People Explain Which Event In History They Think Changed The World The Most

Printing

Invention of the Printing Press. It allowed the proliferation and spread of ideas at an exponentially higher rate and it allowed books to become something the masses could afford. The Enlightenment and by extension the modern world never could have happened without it. It represented as big of an information revolution as the Internet does today.

- SleepyConscience

Internet Is Hard To Burn

I have come to the conclusion that the advent of the internet will eventually be viewed on par with the invention of the printing press. When you consider the amount of world change and political upheaval that the press put into motion, you then realize that we are only beginning to see the political and social consequences of the internet.

- identicalsnowflake18

I think the Internet will be seen as being bigger, because anyone can write and publish their own book on a platform that is hard to burn.

- Cobek

Just Plant It

I think when some bad@ss decided, "Hey why don't we just take these plants we're foraging for and plant them near our huts? That way we can just walk outside and get food rather than walk around looking for it."

- BaconReceptacle

Have you read Sapiens? He argues that was not only the most important but also the worst thing we ever did. We went from hunter gatherers with varied diets, close knit social circles and generally interesting lives to grinding, back breaking monotonous work which yielded a limited and unhealthy diet and the increase in population caused disease and the break down of the social circles.

Obviously it wasn't really a "moment" that people decided to become farmers but thousands of years of gradual change eventually took us there.

- SweetingLFC

It's Electric!

Discovering electricity

We'd still be using letters for communication, construction tools wouldn't allow us to build any structure more than 10 or so stories, spark is a key part of an internal combustion engine-- so no cars unless you had a steam engine.

- EggsAndBeerKegs

A lot more came from the discovery of electricity. There's this neat tool called an MRI which can find a cancer in your body shortly after it forms rather than finding it slightly after your death.

- TomoyoHoshijiro

Avoiding WWIII

Vasily Arkhipov's decision to not fire nuclear torpedos at American submarines.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Arkhipov was one of the three commanders on board his nuclear submarine. In order to use the sub's nuclear weapons, all three members had to vote unanimously. Arkhipov's submarine had not received word from Moscow, and US ships were dropping depth charges on their submarine, trying to get it to surface. Thinking nuclear war had already broken out, the submarine commanders thought the charges being dropped were intended to sink the sub, and firing on them would be defensive. When it came to a vote, Arkhipov refused to give approval for use of the nuclear weapons, and the sub surfaced. Had he caved to the wills of the other two commanders on the ship, the world would have fell into WWIII.

- Reidddddddd

Plow Like An Egyptian

It's not what I think, it's a known fact! The plow, in Egypt. First time in human history we had surplus food and could plan for the future, unlike any other animal on the planet. From here, all human civilization developed.

- noahbodty

Playing Bumper Planets

Another planet hitting the Earth when it was forming. Without that, the Earth wouldn't have enough mass to maintain a dense enough atmosphere to support complex life (like Mars) and there would also be no Moon.

- dildobaggins

Exchanging Earthworms

The Colombian Exchange

So many cultures and species mixed. For instance, earthworms didn't exist on North or South America before, and that completely changes the plant and wildlife composition. And that's only one of many changes

Worldwide diets changed, Europe was introduced to tomatoes, potatoes

Tobacco, chocolate

The fall of the Inca and Aztecs, as well as the wipeout of countless other natives

I'm surprised I haven't seen it mentioned yet, I've seen several historians argue it was the most significant event to happen to the planet since the death of the dinosaurs

- fuzzeenavel

Immune

The invention of vaccination. Just the fact that I am immune to various diseases that took millions of lives a century or two ago, amazes me.

- IAmPirateKing

Vaccines. Specifically the small pox vaccine, polio vaccine, flu vaccines and measles vaccines.

- Michael83

Keeping The Peace

The Bretton Woods Agreement.

It was this agreement that gave us the longest period of peace and unparalleled prosperity and advancement in human history.

- Pertinax123