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Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone has a "horse" today. You're thinking of the developed world! (I remember a WIRED article back in 1999 where a panel discussed which technologies would have the biggest impact in the 21st century, and someone suggested the telephone, only then penetrating third world markets; the same person pointed out that the most impactful technology of the 20th century was probably the bicycle.)

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> most impactful technology of the 20th century was probably the bicycle

The smallpox vaccine is a strong contender. Smallpox killed 300m people in the 20th century, more than all wars combined. And we wiped it out.

The smallpox vaccine would be a candidate for most impactful invention of the 18th century (the first smallpox vaccination, named for the fact that it was derived from a cowpox blister -- vacca being Latin for cow -- was administered in 1796).

Yes but we're talking about the century in which the technology had an impact, not the century in which it was invented. The telephone is a 19th century invention which is only reaching the majority of the world's population in the 21st. Likewise the bicycle was a 19th century invention that really hit home in the 20th.

The form of the vaccine that allowed us to undertake global eradication was much newer:

" In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Leslie Collier, an English microbiologist working at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, developed a method for producing a heat-stable freeze-dried vaccine in powdered form.[50][51] Collier added 0.5% phenol to the vaccine to reduce the number of bacterial contaminants but the key stage was to add 5% peptone to the liquid vaccine before it was dispensed into ampoules. This protected the virus during the freeze drying process. After drying the ampoules were sealed under nitrogen. Like other vaccines, once reconstituted it became ineffective after 1–2 days at ambient temperatures. However, the dried vaccine was 100% effective when reconstituted after 6 months storage at 37 °C (99 °F) allowing it to be transported to, and stored in, remote tropical areas. Collier's method was increasingly used and, with minor modifications, became the standard for vaccine production adopted by the WHO Smallpox Eradication Unit when it initiated its global Smallpox Eradication Campaign in 1967 " -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine

If "horse" is a stand-in for non-human-powered transportation, then many people in the developed world don't have one. Plenty of cities (outside of stereotypical US suburbia) are perfectly livable only owning a bicycle because of their density, decent public transportation for when you have guests, and car sharing.

That speaker was right: don't underestimate the impact of bicycles.

I get your point, but the nuclear bomb by preventing major countries from going to war with each other is a good contender for most impactful technology of the 20th century.

Oh for sure (on the nuclear bomb) -- it's really impossible to compare these things meaningfully. Nuclear bomb? Modern agriculture? Penicillin? Vaccines? It's really impossible to judge.

Which countries did the nuclear bomb prevent going to war? There was never any serious prospect of the US invading the USSR or vice versa but MUAD certainly didn't stop them from involving themselves in more wars (generally supporting opposing sides) in the late twentieth century than in the previous four, India and Pakistan haven't exactly softened their stances on Kashmir since acquiring deadly weapons, and the UK even had part of its territory briefly annexed by a foreign power.

Tell that to the NATO and Warsaw Pact armies and all of the plans, materials, and infrastructure they built around fighting the Next Big European/Asian war. Huge amounts of money and piles of weapon systems were developed by both sides with an eye towards fighting that war.

It's easy to say that in hindsight, but given all of the tension around the Iron Curtain and all of the times the US and USSR came very close indeed to going to war despite how likely total nuclear destruction was, it seems short-sighted to just brush off the idea of that war actually happening if neither side had any nuclear weapons.

I think it was more luck than judgement that we escaped annihilation. There were any number of times where a wrong call would have meant Game Over. And the probability would have been much higher if someone other than Gorbachev had been the last Soviet president.

History isn't over yet. The risk is probably higher now than at any time since it peaked in the mid-80s.

Depends, personally I'd see the number of times the US and USSR nearly went to war (or actually did, but indirectly) despite having nuclear weapons as pretty good indication that lack of any feasible strategy for inflicting a decisive military defeat on the other party was a much more significant factor in the Cold War not turning hot than any nuke-induced desire for peace

Ultimately, one naval officer's minority vote[1] prevented a Soviet sub from launching a tactical nuclear weapon at US shipping. Several thousand miles of ocean prevented the Soviet Union from feasibly achieving decisive military victory against the United States. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

It's true that an invasion of the US mainland was never in the cards, given the situation during the cold war. Pretty much nobody was seriously worried about that. What NATO was very worried about was a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, which is a very reasonable worry considering the number and detail of Soviet plans for doing just that.

For their part, the Soviets were very worried about a combined NATO invasion, which seems quite reasonable considering that Germany alone, while also fighting/occupying most of the rest of Europe, managed to get to the suburbs of Moscow, and kill millions of Russians along the way.

Now if the Soviets did manage to invade and conquer Western Europe and maintain control over it, then they might be in a rather better position to consider direct attacks against the US. Which is a good part of the reason why the US invested so much in keeping them out of Western Europe.

> the nuclear bomb by preventing major countries from going to war with each other is a good contender for most impactful technology of the 20th century.

It didn't prevent the superpowers from having wars with each other. It just shifted the battle fronts, so now the superpowers fight through proxy wars, and the deaths all happen in distant, "developing" countries.

It's speculation, right? Either it had an overwhelming effect OR it had little if any effect. We'll never know -- thank goodness. We do know that penicillin, clean drinking water, vaccines, and the bicycle had enormous effects all over the world.

> It's speculation, right? Either it had an overwhelming effect OR it had little if any effect. We'll never know -- thank goodness.

By that logic, we can 'never know' anything about historical effects, ever, and it's pointless to discuss the consequences of any historical events, including the others you mentioned. But really, the effect of the nuclear bomb in shifting the battlefronts of wars to proxy wars in developing nations under hegemonic control is as clear and as accepted by historians as we can expect.

It may not be quite on par with the "theory" of evolution being all-but-proven fact, but it's in that ballpark.

It's not pointless but we can tell for certain that some things had a certain direct impact. It's very hard to claim that the psychological impact of nuclear weapons was X as a matter of fact, and it's nothing at all like the theory of evolution which is confirmed by ridiculous amounts of direct and indirect evidence.

In a world without nuclear weapons, the USSR would have invaded Europe (and the Middle East) and the entire continent would have been laid waste. They came ridiculously close to doing it anyway despite nuclear weapons. If you think that such a European war would have meant that conflicts in other parts of the world would not have happened, I think you're being a bit naive.

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