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We finally have achieved the ability to destroy man kind and the world as we know it, with in less than an hour
Beautiful and damning at the same time
But we also achieved a sense of dread of what it could do, which leaves us in a quandary. Great historical events leave more than quandary in their wake.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tek_Freek
The creation of City Data, without which none of us would be here.
If there is one single event in human history that changed everything about humanity what would it be?
I would say the Resurrection of Christ over two thousand years ago.
It is not surprising that you get various definitions on what is included in the word "history". If everything concerning mankind can be included, whether it is documented or not, then I'd probably say something like the discovery of fire, or the invention of the wheel. Maybe the bow-and-arrow.
Of course a significant event could be a negitive event. Then you have to look at Hitler's rise to power, the invention of the atomic bomb, and if you go back several thousand years, there's is the first solo mime performance. A moment mankind has always regretted.
In the movie 2001 Stanley Kubrick visualized the moment our early hominid ancester saw the potential in a piece of leg bone to do work and it became man's first tool. Man is a product of his tools and has used his tools as a weapon. Its been quite an advance from clubs and simple stones to thermonuclear weapons and ICBMs and God knows what we will grasp in the near future. Arthur C. Clarke noted that we may be living on borrowed time if we are not careful with our tools.
then I'd probably say something like the discovery of fire, .
The discover of fire probably happened on the first day of humanity, or was already to known to whomever we mutated from the night before. But what was very significant was the technology to make fire continuous and portable, and even more so, the technology to create fire at will. Useful fire would have been a series of improvements. And, like the wheel, was almost certainly discovered independently in different times and places, rather than a single master concept being circulated by word of mouth.
One could make the case the invention of FIAT MONEY was the most important event in human history, making wealth portable. And that, as I understand it, was a singular event, about 2600 years ago, the news of which spread by word of mouth (or jingle of pocket).
There is little question that the death and resurection of Jesus had the greatest impact on world history. It transformed whole societies.
If that is the benchmark, where does the life and death of Muhammad fall? Certainly the impact of Islam has been as equally important as the rise of Christianity.
For me, the extinction of the Neanderthals, was the most significant event ending modern humans possibly greatest rivals.
By convention, history begins with writing, which is the transition from Pre-history to Ancient History. "History" becomes a useful distinguishing term only if it differentiates between what man has told us, and what we infer from other data, because that transition represents a huge gulf of reliability. People who infer "history" from that unwritten data do not, as far as I know, typically call themselves historians.
Whether entry-level school history books preface themselves with a useful summary of prehistory is not, in my view, a compelling argument.
Then you view history books and make the eccentric ruling that portions of them are not history by your standards.
You do not seem to grasp that history is a larger umbrella style science. History uses the findings of other sciences in forming an idea of what happened. It has been doing so ever since those other sciences came into being. I believe that these practices will survive your contrary interpretation of what is proper and what is not.
We are both free to draw the boundaries around History wherever we like.
For the purposes of this discussion, I think it sinks into a meaningless miasma if we try to answer the question with pre-literate events. That would range from the development of air-breathing lungs to the aligning of rocks as an astronomical calendar. Those were not single events, but were stumbled across in many places at many times, and certainly would have occurred by accident anyway.
An "historical" event that would serve the purpose of this discussion would be something directed by human will, combined with a culture prepared to take it and run with it. Such as Columbus. The Vikings sailed to the New World, and NASA voyaged to the moon, but neither yielded much more than conspiracy theories. So Columbus was significant, but the others were not.
I can't think of anything off hand that was directed by thought-out human will, as opposed to accident, which predated writing.
To those already mentioned, I would suggest the Sumerian invention of cuneiform writing, the abacus usually attributed to the Chinese around 2600 BC, the alphabet often credited to the Phoenicians, and the smelting of iron by the Hittites about 1400 BC. However, for overall benefit to mankind, the little-remembered Antony Van Leuwenhoek's discovery of bacteria must be considered a seminal moment in history, in that it paved the way for subsequent medical discoveries, notably, Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccination and Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease.
We are both free to draw the boundaries around History wherever we like.
For the purposes of this discussion, I think it sinks into a meaningless miasma if we try to answer the question with pre-literate events. That would range from the development of air-breathing lungs to the aligning of rocks as an astronomical calendar. Those were not single events, but were stumbled across in many places at many times, and certainly would have occurred by accident anyway.
An "historical" event that would serve the purpose of this discussion would be something directed by human will, combined with a culture prepared to take it and run with it. Such as Columbus. The Vikings sailed to the New World, and NASA voyaged to the moon, but neither yielded much more than conspiracy theories. So Columbus was significant, but the others were not.
I can't think of anything off hand that was directed by thought-out human will, as opposed to accident, which predated writing.
So then by your increasingly odd standards, the eruption of a volcano would not be a historical event.
Okay.
Whatever.
I'm confident that the pros will constinue to sustain a view congruent with mine rather than switching to your limited one.
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