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Why are you kidding? We have the ability to precisely control the environment we live in, to the point that we build machines specifically to set a comfortable temperature for us. Human will can be used to literally move heat where we want it to be with a minimum of effort.

I'd have to enter the bow & arrow into the contest, too. Pointy sticks were awesome in their own way, but the bow and arrow (and similar inventions) let even a weak human kill stronger animals without risk of being hurt.

High explosives. We can level entire mountains because they're in the way of shit we need or want done.

Steel. Do I need to say anything more?

LordOskuro wrote:21: Sex for Pleasure - Including the development of contraceptives, sexual freedom, and all the kinky stuff we've come up with in between. Imagine how utterly horrible life would be if we were to have sex exclusively to have children?

That's easy. How horrible do you currently feel about things you and no one else has ever experienced or possesses awareness of?

^Because men having sex for pleasure and leaving women to care for the children was unheard of, right? Please note that I include the sexual liberation as part of the achievement, as it concerns both parts of the human species.

And I feel pretty horrible about not being able to perceive n-dimensional spaces, mind you. (for n>3)

As for air conditioning, I was kidding because I just dropped it as a one-liner follow up to Mike's quote, but it is indeed an achievement, just as refrigeration was for food storage, or freezers were to mojitos.

This thread has been given a more fitting home; carry on.

LordOskuro wrote:^Because men having sex for pleasure and leaving women to care for the children was unheard of, right? Please note that I include the sexual liberation as part of the achievement, as it concerns both parts of the human species.

What the fuck does that have to do with anything? You stated "sex exclusively for producing children", meaning concepts like pleasure wouldn't factor in. Otherwise, it wouldn't be exclusive, would it?

Furthermore, we didn't invent sex for pleasure any more than we invented eating for pleasure. It's merely an activity we engage in. You'd be more on topic if you pointed out we invented complex sex toys.

And I feel pretty horrible about not being able to perceive n-dimensional spaces, mind you. (for n>3)

Sure you do...

25-ish?

Global communication networks. Wanna talk to a man in China? Call him, and with just a few seconds of delay, you can chat. Geographical limitations no longer exist for communication or data transfer, and that is awesome as well.

LordOskuro wrote:21: Sex for Pleasure - Including the development of contraceptives, sexual freedom, and all the kinky stuff we've come up with in between. Imagine how utterly horrible life would be if we were to have sex exclusively to have children? That'd mean once or twice in a lifetime to keep sustainable population growth! (by modern standards) And before it's brought up, anal sex counts as one of the kinky things in between.
To quote Mike "The miniskirt is truly one of the greatest inventions of mankind. It is up there, along with lube and air conditioning"

This is not exclusive to humans.

26. Law. The collection of rules imposed by authority. We established and wrote down a set of rules with which we judge what behaviour is acceptable or not and enforce it for the greater good.

27: Imagination. The ability to see, in detail, what you cannot see. The ability to create, even if only in your mind, what is not real. In many ways, the driving force of creativity and ambition is found here.

28: The Computer-Devices able to preform thought processes, able to process information quickly and efficiently and in some areas (namely Mathmatics) better so than a human being. Computers allow us. Computerized automation allows us to build machines that can regulate their behaviour to keep them working properly to a far greater degree and are the foundation for multiple things including the internet to SATNAV and makes sure things work far better than they would without in a trillion other ways. They also demonstrate humanity's capacity to recreate its own intelligence, albiet to a fairly limited degree at this time.

Norade wrote:11. Art - We are the only race to make things purely because they are beautiful.

There is more to Art than Simple Aesthetics. Art represents the ability to transmit and preserve abstract thoughts and emotions though various mediums.

Zor

29. The harnessing of electric charges - Made a whole bunch of inventions already mentioned possible, but mostly because I think the ability to send a torrent of volts coursing down a wire in order to create a wide variety of interesting effects such as, oh, light, with only the flick of a switch is one of those achievements that demand someone in a white lab coat step out and yell "BEHOLD!"

Singular Intellect wrote:You'd be more on topic if you pointed out we invented complex sex toys.

I guess you missed the "kinky stuff in between" I mentioned. I was not referring exclusively to the act of sex, but to the many things we've come up with regarding sex, from contraception to sex toys, porn, as well as the understanding of different tendencies and orientations. It can't be denied that sexuality has shaped a big part of our society, and the relatively new concept of sex being a right of the individual, rather than a socially mandated act, is an achievement in my eyes.

30) The optic lense- and everything that comes with it. The ability to make large object small and small obeject large for our viewing (and recording)

31) Mathmatics, understanding numbers.

32) Carpentry, which allowed us to take a living thing from our environment, kill it, and then use it's remains exclusively for something rather than eating.

33) The Sail : While ships in general are pretty amazing, the sail is particularly fascinating and important, because it gave us propulsion without us or any animals having to expend energy to go (obviously you have to adjust sails and whatnot, but that is beside the point) It allowed us to cross vast oceans on something other than our own power.

I'm going to put up only one, though I could do more, and this one I think is underappreciated:

34) The artificial container: The ability to take something from the environment, such as a skin, a gourd, wood, steel or oil, and make it into an object, that you use for containing other items. Without this, we would not have portable water. Without this, we would not have the ability to carry many items - I am counting sticking things in a string or a belt as the same concept here - like arrows, or spears for a spear thrower, or books, or so many other things. We've even expanded the concepts. We make movable containers that we go in, or big things go in, from carriages, to hay carts to chariots to rockets and trucks.

The ability to aquire an item, and use mechanical aid beyond our limited bodies, to move it around to where we want it, is, to my mind, as fundamental as fire.

Modern Medicine- The ability to set bones to mend correctly, the ability to resuscitate someone and restart a heart, anesthetic; both general and local, complex surgeries that take understanding the human body to new levels, x-ray machines, CAT scans, and MRIs all help prolong the life of a human by a couple decades. And this goes back to a very long time ago, when we were coming to understand how some herbs affected our body and it's functions, how honey is an antiseptic, ants that could be used as stitches. Heck, I even remember in my history class that ancient India had a way of doing plastic surgery for people who lost their nose. They would cut a nose shape out of the forehead's skin, right above the brow, and not cut the part between the eyes. They would then take the skin and twist it where it was still connected and make a nose out of it. I think that that is pretty amazing, how we have learned to take in plant matter and turn it into remedies even for the simplest of ailments.

Also, beer. Why drink water when you can drink your bread? And there are no nasty parasites that could be lurking in a local water supply. And it gets you drunk. Not that humans are the only ones that get drunk, but we have turned it into an art form.

I don't know how to word this, but cake and many other foods seem like a miracle when you consider start to finish.

The Apollo program. Humanity not only managed to get human beings into orbit, no mean feat, but they also got them safely to the moon and back. On multiple occasions. I'll grant there were lives lost. But we still managed to do something many thought impossible.

In addition to the stuff with lenses used for magnification, there's also digital imagery and the ability it grants us of being able to take many short exposures, overlap them, and get a far clearer image of stellar objects than we ever thought possible.

As an expansion on written and spoken language, music. There are few things that can compare to music with regards to manipulating emotional responses. The right song can make you laugh, cry, rage, or anything between.

Actually, the fact that we managed to plan, prepare and launch half a dozen moon landings without losing a single member of the crews in space makes the Apollo program even awesomer.

They literally rode 3000 tonnes of high explosives from Earth to the Moon and back. Several times. In a row. They even had an important part of the spacecraft explode on them once, and managed to survive.

I have to say this is the single most awesome thing humanity managed to pull off so far.

I have to say this is the single most awesome thing humanity managed to pull off so far.

Seconded. Going to the moon and back. The stuff of dreams and fantasy since dawn of civilization made real, And done with 1960s technology. Humanity at its finest does not get any better than this.

Sarevok wrote:Seconded. Going to the moon and back. The stuff of dreams and fantasy since dawn of civilization made real, And done with 1960s technology. Humanity at its finest does not get any better than this.

The Apollo 13 incident was in a sense the high point, despite being a mission failure. An incredible amount of engineering work was done in a few short years - and then when it really mattered, those same engineers and controllers improvised completely new solutions in mere hours. I always saw that story as the distilled essence of the attitude that got NASA to the moon.

Artificial Limbs/Organs

I know "modern medicine" as a whole was mentioned, but this just seemed too big to leave off to me. We have the capability as a species to remodel bones (like a shattered hip/pelvis) and rehabilitate amputated limbs! What other species on this planet is capable of doing that? If you had a missing leg as a member of virtually any non-human species, you'd be dead in short order.




Candy

Several of the 'larger' animals on this planet crave a succulent patch of berries or fresh fruit, and the enticement of sugar-rich areas is one that the smaller animals and insects seek after actively. Regardless of size, however, no species that I'm aware of *doesn't* seek out sugar in some form or another. Enter the humans - we not only enjoy our sugar, we produce it in specific appetizing colored forms . . . and we specialize it so much that I actually dislike certain kinds of candy! I can afford to be PICKY about which candy I eat. Which other species can boast that?


Manufacture of Clothing

I know that erotic-items were brought up, but I refer here to clothes in a more general sense. While some animals *do* wear 'clothing' outside of their body (not fur, but shellfish often replace a small shell with a larger one, and I'm not certain that a turtle's shell is an inherent part of their body), no animal is capable of PRODUCING said clothing. And in the bulk and variety that we do - it's unheard of!


Hallucinogens

We understand how they affect us, how to produce them, and then we actually seek them out purely for our pleasure. I think it's a badass achievement.

I'm not certain that a turtle's shell is an inherent part of their body

Lol, yeah - that *was* pretty stupid. I suppose I had that coming. That said, since the shell is technically just the turtle's bones it doesn't qualify as clothing any more than a mammal's fur does.