iPhone. No question. Although I suppose that is a product rather than a technology. If it were a technology, I guess it would be electricity.
StreetlightSeptember 03, 2017 at 10:31#1020470 likes
Imma say tie between crop rotation and sanitation systems, with penicillin just after. Although the fridge and the printing press are also my favourites, for hopefully obvious reasons.
VagabondSpectreSeptember 03, 2017 at 10:58#1020500 likes
The steam and the combustion powered engine. They do all the work.
unenlightenedSeptember 03, 2017 at 12:02#1020530 likes
Fire. Makes the indigestible digestible, the uninhabitable, habitable, and keeps the predator from predating.
TheMadFoolSeptember 03, 2017 at 12:03#1020540 likes
Haber process (nitrogen fixation) behind the combustion engine.
[quote=Steven K. Ritter]about half of the nitrogen atoms in the body of an average person living in a developed country once passed through a chemical plant and participated in the nitrogen-to-ammonia Haber-Bosch reaction. Perhaps no other human invention has had a more dramatic impact on Earth than Haber-Bosch chemistry.[/quote]
I would dispute that mathematics constitute a technology. 'Technology' is derived from the Greek 'techne' which has a connotation of 'craft' or 'artisanship' i.e. something manufactured or made. I would argue that mathematics enables technology but in its own right doesn't fall under the heading of technology.
TheMadFoolSeptember 03, 2017 at 21:17#1021340 likes
Electricity, Crop Rotation, Sanitation Systems, Penicillin, Printing Press, Mathematics, Haber Process, Fire, Steam and the Internal Combustion Engine are all life changing technologies.
The printing press was a critical invention, no doubt. So was the steam engine and electricity. The Haber Process might be a sleeper, along with sanitation. These two probably have lengthened life for more people than modern medicine has.
Bazalgette's London sewer system (1866) was tremendously transformative, but so was the Victorian urban dweller's tolerance of their own feces. The Romans, however, beat Bazalgette by about 2000 years. The Romans valued sanitation, but we probably wouldn't find the Roman baths all that inviting -- the bath water was pretty dirty.
The iPhone isn't that big an innovation. Apple combined phone, radio, and electrical technology--all a century old--with computer technology.
Photography was pretty important --1839-- without it, scratch cameras, movies, Kodak, great and fine art photography, snapshots, porn, and National Geographic.
The first high-speed communication invention was the telegraph (and Morse Code)--that was in 1834. 25 years later, President Lincoln was hanging around the War Department's telegraph room to get the latest (and unfiltered) reports.
Gunpowder transformed a lot of lives, many of them right out of existence. Still works wonders.
The sail, was around 5500 years ago. Boats? That was big, wasn't it? (5500 years ago was the age of a tablet found in Kuwait depicting a two-sail ship.)
apokrisisSeptember 04, 2017 at 00:16#1021800 likes
The answers show that "one technology" is an ambiguous idea.
All technology traces itself back to the one critical formal thought of "a machine". That is nature constrained in a particular mechanical fashion so that it does useful work. An engine is a machine to give useful shape to an explosion. A city's sewerage system is a machine that gives useful shape to another kind of "explosion". :)
To then single out just one most important machine in all history requires some defendable framework of judgement. What are we actually awarding points for? The OP asks us to target "quality of life".
Most would say health - broadly construed - is our number one priority when it comes to quality of life. It could be power, or self-actualisation, or growth. But health is still arguably tops.
That then narrows the field to the usual replies like public sanitation as the "machine thinking" that has had the most general impact.
Fire maybe did have an even greater impact on general health, but was not itself a conscious product of technical thought in the same way as the theory-led design of sewers as a solution in squalid big cities.
And the advances of the agricultural revolution seem only semi-technological. In some ways, crop rotation, hoes, paddy fields, are the imposition of mechanical thinking on the landscape. But as technology, it is more heuristic, less mathematically imagined. In a ranking, early agricultural technology would lose marks on that particular score.
And also it might be questioned how much it improved individual health or quality of life. Turning to farming wore out paleolithic bodies rather faster. It also led to crowded settlements and stratified societies.
The computer is clearly another impactful machine with also questionable outcomes in terms of the generalised quality of life.
Municipal utilities perhaps are the only unadulterated good here - unless you are a wee fish that has to live downstream of the local sewage and stormwater outfalls.
Reply to darthbarracuda Ya, I'm not sure either. Birth rates in poorer countries are better than they were, but they're still too high. China's growth rate is 0.43% while India's is 1.19% - 2016. In parts of the Middle East it's much higher (they're breeding so fast just to terrorize us).
The computer is clearly another impactful machine with also questionable outcomes in terms of the generalised quality of life.
Computers certainly alter the quality of life, not necessarily in a positive way. But what do we count as "a computer"? Are we counting Hollerith's punch card sorters which go back to the late 1800s? They certainly represented a great advance in data processing. The Enigma machine which was first used for commercial communication encryption goes back to the 1930s, and Turing's machine to decode it were mechanical computers of sorts. ENIAC?
The combination of scientific discovery and its application through invention of new devices doesn't seem to go back all that far. When did this begin -- after the Renaissance? or later, in the 1600s on into the 1700s? This seems to be the era when technology really started to take hold. (Maybe invention preceded scientific discovery in some ways. I suspect that the steam engine stimulated studies of materials and pressure--sort of like rocket science got going after a few rockets went up in the air.
apokrisisSeptember 04, 2017 at 01:10#1021890 likes
A von Neumann machine or programmable computer. That is what made Turing computation practical.
But then that throws the spotlight on to transistors and the technology to implement a digital logical circuit. And then in turn, it was the photographic approach to printing chips that paved the way for miniaturisation.
So it becomes like asking which was more important, the invention of electricity or the invention of the switch?
Remember that at the dawn of computing - in the 1940s - analog was bigger than digital. There were also plenty of non-Turing notions of computation. And many thought those were the future. But programmable switches that could encode information digitally were an idea that could be cost-effectively shrunk towards the limits of physics. And the software could be written out in ways that could also be mass produced without limit.
So "true computation" was about this double thing of separate programs and separate logic circuits. Which Turing imagined and von Neumann turned into a practical design with a few clever tricks to fool programs into thinking they had an infinite memory and an infinite time to do their stuff.
The combination of scientific discovery and its application through invention of new devices doesn't seem to go back all that far. When did this begin -- after the Renaissance?
It was happening tacitly. And then Newton made the strong connection between maths-strength theories and the inventions that could ensue. Newton saw the Universe as a machine, wrote that down in terms of equations. Then invention became engineering and not just craft or trial and error learning.
Actually I think we ought to mention TCP/IP. Without that, no internet. It was designed in the 1960's and 70's to provide a bomb-proof means of distributed communication, and is a work of utmost genius, mainly due to Vicent Cerf and Bob Cahn. One of my first tech writing assignments involved putting together a narrative history of computer networking, which is what lead me to appreciate the enormous genius of TCP/IP. (Yes, it has many huge security holes in it, due to it not being designed originally for internet commerce and social media, but even so...)
StreetlightSeptember 04, 2017 at 03:03#1022030 likes
hand washing and antiseptics
trained midwives
pre-natal care
antibiotics
C-sections can help, but only in surgical setting, and not just for the convenience of the doctor.
better diet (healthier mothers)
breast feeding
better sanitation (fewer infant GI infections)
electrolyte drink (salt, a little sugar, clean water) for infant diarrhea
Stuff like that
WISDOMfromPO-MOSeptember 04, 2017 at 03:53#1022160 likes
It's a whole series of things, not one thing. Among them...
hand washing and antiseptics
trained midwives
pre-natal care
antibiotics
C-sections can help, but only in surgical setting, and not just for the convenience of the doctor.
better diet (healthier mothers)
better sanitation (fewer infant GI infections)
electrolyte drink (salt, a little sugar, clean water) for infant diarrhea
Stuff like that
I would say that those and anything else that has reduced or eliminated maternal mortality and infant mortality has changed the lives of humans more than anything else.
I don't have exact numbers, but it is my understanding that before all of that men lived longer than women (that has flipped) and most newborn children--even if we control for infanticide--did not live past a very young age.
Reply to WISDOMfromPO-MO Life expectancy was so short in centuries past because so many children died in the first few years of life. That drove the average down. Many women died in their late teens, early 20s--the beginning of their childbearing years. Any problem delivery (lots of them are) had a good chance of resulting in death of the mother and/or the baby.
Everybody died of infections at a high rate: Small pox, TB, polio, syphilis, staph and strep infections, rabies, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, pneumonia, influenza, and so on. Then there was cancer and other kinds of tumors, and finally, accidents.
Better prenatal care in Europe and North America improved maternal and child survival. Then (1860- 1875) Pasteur, Lister, and Koch clearly revealed the role of bacteria in infection and discovered ways (antisepsis) to reduce it.
Up until the 20th century, infection was the leading cause of death. Vaccinations greatly reduced death from viral diseases, like small pox, rabies, diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough, antiseptics helped, and finally antibiotics came along.
Men who were not laborers did tend to live longer than their wives. Laborers, on the other hand, had proportionately high rates of death from accident and the aftermath (like infections, blood clots, excessive bleeding, etc.) of accidents. Better safety procedures and mechanization did a lot to reduce accidents.
szardosszemagadSeptember 05, 2017 at 07:02#1025690 likes
Anything that causes death: flame throwers, bullets, guns, arrows and bows, nuclear devices, electric chair. I say this because the biggest change you can experience in life is becoming dead.
You are either dead or you are alive and you can only experience life. To be honest even saying, "you are dead" is an odd phrase that does not reflect reality because there is no more "you". "You" can never actually be dead, your life just ends and you cease to exist.
What is the most life changing technology to effect the quality of human life so far?
Computers. They changed pretty much every single other field when they came on. That includes medicine, cars, shoemaking, mathematics, military - anything you could think of. Apart from possibly philosophy LOL :P
The internet IS computers. The computer is a tremendous facilitator. Without content it has nothing to facilitate.
Back in the 1970s, people working in educational technology were groping towards something like the Internet. We pictured remotely accessible libraries, for instance. Or computer assisted instruction. Mainframe computers were available to us through VERY SLOW telephone connections. Computing students were also using teletype terminals and punch tape. Data flowed like an IV drip.
At the time I imagined a system which was a behemoth electro-mechanical monstrosity to do something of the miniaturized sort we now take as a birthright. (It was sort of modeled after the 1909 novella by E. M. Forester, The Machine Stops.) Forester was actually very prescient. The residents of his future society lived underground in 6-sided cells surrounded by mechanical servants. The Machine featured a world-wide communication system through which one could listen to music and lectures, or as he put it, "share ideas". The Machine was voice-operated. An automated subway system connected each cell. It's really a very good story.
The means were not yet available. The connecting infrastructure hadn't been built. I first signed on to AOL in 1990. I down-loaded some HyperCard stacks (a Macintosh application) and it took all night, just about. In the morning there they were -- text and some B&W illustrations. Not great, but a first step.
Ten years later content and speed was much better, but still not great, unless one spent some money on higher speed transmission. Animated full color banner ads slowed transmission of the desired content.
Transmission cables, faster desk and lap tops, and server farms made the Internet's library/audio-visual phantasmagoria into reality.
Reply to Bitter Crank
You are right, it all very much exploded fully into force from 2000-present. Today, computers and computing technology are pretty much everywhere.
Reply to Agustino There are a lot of small inventions we use all the time; they may not be live saving or life changing, exactly. Safety pins; staplers; photocopiers; vacuum cleaners; plastics; pressure cookers; automatic water heaters; Velcro; Zippers; rivets; etc. Some inventions are very over rated. Teflon pans, for instance. Not a great invention. A properly seasoned cast iron pan is better than Teflon. Conduction stove tops -- not great. The self-cleaning oven -- dubious. (Better, maybe, was the continuous cleaning oven coating that was popular in the 80s. I used one for 15 years; somehow the rough gray coating shed carbonized spatters (the bottom wasn't similarly coated, unfortunately.) The pneumatic milking machine was a life saver for farmers. Conveyor belts are quite important. Look how many difficult and unpleasant problems have been quickly eliminated by a 'plumber's devil'. Mechanical barn cleaners and manure spreaders are a good thing.
You are either dead or you are alive and you can only experience life. To be honest even saying, "you are dead" is an odd phrase that does not reflect reality because there is no more "you". "You" can never actually be dead, your life just ends and you cease to exist.
this does no take away from the original claim, that the biggest change in life is from living to dead.
If you define the state of death as nothingness of the conscious, or the ceasing of the conscious, the poster's claim still applies.
Reply to szemi
No, it does't, and death is not a "change in life". Life is not changing, life ends.
I know that is colloquial semantics, but it implies death is life transformed. Even the word death, itself is problematic, and it is a way for those still alive to cope with the absence of those that are gone.
I am sorry, but "death" is nothing but a semantics function used to anthropomorphize our memories of those alive once, and our own complete and final end. "Alive once" is even a disjointed concept, since there is no "once", there is no past, there is no future, there is only now and things either exist now or they don't exist at all. These are words we use to reference our own perceptional framework, which as we all know, does not always reflect reality.
I recognize the usage of these terms as functions to facilitate subjective reasoning and colloquial conversation, but as a reflection of the objective reality they dissolve and fall to pieces. Perhaps the hardest part of "death" is dealing with the fact that the remembered loved one, simply does not exist, there is just a void, just an absences where you can recall them existing. That perceptions persist because your memories do exist in the now, but those are not the same thing. And rather then deal with the reality that said loved one exist nowhere in time or space, we comfort ourselves with deceptive language (even those who "do not believe in the after life").
The most challenging part of dealing with "death" is facing the fact the person you remember simply does not exist. Their life line ended and "death" is really you, your memories and your pain.
Jeremiah, you said that death is not a life change. I accept your reasoning, but there is a chance you may have misworded the question. If you say "what is the biggest change in life after which life still continues", the unanimously you have the right to reject my answer. However, as you worded the question originally, there is ambiguity as to what one can consider a life change.
So to be fair, I wish you worded your original question less ambiguously and more precisely. They way you worded it, you needed a long paragaraph to explain why my answer was wrong. If you worded it less ambiguosly, as per my example, I wouldn't have put my reply.
In other words, I accept your explanation, but I charge that the explanation was necessary to clarify the ambiguity. If it were not so, you wouldn't have needed to clarify with the latter explanation.
Reply to T Clark If we are going back as far as agriculture, what about the atlatl -- the spear thrower? It enabled the North American aboriginals to hunt mastodons successfully -- by the simple expedient of leverage. They also developed the detachable dart head.
Or stone knapping technology that enabled all our predecessors to make tools?
If we are going back as far as agriculture, what about the atlatl -- the spear thrower? It enabled the North American aboriginals to hunt mastodons successfully -- by the simple expedient of leverage.
Or stone knapping technology that enabled all our predecessors to make tools?
I probably couldn't make a strong case that agriculture is more important. One thing that your suggestions and mine have in common - They happened a long time ago. The arm of the lever is much longer. By that standard, your suggestion wins. Agriculture - 10,000 years ago. Tools - more than a million, right? Pre-human.
Reply to T Clark It's a long ways back, but agriculture was a major innovation, if not a discrete invention. Presumably it began inadvertently: proto-agriculturists started collecting seeds -- barley grains, maybe, and planted some of them. They apparently discovered that the biggest seeds produced more big seeds. The people who created the 15th century tomato that the Spanish brought back to Europe started with a very small fruit, more like champaign grape (1/4" in diameter). The maize/corn plant was a very short plant, bearing just a few seeds. Most of our crops started out as rather unimpressive progenitors.
The domestication of cattle, donkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, and horses was likewise very important. For the most part, these animals are all herd animals, and relatively calm in their wild state The American buffalo, on the other hand, is a quick-to-respond aggressive herd animal.
Every improvement on a sharp stick moving towards a proper plow was important inventive work. Figuring out how to use animal power was important -- from pulling things to carrying us on their backs. Learning how to ferment food (cheese, bread, beer, wine, sausage, etc.) was a big innovation.
Agriculture may have been a very early "invention", but you know, it took us a long time to get there after we became homo sapiens.
Comments (42)
[quote=Steven K. Ritter]about half of the nitrogen atoms in the body of an average person living in a developed country once passed through a chemical plant and participated in the nitrogen-to-ammonia Haber-Bosch reaction. Perhaps no other human invention has had a more dramatic impact on Earth than Haber-Bosch chemistry.[/quote]
Article: https://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/86/8633cover3box2.html
Legumes (see crop rotation) and lightning are the pre-industrial nitrogen fixers.
I would dispute that mathematics constitute a technology. 'Technology' is derived from the Greek 'techne' which has a connotation of 'craft' or 'artisanship' i.e. something manufactured or made. I would argue that mathematics enables technology but in its own right doesn't fall under the heading of technology.
Isn't math an invention? Anyway, my next choice is computers.
That's a thread in itself? Math: Invented or Discovered?
The printing press was a critical invention, no doubt. So was the steam engine and electricity. The Haber Process might be a sleeper, along with sanitation. These two probably have lengthened life for more people than modern medicine has.
Bazalgette's London sewer system (1866) was tremendously transformative, but so was the Victorian urban dweller's tolerance of their own feces. The Romans, however, beat Bazalgette by about 2000 years. The Romans valued sanitation, but we probably wouldn't find the Roman baths all that inviting -- the bath water was pretty dirty.
The iPhone isn't that big an innovation. Apple combined phone, radio, and electrical technology--all a century old--with computer technology.
The first high-speed communication invention was the telegraph (and Morse Code)--that was in 1834. 25 years later, President Lincoln was hanging around the War Department's telegraph room to get the latest (and unfiltered) reports.
Gunpowder transformed a lot of lives, many of them right out of existence. Still works wonders.
The sail, was around 5500 years ago. Boats? That was big, wasn't it? (5500 years ago was the age of a tablet found in Kuwait depicting a two-sail ship.)
All technology traces itself back to the one critical formal thought of "a machine". That is nature constrained in a particular mechanical fashion so that it does useful work. An engine is a machine to give useful shape to an explosion. A city's sewerage system is a machine that gives useful shape to another kind of "explosion". :)
To then single out just one most important machine in all history requires some defendable framework of judgement. What are we actually awarding points for? The OP asks us to target "quality of life".
Most would say health - broadly construed - is our number one priority when it comes to quality of life. It could be power, or self-actualisation, or growth. But health is still arguably tops.
That then narrows the field to the usual replies like public sanitation as the "machine thinking" that has had the most general impact.
Fire maybe did have an even greater impact on general health, but was not itself a conscious product of technical thought in the same way as the theory-led design of sewers as a solution in squalid big cities.
And the advances of the agricultural revolution seem only semi-technological. In some ways, crop rotation, hoes, paddy fields, are the imposition of mechanical thinking on the landscape. But as technology, it is more heuristic, less mathematically imagined. In a ranking, early agricultural technology would lose marks on that particular score.
And also it might be questioned how much it improved individual health or quality of life. Turning to farming wore out paleolithic bodies rather faster. It also led to crowded settlements and stratified societies.
The computer is clearly another impactful machine with also questionable outcomes in terms of the generalised quality of life.
Municipal utilities perhaps are the only unadulterated good here - unless you are a wee fish that has to live downstream of the local sewage and stormwater outfalls.
Computers certainly alter the quality of life, not necessarily in a positive way. But what do we count as "a computer"? Are we counting Hollerith's punch card sorters which go back to the late 1800s? They certainly represented a great advance in data processing. The Enigma machine which was first used for commercial communication encryption goes back to the 1930s, and Turing's machine to decode it were mechanical computers of sorts. ENIAC?
The combination of scientific discovery and its application through invention of new devices doesn't seem to go back all that far. When did this begin -- after the Renaissance? or later, in the 1600s on into the 1700s? This seems to be the era when technology really started to take hold. (Maybe invention preceded scientific discovery in some ways. I suspect that the steam engine stimulated studies of materials and pressure--sort of like rocket science got going after a few rockets went up in the air.
A von Neumann machine or programmable computer. That is what made Turing computation practical.
But then that throws the spotlight on to transistors and the technology to implement a digital logical circuit. And then in turn, it was the photographic approach to printing chips that paved the way for miniaturisation.
So it becomes like asking which was more important, the invention of electricity or the invention of the switch?
Remember that at the dawn of computing - in the 1940s - analog was bigger than digital. There were also plenty of non-Turing notions of computation. And many thought those were the future. But programmable switches that could encode information digitally were an idea that could be cost-effectively shrunk towards the limits of physics. And the software could be written out in ways that could also be mass produced without limit.
So "true computation" was about this double thing of separate programs and separate logic circuits. Which Turing imagined and von Neumann turned into a practical design with a few clever tricks to fool programs into thinking they had an infinite memory and an infinite time to do their stuff.
Quoting Bitter Crank
It was happening tacitly. And then Newton made the strong connection between maths-strength theories and the inventions that could ensue. Newton saw the Universe as a machine, wrote that down in terms of equations. Then invention became engineering and not just craft or trial and error learning.
Whatever has reduced or eliminated maternal mortality (the death of women due to pregnancy and childbirth) and infant mortality.
hand washing and antiseptics
trained midwives
pre-natal care
antibiotics
C-sections can help, but only in surgical setting, and not just for the convenience of the doctor.
better diet (healthier mothers)
breast feeding
better sanitation (fewer infant GI infections)
electrolyte drink (salt, a little sugar, clean water) for infant diarrhea
Stuff like that
I would say that those and anything else that has reduced or eliminated maternal mortality and infant mortality has changed the lives of humans more than anything else.
I don't have exact numbers, but it is my understanding that before all of that men lived longer than women (that has flipped) and most newborn children--even if we control for infanticide--did not live past a very young age.
Everybody died of infections at a high rate: Small pox, TB, polio, syphilis, staph and strep infections, rabies, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, pneumonia, influenza, and so on. Then there was cancer and other kinds of tumors, and finally, accidents.
Better prenatal care in Europe and North America improved maternal and child survival. Then (1860- 1875) Pasteur, Lister, and Koch clearly revealed the role of bacteria in infection and discovered ways (antisepsis) to reduce it.
Up until the 20th century, infection was the leading cause of death. Vaccinations greatly reduced death from viral diseases, like small pox, rabies, diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough, antiseptics helped, and finally antibiotics came along.
Men who were not laborers did tend to live longer than their wives. Laborers, on the other hand, had proportionately high rates of death from accident and the aftermath (like infections, blood clots, excessive bleeding, etc.) of accidents. Better safety procedures and mechanization did a lot to reduce accidents.
You are either dead or you are alive and you can only experience life. To be honest even saying, "you are dead" is an odd phrase that does not reflect reality because there is no more "you". "You" can never actually be dead, your life just ends and you cease to exist.
Computers. They changed pretty much every single other field when they came on. That includes medicine, cars, shoemaking, mathematics, military - anything you could think of. Apart from possibly philosophy LOL :P
If not computers, then certainly the internet.
The internet IS computers. The computer is a tremendous facilitator. Without content it has nothing to facilitate.
Back in the 1970s, people working in educational technology were groping towards something like the Internet. We pictured remotely accessible libraries, for instance. Or computer assisted instruction. Mainframe computers were available to us through VERY SLOW telephone connections. Computing students were also using teletype terminals and punch tape. Data flowed like an IV drip.
At the time I imagined a system which was a behemoth electro-mechanical monstrosity to do something of the miniaturized sort we now take as a birthright. (It was sort of modeled after the 1909 novella by E. M. Forester, The Machine Stops.) Forester was actually very prescient. The residents of his future society lived underground in 6-sided cells surrounded by mechanical servants. The Machine featured a world-wide communication system through which one could listen to music and lectures, or as he put it, "share ideas". The Machine was voice-operated. An automated subway system connected each cell. It's really a very good story.
The means were not yet available. The connecting infrastructure hadn't been built. I first signed on to AOL in 1990. I down-loaded some HyperCard stacks (a Macintosh application) and it took all night, just about. In the morning there they were -- text and some B&W illustrations. Not great, but a first step.
Ten years later content and speed was much better, but still not great, unless one spent some money on higher speed transmission. Animated full color banner ads slowed transmission of the desired content.
Transmission cables, faster desk and lap tops, and server farms made the Internet's library/audio-visual phantasmagoria into reality.
You are right, it all very much exploded fully into force from 2000-present. Today, computers and computing technology are pretty much everywhere.
this does no take away from the original claim, that the biggest change in life is from living to dead.
If you define the state of death as nothingness of the conscious, or the ceasing of the conscious, the poster's claim still applies.
No, it does't, and death is not a "change in life". Life is not changing, life ends.
I know that is colloquial semantics, but it implies death is life transformed. Even the word death, itself is problematic, and it is a way for those still alive to cope with the absence of those that are gone.
I am sorry, but "death" is nothing but a semantics function used to anthropomorphize our memories of those alive once, and our own complete and final end. "Alive once" is even a disjointed concept, since there is no "once", there is no past, there is no future, there is only now and things either exist now or they don't exist at all. These are words we use to reference our own perceptional framework, which as we all know, does not always reflect reality.
I recognize the usage of these terms as functions to facilitate subjective reasoning and colloquial conversation, but as a reflection of the objective reality they dissolve and fall to pieces. Perhaps the hardest part of "death" is dealing with the fact that the remembered loved one, simply does not exist, there is just a void, just an absences where you can recall them existing. That perceptions persist because your memories do exist in the now, but those are not the same thing. And rather then deal with the reality that said loved one exist nowhere in time or space, we comfort ourselves with deceptive language (even those who "do not believe in the after life").
The most challenging part of dealing with "death" is facing the fact the person you remember simply does not exist. Their life line ended and "death" is really you, your memories and your pain.
Jeremiah, you said that death is not a life change. I accept your reasoning, but there is a chance you may have misworded the question. If you say "what is the biggest change in life after which life still continues", the unanimously you have the right to reject my answer. However, as you worded the question originally, there is ambiguity as to what one can consider a life change.
So to be fair, I wish you worded your original question less ambiguously and more precisely. They way you worded it, you needed a long paragaraph to explain why my answer was wrong. If you worded it less ambiguosly, as per my example, I wouldn't have put my reply.
In other words, I accept your explanation, but I charge that the explanation was necessary to clarify the ambiguity. If it were not so, you wouldn't have needed to clarify with the latter explanation.
I'll go with agriculture. The case can be made that it lay the social groundwork for almost everything listed above.
Or stone knapping technology that enabled all our predecessors to make tools?
I probably couldn't make a strong case that agriculture is more important. One thing that your suggestions and mine have in common - They happened a long time ago. The arm of the lever is much longer. By that standard, your suggestion wins. Agriculture - 10,000 years ago. Tools - more than a million, right? Pre-human.
The domestication of cattle, donkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, and horses was likewise very important. For the most part, these animals are all herd animals, and relatively calm in their wild state The American buffalo, on the other hand, is a quick-to-respond aggressive herd animal.
Every improvement on a sharp stick moving towards a proper plow was important inventive work. Figuring out how to use animal power was important -- from pulling things to carrying us on their backs. Learning how to ferment food (cheese, bread, beer, wine, sausage, etc.) was a big innovation.
Agriculture may have been a very early "invention", but you know, it took us a long time to get there after we became homo sapiens.