The British Council have a document that sets out the 80 moments that shaped our world and generally i would go along with most of them, their top moments of the creation of the World Wide Web and penicillin have had a profound effect on how we live today but i can't help feel that they have missed a few breakthrough moments which have led us to where we are today.
I would turn towards other events, in chronological order, that have had seismic effects which have led us to where we are today.
With 84% of the world population having faith in one Religion or another, it has shaped nations over thousands of years while being responsible for more deaths than any other cause in that time. It still dominates some laws and has been used, and is still used, by the different faiths to oppress, invade and murder 'others' to this day.
The Printing Press bought books and newspapers to the people, leading them to educate and learn to read for themselves.
It is hard to consider a book that had wider implications than Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. The 20th Century saw Communism and it's smaller brother Socialism sweep around half the World and then retract back again. It led to the Cold War and competition between two competing ideologies which saw two other massive leaps for mankind, one great and one not so much.
Television not only changed home entertainment but the ways family interact and made the World smaller, showing viewers at home parts of the World they had only heard about. It also had the effect of showing the sometimes catastrophic things going on around the earth, both natural and man-made, making a bigger impact than reading about it in the press.
WW1 and WW2 which broke up the order of nations, led to the death of tens of millions and the Holocaust which in turn led to the birth of Israel and the consequences of that decision on the Middle East today and the rest of the World.
The invention of the atomic bomb and the explosion of atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which saw the devastating potential of these new weapons and led to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) which kept in check the Cold War and dominated the World for half a century.
The invention of the female contraceptive pill in the mid 50's which enabled women and men to control their reproductive health and put contraception in the hands of the woman and changing the dynamic of the family.
The second offspring from the competing ideology is the Space Race which saw man take huge strides and led to the satellite technology we make such use of today for our entertainment, communications, mobile phones and navigation as well as dragging us towards expanding out into Space and other Worlds as well as learning the origins of our own Planet.
The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Centre set off a chain of events which led to the emergence of terrorism as a major international phenomenon and awful wars and conflicts which has killed hundreds of thousands and reverberated around the world and still continues today.
Once the global awareness of the importance of the environmental damage we were causing was met with a shrug but now 'green' initiatives abound with the rise of renewable resources and a new World urgency that we have to do something as sea levels rise and the madness of the destruction of our planet becomes obvious.
2 comments:
Of your list I would agree with 3, 6 & 7 as being major drivers of moments that have led us to where the world is today.
The cure for AIDS is important but it hasn't effected our daily lives as nor has Obama being elected.
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