war
- Internet

Invention of LSD.
Internet.
Wireless Phones.

The Great Tsunami
A Tsunami is nothing but a form of oceanic flood, generated by earthquakes that originate underwater. They can generate giant waves that can submerge a whole island. Of all tsunamis, the worst that the world ever faced was the Indian Ocean tsunami of 26th December, 2004.

Medical Revolution
The discovery of Penicillin as an antibiotic still remains as one of the greatest of all medical discoveries. It has cut down the human mortality rate by large figures. Not just health, but the discovery led to a series of other discoveries which have impacted human life. Then we have the discovery of vaccination by Louis Pasteur, which again changed the kind of life we enjoy today. There was a time, when a small cut would have killed a man, or diseases like smallpox were regarded as the ultimate form of divine punishment for the evil-doers. Without these discoveries, the human race would perhaps have long gone into extinction!

The Apollo Mission
Well, of course the invention of the Wright Brothers, did actually fulfil the human urge to fly, but it was actually the invention of space flights, that actually proved to be a “giant leap for mankind!” Commissioned by NASA, Apollo 11 was the first ever vehicle that put man on the surface of the Moon. Though people would normally look at it as a scientific revolution, the impacts of the success of this mission were far greater. First of all, it made the world look at space exploration from a closer and a completely different perspective. It was no more restricted by the observatory walls, peeping through telescopes. A new race started among nations to engineer its own space programme.


Industrial Revolution
In the words of Robert E. Lucas, Jr., “For the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth. Nothing remotely like this economic behaviour has happened before.” Be it the discovery of the printing press, or the textile making machines, the industrial revolution, spanning over a century, did change the socio-economic conditions of the masses in a drastic fashion. The era also gave us the precious steam engine and the there was a sudden development in the field of roads and railways. The invention of the Differential Engine by Charles Babbage gave a new direction to the world of computing! Then the invention of the radio and the telegraph changed the way the world communicated. In other words, it will not be incorrect to say that the industrial revolution was one of the events that taught man to do more than just farming and domesticating of animals.

World war I and II

and don't forget this, Bitcoin Development (2009)
without it, this forum never exist 

These are both very tragic and sad disasters, but what happened afterwards that changed the world?

Talking about natural disasters, the Bhola cyclone ranks 5th overall in terms of human casualties. The first place is occupied by the 1931 China floods, and 4 out of the 5 top disasters has occurred in China.  

Medical Events that changed the world

18th Century - Homeopathy

19th Century -
Germ Theory or the X Ray

I would say the biggest one is the rise of modern medicine in the 19th Century

For a snicker this changed the world a lot
Cocaine for children Have a toothache heres some cocaine kids (http://web.uvic.ca/vv/student/medicine/medicine19c.htm)
 
20th Century - Could not narrow it to one

Blood Types - Discovering different blood types allowed for safe and effective blood transfusion

The Children of Thalidomide - Led to safety standards in drugs being increased to see the effects on the Fetus
Saving millions of birth defects and miscarriages

Radium Girls - Female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint at the United States Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey, around 1917. The women, who had been told the paint was harmless, ingested deadly amounts of radium by licking their paintbrushes to give them a fine point; some also painted their fingernails and teeth with the glowing substance.

Developed working health standards when dealing with dangerous substances and the effects of Radium on the body
Triggered the enactment of regulations governing labor safety standards, including a baseline of 'provable suffering'.

Before that no real regulations so that is worth noting.

Penicillin - Saved Millions of Lives and also began the modern era of antibiotic discovery.

21st Century

- 2003 – Carlo Urbani, of Doctors without Borders alerted the World Health Organization to the threat of the SARS virus, triggering the most effective response to an epidemic in history. Urbani succumbs to the disease himself in less than a month.

In other words effective dissension of information to prevent pandemics part of a larger contribution to healthcare with technological advancements.

From the same period -Tangshan earthquake 1976: The Tangshan earthquake in 1976 was one of the deadliest earthquakes in China’s history, causing around 242,000 people to lose their lives. The political repercussions of the disaster, however, went far beyond the death toll and damage.

Bhola cyclone 1970:- The Bhola cyclone that struck the Bengal Coast in 1970 was the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded, wiping out entire villages and killing as many as half a million people. The government at the time was criticized for failing to handle relief efforts and protests led to its defeat in the national elections a month later.

We ,the governments,media can still do something about those girls before it becomes history...and an sad even that may not change the world....as many other events from history,posted here ,that didn't changed much  the way the people act today.

That is a neat one I wonder if this combined with the problems Boko Haram brought to the country
One can hope for change but I hope that change does happen and captivate the people to do something
Then it will be history and an event that does change the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibok_schoolgirl_kidnapping

January 2, 2012, Occupy Nigeria protest began in Nigeria in response to the fuel subsidy removal by the Federal Government of President Goodluck Jonathan. Protests took place across the country, including the Nigerian Embassy in London, New York and Italy.

Except for the bay of pics and the "proxy" wars yes, nukes have prevented wars from breaking out.

Even the "proxy" wars involve much fewer people and hence less people die (or are otherwise negatively affected).

You are correct and I agree to say that we are much closer to world destruction as a result of nuclear bombs/missiles. There are probably examples when we came even closer to nuclear way then what you or me or the public is aware of.

The US has several (at least one) treaties with many countries (I know at least Russia, but I think others as well) to reduce the number of nuclear bombs that each country has. I think the goal of these treaties is to prevent the types of disasters in your scenario when a "non sanctioned" nuclear war could erupt and when a "true" nuclear war breaks out (both would be very deadly for everyone/everything on this planet).   

Since many of the inventions listed are more of a transformation of 1 invention to another:

Flight - Essentially the world in available to everyone
transistor/microchip - without them everyday life for almost all of Earth is different
Atomic bomb - not so much of a change now besides all the fear since it's creation, but it will power us in the future when we leave Earth
Moon landing - 10k years ago the above 3 were not conceived but people looked at the moon and I'm sure some thought of going there
DNA/origin of life - still a work in progress. When we do solve or have a really solid clue it will answer the oldest questions - who are we and where did we come from.

Well, the US had already tried and failed to invade Cuba before the Cuban Missile Crisis; that's what the whole fiasco of the Bay of Pigs was about. Now, it's true that several wars were most likely prevented by both sides either having access to nuclear weapons, or allies that did. Pakistan and India are probably a good example: before they both had nukes, they engaged in about 3 wars, and none after. On the other hand, this means that what conflicts there are tend to be proxy wars; that is, instead of engaging each other directly, the nuclear powers arm and support conflicts in regions strategically important to them, if necessary overthrowing governments left and right by whatever means necessary.

But the reason I brought up the Cuban Missile Crisis was because it was an example of how close they were to using nuclear weapons on each other. And that isn't just at the top levels; there is the case of a soviet submarine, the crew of which finding itself under attack (the US ship was supposedly just practicing on it...), was deciding whether or not to fire their nuclear tipped torpedoes on the other ship. In the end, it came down to one person refusing to go along with it (all 3 officers on board had to agree). I guess I don't have to tell you what would have happened if that had gone differently.

On the same day, a couple of US planes flew out of course and entered Soviet space, which prompted them to scramble fighter planes after them; in turn, the US scrambled nuclear armed fighter planes. Again, things could have gone quite wrong, if cooler heads hadn't prevailed.

And remember, we're not in the clear yet; either intentionally, or due to an unfortunate set of circumstances, we can still find ourselves in the middle of a nuclear conflict. Sure, nothing like that has happened yet (except if you're Japanese), but if it ever does, it might not take long for the destruction to surpass all the wars that it "avoided" (though as I said, many turn into proxy wars of one type or another).

Try to do the same with a natural juice and you'll be amazed of finding another dinosaur s** in your pot
Of course it might look as being from a different species but you've got my point.

Also , do you find caramel grose?

Hell,hello...who's calling me......Alexander Graham Bell Invented the Telephone By By June 1875 the goal of creating a device that would transmit speech electrically was about to be realized. He had proven that different tones would vary the strength of an electric current in a wire. To achieve success they therefore needed only to build a working transmitter with a membrane capable of varying electronic currents and a receiver that would reproduce these variations in audible frequencies.

Dolly (5 July 1996 – 14 February 2003) was a female domestic sheep, and the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell, using the process of nuclear transfer. She was cloned by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and colleagues at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh inScotland. She was born on 5 July 1996 and she lived until the age of six; unfortunately she suffered from a progressive lung disease.

TV is also an event that changed the world.The first television set was built in 1928 and was a very simple invention; it consisted of a disk and a light and required only a little bit of electricity. Very few Americans owned a television set until the years following World War II. The progression of the picture quality of televisions was quick, engineers worked rigorously to improve it. In 1939, the first nationwide television broadcasts aired. And from 1945-1948 television sales increased 500%. The first widespread broadcast was in 1954. Today over 110 million households have televisions.

And thanks to them we are here, today, talking on this forum and haveing bitcoin.....Thank you Charley Kline and Bill Duvall!

If it wasn't for nuclear missles/bombs the the US would have simply attacked/invaded Cuba if there were missiles pointed at us. Lives would have been lost.

The nuclear bomb has brought us closer to world destruction if something catastrophic were to happen (a country launches a nuclear missile aimed at an enemy)but it has also prevented several wars from breaking out (some conflicts likely never even existed due to the threat of nuclear bombs).