Those in a reflective mood at Christmas may wonder why the human race progressed so much in the past five hundred years - in comparison with the sixty thousand years that science estimates that we primates have lived on planet Earth.
For some strange reason it was in that mere flicker of time that human ingenuity made scientific discoveries - that completely changed the world. It is an interesting conjecture to try and guess what handful of "Eureka "moments resulted in the world in which we live today. Deciding the most important would surely provoke a lively argument.
In 1439 Johannes Gutenberg discovered how to make moveable type, creating the first printing press. Until that time, each and every book on the planet had been hand crafted by monks. They were usually religious works and were very valuable, and with the coming of printed matter came the quest for education which went hand in hand with the expanse of communication - and the spreading of "ideas ".
The moment that changed the world was James Watt's invention of the steam engine in 1712. For the first time, mankind was freed from the limitation of energy provided by the muscles of the human body or the energy provided by horses or other livestock. The steam engine powered machines that overcame the need for regular rest and very quickly that progressed to the locomotive that ran on rails, and suddenly that era of transport was connecting the world. For the first time, humans had overcome the speed limit imposed by the physical power of the horse.
Perhaps the most significant discovery of all time - was electricity, and it had many fathers. In 1752 Benjamin Franklin discovered that flying a kite in a lightning storm attracted an electrical discharge. By 1800 Italian physicist Allesandra Volta had managed to create the steady flow of an electrical charge, and then Michael Faraday in 1831 discovered how to make an electrical current flow through a wire. All this came together in 1878 - when Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb. For the first time, planet earth had electric light.
From there is became a cascade of progress that was all reliant on electricity. The internal combustion engine that gave us personal mobility relied on that electrical spark to ignite petrol vapour and move cylinders. In 1909 Guglielmo Marconi won the Nobel prize for his discovery of radio transmission. The Wright brothers created powered flight, again relying on a combustion engine for power and then in 1947 physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invented the transistor - and we were up and away in the age of miniaturization.
Today, electricity is present in every aspect of life - as we know it. Alan Turing gave us the age of the computer and with that came the Internet. Humankind has set foot on the moon and we have a permanent space station hovering in space. Nothing seems beyond the realm of future possibility, and all of that relies on the flow of electrical current. Perhaps the discovery of electricity is the most important invention of all time.
It is a sobering thought that the brain of Albert Einstein arrived at a formulae that led to the splitting of the atom, and from that line of thought we have developed a weapon that could deliver a thermonuclear pulse that would completely destroy the means of creating and distributing electricty as a result of it's detonation - sending the citizens of planet earth back to the stone age !
At the same time, perhaps that greatest living brain we have today - Stephen Hawking - has sounded a warning that we need to take care in the relentless race to develop artificial intelligence. He warns that we risk losing control, and it could "take off on it's own and redesign itself ". It may make us humans redundant !
Perhaps we should heed the wisdom of the genie that lived in a mythical lamp and when summonsed granted three wishes. It warned us to be "very careful what we wished for "!
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