What Is The Most Important Invention In Human History? (ft. Ryan North)

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Speaker 1: So sometimes when I look around me, I'm amazed at how many tech devices I have in my life. I mean, of course I have a laptop, I have a telephone, you know, I have a TV, this kind of stuff, But just all around me, to my kitchen is a bunch of stuff that my grandparents and their grandparents wouldn't even recognize. Your grandparents didn't have the George Foreman grill. What do you mean, that's right, the panini maker. I mean, it's a fundamental element if youman society. Now, how did people live so long without paninis? Be without Panini's. It's baffling to me, It's baffling. Um. You know, I just feel like so many elements of my life rely on inventions that have appeared fairly recently, which means that my life is completely different from the life from my grandparents and their grandparents. Yeah. I guess what maybe one way to think about it is look around you and think which technology, if it was wasn't there, would make my life totally different. Yeah, And I think the most important invention might not be something that you notice when you just look around you might not be something that throws itself in your face every single day of your life. It could be something you use every day and not even think about it. Are you talking about the toilet? Maybe I'm using it right now. Please this podcast out of the studio and into the toilet. Him and I'm Daniel, and this is our podcast degree his invention in the universe. The podcast called Daniel and Jorge Invent the Universe. Inventing new title for the podcast on this pot now the podcast is called Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, in which we take everything in the universe. We explained to you how is an invented or discovered or at least understood in a way that you can possibly understand it and explain it to somebody else, and then you can tell them about the awesome podcast you heard it on and maybe using this knowledge, you can go out there and invent new thinks. That's right and give us one percent of all your royalty. That's right. By listening, you are implicitly signing a contract, that's right. Or there we need terms and conditions on this podcast. Yeah, so welcome to our podcast everyone, and the topic today, what is the most important invention in human history? Yeah, of all the things that have been invented to make life easier, more fun, maybe more violent. What do you think is the one invention that has had the most impact on human filization or the human condition? That's right. And you might be tempted to think about something which is very immediate, like well, I use my phone every day, and so the iPhone is a very impactful invention. But think a little deeper. I mean, think about the thing in which if we didn't have it would change human history. And so I think that's I'm tipping my hand here. That's my definition for what's the most important invention is the invention with um, without which human history would be markedly different. And I love thinking about the way that history could have been different. Yeah, I mean, let's talk about that. When you say what's the most important invention, what do you mean? And so for you, it's about changing history, like the invention that marked the point in time at which humanity could have gone left or right exactly. And some of these inventions they really come from like moments of inspiration or or or you know, just um accidents. You know, somebody accidentally invents something in the lab. They're trying to make a better peanut butter, sandwich, but they actually invent a laser gun or something, right, And this kind of thing happens all the time, and it changes the course of human history. And so I wonder sometimes, like if that person had been sick that day, or gotten a car accident, or decided to become an artist instead of an engineer, how human history could have been different. And so there are these moments, these pivot points in history, or I feel like if things hadn't gotten a certain way, the whole future could have been dramatically different. And inventions are one of those. And so I like to think about if you had deleted one person from history or distracted them in the right moment, things could have been very different. Yeah, like talk about a butterfly. Fi Like, if a butterfly had flown in front of Einstein just as he was about to come up with, you know, the idea of relativity or quantum physics, he could have been distracted and not come up with it. That's right, Yeah, absolutely, And there's there's lots of real examples, you know, for example, Isaac Newton, genius in human history, right, changed the way we think, invented lots of important stuff, physics, gravity, calculus, all this stuff. His family was sheep herders, right, And the only reason he actually got an education was because his father died and his mother remarried somebody who insisted he go and get an education, maybe just to get young Isaac out of the house, right, And so if Isaac hadn't been sent to school, he never would become this staggering genius in human history. Yeah, or even more sort of crazy is supposedly he came up with the idea of universal invitation when the end an apple hit it hit him, right, I think that's probably mythology. But let's but let's go let but you know what would have happened if instead of an apple had been an orange. You know, we could have had a totally different science, the theory of universal juice instead, Right, Orange, You're glad it was an apple who invented the first pun. Anyway, somebody's got to get credit for that one. That definitely changed that is the most important for the worst. Yeah. So I'm not an expert in history of technology, and I'm guessing that Moore you are not either, And so for this particular topic, we decided to reach out to somebody we know who is an expert who has thought really deeply about these topics. So this is a good friend of mine. His name is Ryan North. So Ryan, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me great. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure? My name is Ryan North. I m write a web comic called Dinosaur Comics between that for fifteen years, and on top of that, I do nonfiction writing. I write the inm Beautifule Squirrel Girl for Marvel Comics. And my new book is called How To Invent Everything, a survival guide for the stranded time traveler, and it's proceeds in the premise that if you are in the future, you've rented a time machine, you go back in time and your time machine breaks, Here's how you fix things. There's how you rebuild civilization from scratch in any time period in nurse history. So it's sort of a nonfiction book with a fictional candy coding on the outside, which is the time travel part of it. I get to call my my nonfiction time travel book, which I'm very happy about. And was it inspired because you met a stranded time traveler and thought, how am I going to help this person? I have no comment on that you are. Yes, I always thought of you as a man from the future, Ryan, So is that true? Maybe maybe that's your secret. This is your way to disclosing it to the Again, I don't want to confirm anything, some mystery, right, keeping guessing. I was really interested in the book because it reminded me of when I was a kid. I was totally enamored by that game Civilization, which you also played, right, And in Civilization for those of you haven't played, you have to basically reinvent Civilization and you have to do it in order. And for me it was the first education where somebody had taken down a lot of humanities breakthroughs, you know, and said, well, what would you need to reinvent um the combustion engine? What you need this? And for that you need this, and for that you need this, all the way back to numbers and writing and this kind of stuff. So it was really fun to see this sort of detailed breakdown and what made me think about, like, which are the inventions in human history that most catalyzed technological progress, from which most changed the future. So that's what we wanted to sort of focus on in today's podcast episode. Is this sort of broader question, what is the most important invention in human history? And before we talk to you about it, since obviously you've thought deeply about this to write your book, we went and asked um, a bunch of people on the street who hadn't had a chance to think about at all, and ask them what they thought was the most important invention in human history, just from the top of their heads. Here's what they had to say. Fire. Fire. If I call the wheel, I would say that, all right, thanks, light bulb, the wheel, wheel, the wheel. The concept of evolution is that what you're happen to be studying right now. I was surprised how often fire showed up. Yeah, fire, fire was a popular one. Fire in the wheel. Yeah, so that that's surprised to you. How come? Yeah, Um, and I see why they went for fire, But I feel like it it kind of dodges a question a little bit because it's a pretty human invention. Yeah. Wow, so fire predates humanity. Homo erectus was using human was using fire, and they're not us. I mean, they're humans, are homo, but they're not Homo sapiens are not. So wait, we can't we can't claim credit for fire. We can't claim Homo sapiens did not invent fire, and they might have stolen it or reinvented it, but they didn't first invented it was Homo orectus. I think you've just undermined like a core tenant and belief a lot of people have about their own species, and a lot of people went to fires like this is the defining thing about humanity. This was mixes who we are with this is what makes us. Yeah, you just de cute it from the list. That's pretty tough, man. Okay, so we eliminate fire then from the list of important to mentions because we didn't invent it. Yeah, so yes, so people said fire. They also tend to go with for the wheel, right, the wheels are a pretty common one. Was also embarrassing, though the wheel is embarrassing, was that, well, we had the wheel for thousands of thousands of years, but we used it for pottery on this side as a pottery wheel. So it's again like if you want for transportation, it took us thousands of years to flip it over on its side. And that's what we think with think about whe we think about movement transportation, but we use it to make pottery for a really long time. Is that true? Yes? Yes, the wheel for transport comes well after the wheel for pottery. Nobody thought to put did on the side. I want to talk about that some more, but first let's take a quick break. So this is something you come back to a lot in the book. Is that you say, we had everything we needed and if you just knew what to do, you could skip a thousand years or a hundred thousand years, you could accomplish something in an afternoon. Right, And I get that that's like a really fun fantasy to imagine fast forwarding human progress. But I wonder sometimes how true that is. Like, let's take the question of language. Right in your book, you you lay down language is like a pretty critical cornerstone of human technology, and I completely agree. But um, do you think that going back like fifty years to skeletally identical humans, that if you went back that you could teach English, for example, to a group of two year old, um, you know, modern human from fifty years ago, and that they would learn it and develop and and and turn into you know, English speakers. I do. And the reason, UH sort out of that loophole there is that you said two year olds, which is great because, um, it's very hard, maybe impossible for humans to learn a language after puberty. It's also really unethical to test to run experiments on it. But in cases of feral children, people spend their lives trying to teach them to talk, and maybe they learned it a little bit, but they're never communicative that don't really use it. And so if you're traveling back, you know, a hundred thousand years, fifty thousand years, and you want to start rebuilding civilization, I would recommend don't necessarily chat up the cave men the cave women, but maybe talk to their kids. Maybe steal some babies if you're going to do it that way. So you're on going on record for baby stealing right here. Um, I don't want to go on record for fully endorsing baby stealing. But in terms of just pure efficiency of civilization building, directing your efforts towards the cave babies will get you much better results. And there's there's a there's a hug question where care right, because you mentioned how we have these skeletally identical humans like um, anatomically modern humans. So people whose skeletons look like ours, and those show up around two thousand BC, and then behaviorally modern humans show up, humans that that act like us, that behave like us, that decorate their bodies, bury the dead, that sort of thing shop around fifty You know, there's there's this huge gap of what took us along, what what made us finally take that leap from anatomically modern to behaviory modern. And we don't for sure, no, because it's very hard to desk. None these things fossilized are preserved. But one the theories and want to go within the book is it was the mention of language. It was he mentioned of talking to each other, that that let us make that leap, for let us finally become fully human. And so that's the technology. I would say it's the most important one for us, language because it allows us to to have not just to talk to each other, but to like have ideas that can survive the death of the host. That's so importantly. Language is definitely definitely important. But but the supposition there is that somehow we had the capacity for it but didn't invent it for aft years, Right, But is it There are other ways you might imagine it could have gone, right, it could be that most of us didn't have the capacity for it, and then a few brains you know, mutated, evolved whatever in to develop an additional capacity which allowed for the creation of it um and then and then of course it would be a rapid selection effect. So you can imagine that after the capacity for language evolved, it might have been developed and then spread very rapidly. Sure, but that requires a change to the brain that sort of evolved in us. And without needing to suppose that, we can just suppose someone inventive language, and then the question, well, why why did it take us so long? And language is a really hard thing to advent because imagine you're trying to you have to be sort of this uh, it might had a column Caveman Einstein who has to not only come up with the idea of language, the idea of expressing thoughts in words, but instantiate that idea. And it's still completely useless unless you're also smart enough to teach someone else how to use it all within a single lifetime. Like it's it's not easy to be that first person who's coming up with the technology of languages, inventing language. And I think you can point to out and say, yeah, that that might take a long time to have all those things line up as they would need to be for this to have any practical use, right. And I think it touches on this other issue, which is a lot of these foundational inventions. People who are listening might think, what, that's crazy. It's just so obvious, And a lot of these things are so foundational. They've in you know, they're deeply embedded in the way we think that it's impossible to imagine life without them, which is why, frankly, they're so difficult to invent, right, I mean, because they completely transform the way you think and then become deeply ingrained in your thought process. It's hard to imagine how to get there when you don't have it. I've spent years trying to picture thinking without words, Like, how do you what? I'm talking to two cartoonists here, right, you guys are experts at thinking without words, right, But we're we're taking words and put them into pictures. But it's still your The process seems very very language based. But one of examples I love touching on that is the idea of if you have a time machine, you could take one of those children born, take them to the modern world, adopt them, raise them as a modern child, and they'll be like any other human on the planet. They'll they'll be a smart and creative and clever and fun and loving as any other human because they're, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants. They're having fifty years worth of technological process for free. They get to have language, they get to learn how to read and write, they get to be in a community. And it seems almost like you're breaking a rule right to have this you know, literal cave person and have them be in distinguished from modern person just by changing the environment in which they're raised. But that's what that's what these inventions do for us. They change the nature of who and what we are in a way that makes it hard to imagine what it's like without it. And that's the kind of thing that makes me wonder what's in the future, Like if there were in the past these sort of trivial but transformational inventions math, language, etcetera. Are there ones that remain, you know, well, in a hundred thousand years, people look back and think, how come Ryan North didn't think of you know, blah blah blah, some transformational but basic way of living and thinking that exploded our capacity for technology in life. I mean, do you think that there are those sort of transformations left? Yeah? I hope so, I mean I believe. So what the punchline of this is, you know, we could have met all this stuff and we didn't. And look how blind we were not to see that. How can we have been so stupid? But if there are all these inventions and all these points in history we can point out and say, yeah, we didn't see this until later, Um, it stands the reason that there maybe that right now there's probably still some of this I call it the low hanging fruit of civilization that we could invent an arn't and just aren't seeing yet. And I think that's really optimistic. I don't think that makes us feel stupid, that makes us That makes me feel like side it, like, that's what are we missing? That's out there right now? There's still really cool stuff that we can all come up with. So is that your choice, Bryan, for the most important invention in human history? Language? Yeah? I think it's foundational. I think it's consequential. I think it's transformational. And also I'm kind of cheating because it's actually two inventions. I'm rolling reading and writing together into one. They're just calling it language. But how do you define language? You mean, like the the idea of words or just communicating because people I'm sure communicated with grunt or hand signals, right, yeah, but that's not language. Um, So the example I would give is, let's say I draw three pictures. I draw a picture of a cool dog and a picture of a skateboard, and a picture of a thumbs up, and those symbols can be interpreted. You can, Oh, he's saying a cool dog in a skateboard is good. Or maybe I'm saying I saw a cool dog in the skateboard and I gave it a thumbs up because I love cool dogs on skateboards. But there's there's ambiguity there, and what languages is something that works to eliminate ambiguity. So when we're communicating now, because I'm using words with precise meanings, they're not perfect, but they try to be precise so that we can communicate quickly and clear that they're having to go back and clarify all the time. And so yeah, you can communicate with Brench, you can communicate with how you can communicate with long ang glances across the dance floor, but for precision communication you need language. And that's that's what I'm calling the technology. So it's kind of like the idea of somebody at some point they say, hey, guys, this is crazy. We should have rules that define what those glances across the dance floors are. Yeah, yeah, okay. So it's the the invention of rules that everyone would agree to communicate ideas Yes with an asterix. Because when the when of the craziest proofs I read when I was doing computation linguistics was this person was making the argument that one of the neat things about language that is almost unique is that it involves so quickly. You look at the way English was spoken a hundred years ago, it already it sounds age and or at least odd. You go back two or three or four, you go back to Shakespeare four years ago, and it's hard to understand, right, So why is it changed so quickly? Why isn't why it's based on rules, rules what make language work clearly? Why these rules seem to change so often? That seems like a failure. And the argument this paper was making, which I love was that the reason language evolves so quickly is because language is really hard to learn, which is true, but actually it's impossible to learn, and we never actually learned the language our parents are speaking. We learned an approximation of it that allows us to communicate, but we all the edges are fuzzy, and so since we have all these places where we don't actually know what the rule is, that allows language to change so quickly and to evolve generationally so fast, which I love. I love to do that. You know, language not just hard, it's impossible, and you will never learn the language your parents are speaking just can't be done. Well, it's certainly true. The parents just don't understand. So maybe that's the reason. That's right, I forgot your computational linguist, right, that was your education, Yeah, I did. I did a master's in compunition linguistics. So that's a bit suspicious that a computation of linguists thinks language is the greatest invention ever. You know, cartoons are the most important invention ever. It's only a tiny of itself centered. But also it's a bit of a dark view because it suggests that the greatest accomplishment in human history is thousands of years ago and we haven't really done anything since, which matches up. But we're still using it right, Like it's allowed us to do everything else. So that's that's why I say it's so it's so foundational, is that it it is what unlocks everything is you can be the smartest person in the world. Without language, You're trapped in your own head and you're having these amazing world changing thoughts and can't communicate them in a way that's clear you can. You're not gonna communicate, you know, relativity through grunts and glances. You need you need language that I need mathematics for that. So I think it's fascinating what you're saying, because I was going to make exactly the same argument to make a different point. I was going to use the same argument to suggest that math and science are the most important inventions in the industry, but for exactly the same reason. And I feel like you guys are maybe a little biased in your selections here. I feel like until we had mathematics, all we had was language, which is frankly kind of clumsy when you want to communicate very clearly and precisely. And I remember learning math and learning logic and feeling like, finally, here we have effectively a language for very clearly and precisely communicating ideas ideas which are too fuzzy in English to communicate clearly. But is mathematical language just another language? You know what I mean? Like? Is that a sub invention of language? Uh? In the book, I cheat because I'm saying now language is the most important to mention the book. I actually give five I say written language, spoken language, scientific method, calorie surplus, so again having extra food so they can worry about other things, and we're your next meal is coming from. And the last one I call non stucky numbers, which is basically a number sism that permits mathematics to happen in a in a productive way. So one of the reasons the ancient Romans didn't get that far with maths. They have these Roman numerals which are just incredibly clumsy to operate with. You you have to do math. We know what number you're looking at. So I'm not gonna sit here and argue that math isn't important because I have I have on paper, I think it is important. But I will say, um, and this is maybe dodgy, But I, personally, Ryan North, think that mathematics and correct me if I'm wrong, But I feel like mathematics can be a creative expression in the same way that language can, only with more rules. Is that wrong? Is that romanticizing it? Or am I the romantization of mathematics? While um, I'm not sure it's possible to romanticize math. Now I think that's fair. Um, but I would also make a similar argument, you know, for science, like in terms of helping us develop technologies, or helping us understand the world, or communicating clearly with each other what we know and what we don't know. Um. It's always amazing to me that took so long for people to come up with a scientific method, you know, or even to come up with the idea of empiricism, Like you have an idea, let's actually check if it works before we accept it in the canon of ideas, right, Um. You know, one of my favorite examples when I teach introductory physics is the comparison between Aristotilion physics and Galilean physics. You know, like Aristotle thousands of years ago said, oh, things just moved, because it's in the way of things to move, and Galileo was like, let's check, and turns out in an afternoon he disproved all of Aristotle. Right, And there's an example of somebody actually making huge progress in an afternoon based on a single simple idea. But why did it take thousands of years before people realized, Wow, science is actually only useful when you compare it to what's actually happening in the real world. Um, I, you know, once you have that idea, of course, then that you have this enormous flowering of technology and advancement. So it seems to me like, yeah, language is important, math is important, but in some sense science is a really strong contender for the most important because it's we've had it the shortest amount of time, but it's led to perhaps the greatest transformations in you know, the way we live. Well, here's an interesting question. Um so you Ryan think language is the greatest invention ever? Uh? And Danny, you think math and science are the greatest inventors ever? Do you think that we're done? Like, can you foresee a possibility that there's an invention in our future that could maybe overtake these two things to be the greatest invention ever? So one of the reasons my book is structured the way it is, where it has this invention of time machines and then you go back and you're doing time tourism and you get trapped in the past. Is that. I feel like, if you invented time travel, then you're done. That's the last invention that ever needs to be invented, because any problem you encounter, you go to the future, see how they solved it, bring the solution back with you. The second you invent time travel, you've invented all other inventions. It's possible for humans to invent boom, which rooves the time time travel is impossible, or it proves that that could be that would surpass language and science in my est ration, all other inventions on mass beats everything else for sure. But what do you think, Daniel? I think that for that to work, you'd have to invent time travel, which would violate causality, which is what you need in order to be able to steal inventions from the future that haven't been made yet, which is basically just science fiction and so, and we already invented that. So that's what I think about that. What do you What do you think, Daniel, would be What do you think could be something we might invent in the future that could totally revolutionize things even more. That's impossible to comprehend, Like I, you know, if I if I knew that, then I would invent it right. All of these inventions that really the transformational ones that And I love the way Ryan pointed this out in this book, all these inventions, if you just knew what the invention was, then you have invented it, right. It's like having the password right. All you need to know is the password and the doors open. Some of these inventions, like you know, steal, how do you even if you went back and told somebody how to smelt steal. It's not like they could do that that afternoon. They have to build a whole industrial base, etcetera, etcetera. But these really transformational ones, it's just knowing the idea is the invention, so all right. It's not like I have the next human transformational invention already in my head. I just haven't shared it with anybody, and I was waiting for this podcast to reveal it. But if I did, I would totally roll it out right now, let's take a quick break. I also wonder like if you could go back in time and you're you're talking to year old dude and you're like excited to share with them the ideas you have and the technology that you can use to transform is in her world. I wonder if they might think, you know what, we're good, like, uh, you know, I got I got my roving mammals, I can eat. You know that, hunter, I gather, I you know, carve sticks. Every once in a while, we bang rock together around the campfire. Life's not bad, you know. Yeah, that's the That's the thing that we kind of forget is that in times of plenty, the hunting and gathering lifestyle is a fabulous lifestyle. It's like you're lazing around. It doesn't take all day to hunt and gather. You have lots of free time, just chill out, do whatever you want. Foods plenty. Who would give that up? Farming sucks. Farming is fluck crack, break back, breaking labor in a field. Like it's it's a lot of work, but what it gets you is reliable foods that when the times of plenty run out pretending gathering, you don't starve and suffer catastrophic population collapse because you have resources. You're in one place, you can build infrastructure. You can start building buildings that you don't have to pick up and carry with you like it's it's where civilization begins when you when you stop moving around. Every time things get hub, it gets hard. So yeah, I can I can see. Uh, if you arrive at a time where it's very easy to find food, is gonna be hard to humance people to join the farm and work for you or work with you. But one of the arguments for that that I found was, um, someone was pointing out that it's very hard to produce alcohol in a hunting and gathering lifestyle all the time, and so if you want to have a beer, you need a civilization for that, and that might be one of the things that induces people to come and help out on a farm. Yeah. My my other fear for time traveling Ryan is that you go back in time with all these crazy ideas, you're just gonna get brands into which and killed. Like you know, this is sort of a social barrier to convincing people to join your let's transform humanity movement. But you're you're right, maybe beer is the answer to that problem. All right, I only only have one more question for you, which is sort of a multiverse question. To me, the history of human invention seems sort of chaotic, you know, with somebody had this idea, somebody had that idea, sort of came together here and there. Have you thought about sort of the thousand parallel universes where you run the human experiment, and how many of them do you think we would end up after this out of time at roughly the same place? Like do we always end up stumbling into the same things in roughly the same order? Or are there these moments when human technology could have shifted dramatically and gone down a different path and become, you know, done things more rapidly. Do you think those thousand different parallel universes have similarities? Are all totally different? I think that's similarity. I think they're they're markedly different. Like when you have these huge expanse of time which we could have met something and didn't, all you need is that one person to invent it. You remove Isaac Newton from our history and we have a very different history of thoughts of mathematics, right perhaps, but you know, maybe Leibnitz would have invented everything. Isaac Newton didn't think of right, there could have just been like it could have been an idea of the time that somebody was going to invent because the pieces were there. And that does show up. We look at the invention of radio, and there are a bunch of people independently coming with radio at about the same time because the pieces were in place. There are certainly moments where sort of things are in the air and everyone's moving towards this one invention, and radio's example of that, but all these other examples where it didn't have to be that way. Um, the stat Dou's go, it was a fun one. That's that's The first stethoscope was just a rolled up tube of paper to listen, to isolate and listen to a sound, and we had paper since it was invented in eighteen sixteen CE by male heterosexual doctor who had a busty female patient and didn't want to press his ear to her chest. That was too erotic and experience for him, so he rolled up a top of paper to leave some room for Jesus and listened through that and accidentally discovered that this isolates and clarifies the sound. So that's when a few examples I can find where someone actually progressed science by being too horny to do with their job properly. And that guy could have shown up at any point in history, right, Like that's and also proves that that boobs are useful for something. All right, Ryan, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much, Ryan for entertaining all of our amateurish thoughts on a topic in which you are an expert. Thank you. I think they're great questions. I love talking about this stuff. I wrote a book about I love talking about it so much. It's called How to Invent Everything, a survival Guide for the Stranded time Traveler, and you can get it at how to Invent Everything dot com. Well, I think that Ryan, who has a history of studying language, thinks that language is the most important thing invented human history, and me, as a scientist, I think math and science is the most important thing invented in human history. Yeah, I found that a little suspicious, Like you guys said all these great reasons why your team should win. That's right. And you know there's a trend there, because when I was asking people on the street what they thought the greatest invision in human history, was. Most of them talked about what they happened to have been reading. You know, so students studying evolution said evolution. A student studying the atomic theory said atomic theory. Uh, student on a scooter said the wheel. I think it's it's just it's a hard question to answer because it's so broad, and so people freeze up a little bit and then they think about it from their perspective, and there's a lesson there, and you know that we all see the world from our own perspective. Well, you know, it sort of happened to me too when I was asked this question. When I had to think about it, I just kind of looked around me, you know, like I didn't think internally through the history of human civilization. I just kind of looked around me, and I thought, what would be You thought banana? I could not live without bananas. Yeah, it's what makes everything else possible. To come on, It's what God monkeys out of the trees, anything up into the trees exactly. But yeah, you sort of have that instinct to look around you and to try to gauge impact that way, like what all around me would not be here without if it hadn't been invented, That's right, And I think the lessons there is that we can all see only a tiny bit of the fabric of human history, right, and so it's very difficult to say anything in general, because human history is this incredible mosaic of billions of people's experiences, and all we can do is speak for ourselves. I mean, I know historians try their best to weave these broader stories about what has happened in humanity, but I always feel like so much of actual human experience it just brushed under the rug when they try to do that, And so I think none of us can really speak for all of humanity, can only speak for ourselves. What is the most important invention that is affecting your life? I think that's really the question of the podcast, or you know, maybe points to the idea that the more you know about something, the more fascinating it becomes, you know what I mean. Like Ryan has studied linguistics for a long time and so he just knows so much about it and how it's connected to everything. So from his point of view, it's like the most important thing. It's it's the hub of all things. And like you've studied science, and physics for a long time, and so you've seen how it's kind of sort of connected to everything else, and how it's nothing would be possible without it, and so you see it as the most fascinating, most important thing. And so maybe it's just all sort of connected to itself. And it's just that the more you know about something, the more you think it's crucial to the structure of human history. So why didn't you argue for comics to be the most important? Do you spend twenty years studying it? Right? I totally agree that things as you study them, anything can become interesting. You can find a puzzle anywhere, right, Like you can go into deep I have about like a cup, you know, like if humans hadn't invent at the cup, what would happen? There'd be a lot more injuries in baseball. Wait, now you're talking about a different Sorry, but you don't do you know what I mean? Like you're going to deep diving on anything and see how it's all connected to the greatest moments in history and civilization. Right, Like without a cup or any kind of vessel to hold water, maybe we wouldn't you know, being able to you know, leave the water and hole and start building villagers and things like that. All right, so maybe we should leave that as a challenge to our listeners. Choose some trivial item in human life and challenge us to spend an entire podcast drilling down and discovering what's fascinating about tonail clippers or glad wrap or whatever it is in your life. Send it to us at feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com or rights as at jog strap at Daniel Cornall hot coom. And thank everyone for listening to this episode of Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. If you enjoyed it, tune in next time or check out our book called We Have No Idea, An illustrated guide to the Unknown Universe. See you next time. Thanks for listening. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge That's one word, or email us at feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.