
Ask HN: What is mankind's greatest engineering achievement? - donjuanica
Frankly it boggles my mind to think of the crazy things humans have been able to accomplish -- all while realizing just how primitive we really are. That said, what do you think is mankind&#x27;s greatest engineering achievement?<p>I think my vote would go to the LHC, but the ISS, Saturn V, Mars Rover, 10nm process technology are all good candidates.
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11thEarlOfMar
Hands down, the state-of-the-art in semiconductors.

\- Print pictures with features measured in single-digit nanometers

\- Deposit layers of photo-sensitive, conducting and non-conducting materials
measured in atoms

\- Remove layers of materials measured in atoms

\- Create devices at these geometries that execute logic at 238,310 MIPS
(Intel Core i7 5960X)

There are >250,000 scientists and engineers globally working to make this
happen. I can not think of another technology getting this much focus.

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petra
I would say windows and it's developer tools. It was the first platform that
enabled engineering collaboration on such a scale that the world has never
seen before - between any hardware/software/library designer - all while
making the fruits of this efforts extremely accessibly to the common people.

And it succeeded in running the "mind of the world" for quite a few years.

On the same note i would add the internet, but i'm torn, i think(maybe
mistakenly) that windows is a bigger engineering achievement - something much
harder to pull off, and the internet on the other hand is brilliant in it's
conceptual simplicity{ routers + links + packets + redundancy + intelligence
at the edge} - although the implementation has definitely pushed many
boundaries.

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elmerfud
It kind of depends. If you consider the achievement in the context of the time
period it was done vs achievement of all time you'll get different answers.

Semiconductors are a marvelous feat of engineering but in the time from when
they were first developed until now the ability to share communication has
been unparalleled allowing this to happen.

In the other hand the concrete dome on the Pantheon is quite a feat as well
considering their relatively basic understanding of the principals of forces
and simplistic methods of collaborative sharing.

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ankurdhama
I don't think it can be one single thing as we know all of our achievements
are based on the idea of "standing on the shoulders of giant". I can suggest
various vaccinations and medical technologies.

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pinewurst
The New Horizons probe. Not only combining the parts into the whole, but
sending it so far away over such a long time, only to arrive with great
precision fully operational.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
How about them pyramids.

