Antibiotics
Electricity
Internal combustion engine
Flight
Li-Ion batteries
Radio communication
Or let me put it a different way: do you think the USSR did not have an industrial base?
And who do you think paid for the construction of the municipal sewer systems in American cities? Like in Chicago where the whole city was raised 4 ft to accomplish it[1].
[1] https://gizmodo.com/chicago-was-raised-more-than-4-feet-in-t...
> And who do you think paid
state resources are always a fraction of the gdp trough whatever form of taxation. larger industrial base means proportional less burden on the society. that is why for example urss imploded, taxation was too high and spent too wastefully on military budget to be sustainable long term, while usa could spend that money on the defense budget, infrastructure, et etc, while still being sutainable from the economy, because the industrial base was so much larger.
That is the whole game.
If we developed the will to sustainably mitigate its toxic by-products including plastic, that would be another nice black-swan for the future. Though it also won't be singular moment but a systemic change that is hard to notice.
Also, tea making was a huge sanitary step forward.