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FWIW, Facetime. It is not an unmixed blessing, as recent events have shown, but still, to be able to see and speak to those at a considerable distance has made our world seem so much smaller and closer. I still remember having to wait hours just to make an international call, and sometimes the quality was very poor.
I have two answers; one from a purely 'convenience' perspective and the other from an existential angle.
In terms of the greatest impact in everyday life, I would say the internet. I was tempted to say the cell phone but when you think about it, your cell phone just acts as a proxy for access to the internet. I mean, come on. Who actually uses it as a phone?
The internet impacts nearly aspect of our lives. Interestingly, while reading some of the other threads on here about people living on a shoestring budget in retirement, the one item that no one wanted to live without was access to the internet. That alone should tell you everything you need to know. Personally, there are very few parts of the day when it's not touching my life. On it I watch baseball games remotely from 1500 miles away from my "home" city. I check the currently volatile ups and downs of my investments. My job as a technical writer depends on it. I can order Double-Stuffed Oreos from Amazon on a whim. I watch news clips of the Iditarod race in Alaska. I communicate with all the members of my family strewn all over the country in real time. The list is endless. But if you think about life prior to 1998ish, the impact of the world wide web has been completely and utterly transformative for the vast majority of us.
Existentially, I would say the advancement of pharmaceuticals and medical devices. It would be interesting to know the impact on civilization today without the development of drugs and stents and transplant technology over the last 50 years. This has affected me personally. I have two daughters. One would have died at four years old in 1988 of leukemia but for the advancement of cancer drugs such as methotrexate and prednisone, which saved her life. Five years prior? She had no chance. In 2013, my adult daughter collapsed on the floor of her home with a rare condition that stopped her heart and was saved by paramedics who brought her back to life using a portable defibrillator, which didn't exist when I was a snot-nosed 7 year-old running around suburban NH. Both girls live today because of the spectacular rush of medical progress, and they have children who will likely have children themselves. That would not be true for either of them had they been living in 1967 at the time of their medical events.
Now take my personal experiences and multiply that by all the millions of people who've benefited from similar medical miracles. Start extrapolating from that how many people wouldn't be alive today without those inventions, and you can see the impact across a global cross-section. Kind of reminds me of that quote in the scene in Star Wars: Episode IV when the Death Star takes out Alderaan, "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced." Without pacemakers, tetracycline, and laparoscopic surgery (all developments since I was born), a significant percentage of people walking the planet today wouldn't be here, and their progeny (and THEIR progeny) wouldn't have had the chance to be born. And one of those could have been the guy who finally invents a better customer flow for municipal DMVs. So yeah, let's hear it for modern medicine.
I have two answers; one from a purely 'convenience' perspective and the other from an existential angle.
In terms of the greatest impact in everyday life, I would say the internet. I was tempted to say the cell phone but when you think about it, your cell phone just acts as a proxy for access to the internet. I mean, come on. Who actually uses it as a phone?
The internet impacts nearly aspect of our lives. Interestingly, while reading some of the other threads on here about people living on a shoestring budget in retirement, the one item that no one wanted to live without was access to the internet. That alone should tell you everything you need to know. Personally, there are very few parts of the day when it's not touching my life. On it I watch baseball games remotely from 1500 miles away from my "home" city. I check the currently volatile ups and downs of my investments. My job as a technical writer depends on it. I can order Double-Stuffed Oreos from Amazon on a whim. I watch news clips of the Iditarod race in Alaska. I communicate with all the members of my family strewn all over the country in real time. The list is endless. But if you think about life prior to 1998ish, the impact of the world wide web has been completely and utterly transformative for the vast majority of us.
Existentially, I would say the advancement of pharmaceuticals and medical devices. It would be interesting to know the impact on civilization today without the development of drugs and stents and transplant technology over the last 50 years. This has affected me personally. I have two daughters. One would have died at four years old in 1988 of leukemia but for the advancement of cancer drugs such as methotrexate and prednisone, which saved her life. Five years prior? She had no chance. In 2013, my adult daughter collapsed on the floor of her home with a rare condition that stopped her heart and was saved by paramedics who brought her back to life using a portable defibrillator, which didn't exist when I was a snot-nosed 7 year-old running around suburban NH. Both girls live today because of the spectacular rush of medical progress, and they have children who will likely have children themselves. That would not be true for either of them had they been living in 1967 at the time of their medical events.
Now take my personal experiences and multiply that by all the millions of people who've benefited from similar medical miracles. Start extrapolating from that how many people wouldn't be alive today without those inventions, and you can see the impact across a global cross-section. Kind of reminds me of that quote in the scene in Star Wars: Episode IV when the Death Star takes out Alderaan, "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced." Without pacemakers, tetracycline, and laparoscopic surgery (all developments since I was born), a significant percentage of people walking the planet today wouldn't be here, and their progeny (and THEIR progeny) wouldn't have had the chance to be born. And one of those could have been the guy who finally invents a better customer flow for municipal DMVs. So yeah, let's hear it for modern medicine.
Just my 2 cents.
Wow! That is a good post. I am adding;
Microsoft Office. Excel, Word, Outlook, cloud, are life savers. I am not exaggerating.
The transistor
The Jumbo Jet
The Microprocessor
Electronic memory
SPICE
Unix
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