2025-10-07
human progress checklist
done
- controlled fire - cooking, metallurgy prerequisite
- language - cumulative culture
- stone to metal tools - bronze, iron
- wheel and axle, animal traction, sailing - preindustrial transport multipliers
- positional numerals with zero - compact computation
- coinage, standardized weights and measures - low-friction exchange
- rule of law, bureaucracy - scalable coordination
- double-entry bookkeeping - enterprise-scale accounting
- mechanical clocks, standardized time - synchronization
- agriculture - surplus and settlement
- watermills, windmills - preindustrial prime movers
- steam engine - heat to work
- industrial revolution - mechanization, coal, factories
- internal combustion and petroleum - dense mobile energy
- electrification - generation, transmission, motors
- fission nuclear - high-density baseload
- haber-bosch - synthetic ammonia, fertilizers
- germ theory and sanitation - clean water, sewers, chlorination
- vaccination - immunological prevention
- antibiotics - bacterial mortality collapse
- anesthesia and asepsis - surgery at scale
- public health and epidemiology - surveillance, interventions
- writing - durable records and administration
- movable type printing - mass replication
- scientific method - systematic accumulation
- probability and statistics - inference under uncertainty
- calculus and analysis - continuous modeling
- telegraph and telephone - real-time distance signaling
- radio, microwave, fiber - spectrum and guided media
- transistor and integrated circuit - scalable computation
- software engineering and operating systems - reliable abstraction
- packet switching, tcp/ip, web - global internetwork
- computing - general-purpose automation and control
- internet - instant global communication and software distribution
- satellite navigation - gps/gnss positioning
- earth observation - global sensing
- railways - high-throughput land transport
- automobiles and roads - point-to-point mobility
- aviation - high-speed global travel
- containerization - intermodal trade at scale
- civil engineering with cement and steel - durable infrastructure
- polymers - lightweight ubiquitous materials
- machine learning - function approximation at scale
- cloud computing - elastic compute and storage utilities
- sequencing and synthesis - cheap read/write dna
- crispr gene editing - targeted edits
- photovoltaics and wind - low-cost generation
todo
- autonomous science - self-driving labs, machine inference
- bioengineering - programmable organisms, healthspan extension
- fusion energy - abundant, dispatchable power
- grid-scale storage - high-cycling, seasonal variants
- high-voltage dc supergrids - continental balancing
- advanced fission and waste minimization - safer, cheaper reactors
- reusable rockets - rapid, lower-cost orbital access
- low-earth-orbit internet - global constellations
- orbital industry - in-space assembly, resource extraction, on-orbit manufacturing