While I understand the heft of your argument, I don't think food production and electricity generation can be categorized as simple innovations. Everything star

While I understand the heft of your argument, I don't think food production and electricity generation can be categorized as simple innovations. Everything starts off when a small number of people work on something, and later spreads around through consensus. But crops are a basic necessity for survival so I feel it is unfair to bring it into this debate. If anything, I would classify antibiotics, standardization of drug manufacturing, and scaling of energy (oil, nuclear power) as humanity's greatest achievements because all other achievements are made possible by (1) people being alive and well and (2) having the energy budget to carry out research and development.