What has helped Humanity the most?
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If I had to boil it down to one thing, it would have to be language. - More generally, the spread of information has been immensely beneficial to humanity's progression. Sharing knowledge facilitates expansion on information you did not develop. This means information in particular fields can be researched by multiple people, facilitating technological advances. - It is responsible for trade and thus the founding of economies, human connections and thus the founding of nations, research and thus the advancement of technology, etc. Side: language
There are a number of things which have helped us the most. Oxygen, hydrogen, a planet with conditions capable of supporting life, etc. Remove any one from the equation and what do you get? No humanity. Therefore, the fundamental requirements of life have been the greatest help. If you are looking for the greatest creation of man in terms of how it has helped mankind, I'd have to go with the alphabet (and when I say alphabet, I mean alphabet as it was developed by the Greeks, not the abjads and abugidas of the Semites and the Indians, respectively, nor the logographic "alphabet" of the Chinese). Without an alphabet, much knowledge and tradition would be forgotten. Without that otherwise forgotten knowledge, we could not continue to advance ourselves. Side: Alphabet
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Abugidas are probably the next best after the Grecian alphabet. In an abugida, only the consonants are written as characters, but the vowels are either implied or written in the form of markings around the consonantal character. They are also called syllabaries because each consonantal character represents a syllable. An abjad is a form of writing in which all the vowels are implied, not written. Hebrew, Arabic, and Middle Egyptian, to name a few, are abjads. Logographic languages are those, such as Chinese, which have an image to represent an idea. хов, for instance, means "guest". But, if you don't know that, it may be difficult to figure out what the word means, and how to pronounce it. There are some phonograms in Chinese, elements which make it possible to at least guess the pronunciation, but they are not ubiquitous. The Greek alphabet is so important because, despite having been taken from the Phoenician alphabet (which, being Semitic, was an abjad), the Greeks included letters for each vowel sign. Alpha, epsilon, eta, iota, omicron, upsilon, omega are the Greek vowels, and they were added because they were not placed regularly in the language, making it hard to guess what any given word meant if only the consonants were written. Imagine the word "lttr" - if vowels were added, it could mean "letter", "latter", "litter", "lottery". Side: Alphabet
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