3 ms·

Don't forget: Soap/handwashing, antibiotics, the smallpox vaccine, the Haber-Bosch process, blood transfusion, anesthetic and PCR!

• kragen 3y ago
  soap is a good one for sure; the others might turn out to be less important than the transistor time will tell
  • dharmab 3y ago
    Haber-Bosch is the reason there are over 7 billion humans on Earth instead of closer to 2 billion. It's very difficult for any digital technology to compete with that.
    • kragen 3y ago
      agriculture is the reason there were 2 billion instead of 20 million, which is a much bigger difference it seems likely that digital technology will be crucial in enabling there to be far more humans off earth than on earth; o'neill cylinders could enable many orders of magnitude more physical humans even within this solar system to say nothing of the possibility of backing up your mind with a brain scan and thus becoming immortal, and possibly forking into more copies of your mind than there are humans alive today (nitpick, transistors aren't digital)