Blogocentric Formulations

I probably could have picked any number of events for #10, but I chose one that I think had a broader impact than just what happened on that day in those places that were affected. While 9/11 is mostly an American-centric event, it fundamentally changed America's relationship with many other countries around the world, and was the beginning of the modern era where the world's most powerful nation and it's attitude of "American Exceptionalism" lost quite a bit of its luster.

This might be getting out ahead of the skis since we're only sixty days into Trump's second administration, but if they keep moving and breaking things at the pace they have been, I don't think it's crazy to predict that the world might be in a very different place than it was in January 2025. Whether or not people agree with what's going on, this administration's views on what America should be doing in the world is vastly different than anything that's come before, and I don't think you can have a world superpower undergo such radical changes without it having a massive effect on the course of human history. Personally, I fear it's going to be for the worse.

Similar to the above, the most dominant civilization in the world at the time collapsed. That's world-changing, plain and simple.

Much like I think the second Trump Administration listed above is going to usher us (whether we like it or not, and for better or worse) into a new era of global dynamics, I think World War II and its aftermath was probably the last time the world faced such an upheaval. And not just WWII itself, but the programs and plans and things that developed out of that era survived for decades and were precursors to several of the things further down on my list.

The advancements in technology and human civilization that took place during the Industrial Revolution were nothing short of exponential growth upon what came before. While it will very likely be eclipsed by The Information Age (if it hasn't been already) in terms of global impact, looking at the world pre-1760 and looking at the world post-1970 are entirely different worlds by a variety of metrics.

An efficient way of replicating and distributing the written word all around the world? Hard to imagine a list of important historical events without this one on it.

The next three are going to kind of go hand-in-hand, but the invention of electricity meant that - for the first time - people didn't need to structure their schedules around available daylight. Everything from modern technology to our modern sleep schedules can be attributed to the invention of electricty.

Once the microprocessor was invented and computers became something that everyone had access to and you didn't need a giant room to house, it started us on our warp-speed adoption of technology at the advancements ushered in during the Information Age. Which of course leads us to...

Those of us who have been alive in the three-ish decades the internet has been around can attest to how radically different life is now from what it used to be. The fact that we can connect to people around the world instantaneously, or access basically the entirety of human knowledge from a device we carry around in our pockets, is remarkable. The internet reshaped our entire world.

Whether you're a Christian or not, and whether you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, I think it's hard to argue the impact of the historical figure of Jesus and his followers. Christianity has fundamentally impacted countries, and even entire continents. Wars have been fought in his name, and incredible acts of kindness and generosity have also been done in his name. Hundreds of billions of dollars flow through the economy every year based on Christian ideals and/or the actions of people who consider themselves followers of Christ.