January 15, 2019 • 35 mins
We discuss the most fundamentally important inventions in human history. Featuring Ryan North.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
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,
(00:29):
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
(00:51):
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?
(01:15):
Maybe I'm using it right now. Please this podcast out
of the studio and into the toilet. Him and I'm Daniel,
(01:41):
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
(02:02):
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
(02:23):
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
(02:46):
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
(03:07):
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
(03:29):
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
(03:51):
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
(04:11):
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,
(04:31):
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
(04:52):
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.
(05:14):
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.
(05:37):
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.
(05:59):
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
(06:21):
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.
(06:42):
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.
(07:07):
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,
(07:27):
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
(07:48):
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,
(08:09):
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
(08:29):
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.
(08:51):
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
(09:13):
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,
(09:34):
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
(09:57):
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
(10:18):
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
(10:38):
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
(11:00):
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
(11:21):
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
(11:42):
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
(12:04):
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
(12:25):
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
(12:46):
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
(13:08):
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
(13:29):
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
(13:50):
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
(14:13):
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
(14:34):
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
(14:55):
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
(15:16):
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,
(15:39):
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
(16:03):
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
(16:27):
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
(16:49):
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
(17:10):
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
(17:31):
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
(17:51):
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
(18:11):
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
(18:35):
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
(18:56):
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,
(19:17):
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
(19:40):
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
(20:01):
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
(20:23):
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
(20:44):
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
(21:06):
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
(21:27):
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
(21:49):
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
(22:10):
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
(22:33):
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.
(22:54):
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.
(23:17):
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,
(23:39):
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
(24:01):
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?
(24:23):
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.
(24:45):
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
(25:06):
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
(25:28):
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
(25:48):
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.
(26:11):
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
(26:36):
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,
(26:58):
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.
(27:19):
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
(27:40):
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,
(28:03):
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
(28:25):
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
(28:47):
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
(29:10):
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,
(29:33):
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,
(29:54):
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
(30:17):
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
(30:39):
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
(31:00):
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
(31:20):
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.
(31:41):
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.
(32:04):
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
(32:24):
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
(32:44):
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,
(33:06):
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
(33:29):
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?
(33:52):
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
(34:13):
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
(34:34):
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
(34:54):
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
(35:23):
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.
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,
(00:29):
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
(00:51):
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?
(01:15):
Maybe I'm using it right now. Please this podcast out
of the studio and into the toilet. Him and I'm Daniel,
(01:41):
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
(02:02):
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
(02:23):
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
(02:46):
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
(03:07):
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
(03:29):
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
(03:51):
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
(04:11):
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,
(04:31):
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
(04:52):
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.
(05:14):
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.
(05:37):
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.
(05:59):
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
(06:21):
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.
(06:42):
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.
(07:07):
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,
(07:27):
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
(07:48):
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,
(08:09):
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
(08:29):
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.
(08:51):
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
(09:13):
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,
(09:34):
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
(09:57):
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
(10:18):
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
(10:38):
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
(11:00):
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
(11:21):
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
(11:42):
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
(12:04):
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
(12:25):
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
(12:46):
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
(13:08):
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
(13:29):
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
(13:50):
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
(14:13):
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
(14:34):
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
(14:55):
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
(15:16):
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,
(15:39):
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
(16:03):
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
(16:27):
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
(16:49):
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
(17:10):
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
(17:31):
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
(17:51):
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
(18:11):
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
(18:35):
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
(18:56):
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,
(19:17):
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
(19:40):
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
(20:01):
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
(20:23):
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
(20:44):
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
(21:06):
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
(21:27):
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
(21:49):
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
(22:10):
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
(22:33):
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.
(22:54):
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.
(23:17):
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,
(23:39):
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
(24:01):
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?
(24:23):
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.
(24:45):
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
(25:06):
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
(25:28):
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
(25:48):
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.
(26:11):
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
(26:36):
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,
(26:58):
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.
(27:19):
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
(27:40):
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,
(28:03):
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
(28:25):
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
(28:47):
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
(29:10):
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,
(29:33):
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,
(29:54):
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
(30:17):
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
(30:39):
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
(31:00):
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
(31:20):
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.
(31:41):
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.
(32:04):
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
(32:24):
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
(32:44):
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,
(33:06):
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
(33:29):
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?
(33:52):
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
(34:13):
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
(34:34):
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
(34:54):
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
(35:23):
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.
Hosts And Creators
Daniel Whiteson
Kelly Weinersmith
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.