Slashdot Mirror
20th Century's Greatest Engineering Achievements
dgw1 writes "The National Academy of Engineering has produced an ordered list of the 20 greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century. I thought the articles about all of the entries were very interesting, even if I didn't agree with the order that some of the achievements were placed in. "
Where's slashdot on the list?
Well...I know I'll get flamed for this but here goes.
Actually the advent of Nuclear Weapons and MAD (and to a lesser extent the lessons learned by the Great Powers in WW1) have lead to a period of unprecidented peace in Western Europe. While there have been some clashes (Serbia, Gulf War, Vietnam, Korea) for the most part they have been scaled down because of the spectre of full scale nuclear war.
Chemical weapons havn't been used on the battlefield in large scale or with much success since the WW1, while there was the Holocaust and that did involve chemical weapons, the Germans wouldn't use gas against the Allies because of the retaliation of gas against the Germans.
So I'm of the mind that MAD is a good thing.
I agree that the placement of refrigeration (and air conditioning) is incorrect -- it is possibly the single most important engineering accomplishment of the past several hundred years, right with the printing press.
Talk all you want about internal combustion, petrochemicals, etc, they are all very important and changed the world, but they did not unquestionably and uniformly improve every aspect of our lives and our existence as a species.
Without refrigeration, we would not have any other technologies on the scale necessary for modern life. You couldn't have the current phone or electrical grid, computers and most other modern technology would have been nearly impossible to invent. Space travel would be impossible, much air travel would be as well.
Without refrigeration, our life expectancy would still be about 30-50 years because vaccines and the blood supply would be impossible to make and maintain. Our food supplies would be just as questionable as those at the turn of the last century (when food poisoning was a perfectly common way to die).
And of course without such reliable ways to safely transport food and other perishables, our economy could never grow to the scale of current urbanization.
And don't forget that "air conditioning" as it literally means, allows us to control the air in an environment. We can not only make it warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer, we can also control the humidity so that electronics can function properly and valuable materials are not destroyed or contaminated by water vapor.
To understand the danger of humidity, simply visit the tombs of Egypt, where humidity did not exist until the irrigation projects of the past hundred years. For thousands of years, delicate artifacts sat perfectly preserved, and in the past hundred they have literally begun to disintegrate as humidity attacks them.
Refrigeration is unquestionably one of the most significant advances in mankind's control over his environment, along with irrigation and fire.
And like many great advances, it was scorned early on by others. The New York Times (keeping in mind NY made a lot of money by shipping ice all over the country for cooling) published an editorial making fun of "some fool in Florida thinks he can make ice better than God Almighty!"...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Just think folks, 102 years ago the most that people could kill with one weapon was about a hundred people. What an enlightened time we now live in.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi