Comment by bgun

Developments without which the modern world would be unrecognizable:

Materials: concrete, petroleum, steel, aluminum, cotton, plastic Music: 12 tone equal temperament Food: Cereal crops, food preservation (canning, pasteurization), fermentation Technology: batteries (lead-acid, lithium-ion, alkaline), circuitry, GPS Transportation: internal combustion engine, asphalt road engineering, flight, rocketry

Lists like this, or “tech trees” as you might find in Civilization-type games, are hard in part because language is insufficient to map technological progress. There’s also no version of modernity that could exist without some form of philosophy, pedagogy, and cultural development, but naming “most significant” ones in a modern context involves going back to very ancient and deeply opinionated texts that include the Bible, Koran, Torah and so on.