# 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