these inventions changed the world..

The latrine, the porcelain throne, the Oval Office toilets... do I really need to say anything here? Before toilets, we would literally use buckets or just went into the forest or peed on a tree or something. We didn't really have any efficient way of getting rid of our waste. We would take all of this filth and go dump it into the closest river and then later that same day, go get water to drink from that same river or even try and bathe in it.

Luckily, it only took tens of millions of people dying from dysentery until we realized, "Hey, maybe we're doing something wrong." On top of toilets themselves and toilet paper, that's also really important. A sewer system and subsequently water treatment plants have become some of the most important things in almost every major city on the planet.

There are some things in life that we just don't notice, but in reality, they have shaped and molded the foundation of the very society we live in today. Without them, your life would probably fall apart. So here are some inventions that change the world. Being able to refrigerate food is something that is heavily slept on. Without this, feeding a population of almost 8 billion people would be nearly impossible.

Food was boiled much faster and would in turn make it cost much more. Your bills at restaurants would no longer be fifty to sixty dollars but upwards of 1,000 or even more. This would also mean fewer people will be able to afford good and nutritious food. Diets would change, and your food sources would be much more limited. Life expectancy would drop, and your time on this planet would slowly run out.

We're really, really lucky that everyone on the planet uses the same units of time though, like seconds, hours, days, and so on. Imagine if we all had different definitions for what these were and how utterly impossible it would be to keep track of anything. "I have an appointment at 2:30 today." "Oh, which 2:30?"

Speaking of appointments, I had an eye doctor appointment a couple of days ago and it made me realize that I would be completely screwed if eyeglasses weren't a thing. Now, my vision isn't the worst, which I'm grateful for. Well, you never truly understand how bad your vision is until you realize reading something from ten feet away is harder than understanding quantum mechanics.

Even just a thousand years ago, if you had bad eyesight, you didn't really have any options to fix it. Glasses gave people with terrible vision a get-out-of-jail-free card of sorts. It gave them an extension to continue doing things: to continue creating and building the things that we use today, to continue learning about us and the universe we live in. Imagine if Einstein couldn't get glasses and just gave up on everything he did— that would suck.

So thank you glasses, you've saved us many times. If this were still survival of the fittest, a lot of us would have been wiped out a long time ago. Thermostats and temperature control, in general, are just unbelievable. We can just set the temperature of a car or a house or an entire skyscraper to a specific degree on command.

We use cars, buses, and trains on the daily, but it's become just a routine part of our life. Monitored transportation, in general, was actually super overlooked. Traveling is much faster than it has ever been, but we genuinely take it for granted. Sure, being in a cramped airplane seat for five hours to travel across the country sucks, but it’s a lot better than riding on a horse for a week or getting sick from just being in the back of a carriage.

And this is just talking about airplanes— cars are just as crazy. Despite there being tons of terrible drivers, almost any competent person can get into a car, which is just a few thousand pounds of metal, press two or three pedals, and move at nearly 100 miles per hour. In the best scenario, you can drive thousands of miles without getting into a crash or hurting yourself or someone else in the process.

Compare this to traveling across the country hundreds of years ago, where many times you wouldn't even survive the journey. Cars are one of the most useful things ever created and it's yet so simple. With self-driving cars becoming more and more capable, eventually, in however many years, driving will be just as safe as airplane flights.

This sounds kind of weird. The odds of you dying in a car crash is about 1 in 100, but the odds of you dying in an airplane crash is 1 in five million. Driver error and the pure volume of cars and risks while driving is enough to shoot up your odds of dying, but fully autonomous self-driving cars will take out this large risk factor.

Both old and young people who aren't capable of driving will be able to be mobile. It will revolutionize travel. The wait for ubers and taxis will be eliminated, and this time they'll be fully autonomous. Cars can be designed differently to accommodate for sleeping or to be more social. Sure, you can take a short plane ride a couple of hours, or you could have an overnight car ride for cheaper, but this is all speculation. Maybe I'll talk about this some other time.

At any moment in time, you can know exactly where you are on the planet within a single meter. Shout out to Google Maps! One day, some Google employee just said, "What if we drove a van down every street on the entire planet?" And then they actually did it. But also, you can get directions from your current location to anywhere on the planet.

On top of that, you can also get the traffic conditions, detours, and other information that might prove to be useful along the way. But also, it knows where you're going, which direction you're headed, and can give you pictures of the exact location you're heading to. On top of all that, you can also get local restaurants, stores, parks, gas stations, and much more while you're driving.

And even after all of that, there's one thing that makes it amazing— it's completely free! If you have a phone, you have a map that can lead you to almost any specific spot on the entire earth and show you exactly what it will look like when you get there. We take it for granted every day.

Transistors— they're everywhere and outnumber humans by far. For perspective, there's about 200 billion stars in our galaxy. There are about 100 trillion cells in our body and there's over 1 quadrillion ants in the world. But transistors outnumber all three of these combined. There have been nearly 3 sextillion transistors made since they were invented.

Transistors are basically switches— on as one, off as zero. Electronics have currents. Picture them as cars on the street. Transistors operate as a stoplight. When the light is green, or the transistor is on, the cars can pass through the intersection, no problem. When the light is red, or the transistor is off, they cannot.

Now, scale this up to billions of transistors in a single device, and you can perform complex tasks like a smartphone camera. These things allow USB drives to have more storage than the computers that took us to the moon, and they could fit in your pocket. That kind of speaks for itself. Transistors are getting smaller and smaller year after year. As of right now, the smallest transistors come in at around 5 nanometers, or about 10 atoms wide. You would not have modern electronics without these.

Cameras are built to preserve snapshots of time. It's a copy of something that happened in the real world. We can look at anything and decide to preserve it and keep it for the rest of eternity. Imagine all the memories, all the special moments that were lost to history before cameras were invented.

It only takes a few seconds to take out your phone, open the camera app, and snap a picture. You could do it in a single breath. But on the other hand, the first photograph ever taken took 8 hours. The speed at which we can save these single moments is unreal. We can take pictures of some of the largest things in the universe that are trillions of miles away, and at the same time, we can take pictures of the smallest things known to man.

Cars, video games, cameras— you buy all of this modern technology with money. And money itself is a simple invention that changed everything. Before, we used to trade things. "You want a loaf of bread? I have a chicken to trade you!" The chicken could stay alive for however long you could keep it, but that loaf of bread will start to mold within a week or so. We needed a way to place value on something without one end getting an unfair trade.

Something that holds value that isn't cigarettes or bars of gold. Money fortunately doesn't depreciate in value most of the time. It's something we use every day and now it actually runs our lives. Without it, you will probably die. Oops! Alphabets have single-handedly shaped modern civilization. Without them, languages wouldn't and couldn't exist. It allowed us to evolve from grunting at each other and pointing our fingers to actually being able to create cohesive sentences and convey our ideas.

It allows us to time travel in a way— write down your ideas, make a book, mass-produce it, and if it's good enough, people in a hundred years will still be reading it using the same language you're using today. It might be a little bit different, though. These letters hold all the information and knowledge that we've accumulated over thousands of years. Just learn how each of these letters sound and what words they form when combined, and you can learn almost anything.

All of this information needs to be stored somewhere. Search engines are blessings in disguise. There’s so much information on the internet, and you couldn't even view all of it even if you wanted to. It's amazing how quickly you can Google something and have it search through billions and billions of results, finding you exactly what you want most of the time.

Math is the language of the universe. It's not always used to talk to one another but rather explain everything around us. Math didn't just come out of thin air— we discovered and crafted equations and formulas to explain everything we know. But even more interesting is that math is forever incomplete. It's been proven that there is no way to prove every possible statement about math, so there will always be more to learn forever.

But with math comes another question: Is math an invention or a discovery? Numbers and variables are just human constructs used to give order to the world. All of math that we figured out was always there; we just needed someone to discover it. We needed a way to put these universal truths into the language that we build.

Picture it like this: If humans had named a tree "tree," it would still exist; it just wouldn't be called a tree. Electricity always existed; we just didn't understand it. But now, with lightbulbs, batteries, and everything else we do— fun fact! Telescopes are basically just tubes of mirrors. Make one big enough, and you can see galaxies tens of billions of light years away, effectively looking back in time at a younger universe.

But in order for these things to be made, you need glass. Literally just heat up sand to a high enough temperature, and you can make glass. Without glass, there's no telescopes, no chemistry, no medicine, no airplanes, no buildings— none of that. The world would be a lot more difficult to navigate or even to just live in.

The global mailing service is one of the most impressive feats of the past 100 years. Before 1900, mail could take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to get delivered. But today, you can ship almost anything from anywhere on the planet across the world in a single day.

The fact that you can send a single piece of paper from, let's say, a house in the middle of Kansas in the United States to a random town in Russia, and despite the distance, despite the fact that your single piece of paper will pass through tens or even hundreds of people and travel thousands of miles, it will arrive. Life can suck, trust me— I get it.

But so many inventions that change the way the world works came within the last 200 years or so. You could have been born in the 1400s and had to deal with the plague, but you weren't. Your life now has airplanes, toothbrushes, and never-ending amounts of water whenever you want it. Most things in this video were invented within the last couple hundred years. There’s so much more that's going to be invented and discovered even within the next couple of decades.

So thanks, everyone, for figuring stuff out. I owe you.

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