What is the https in front of every link mean?

It's the protocol used, secure http

And why is it important for it to be there?

So the browser knows how to communicate with the server

Are there no alternates to https?

http, which is insecure, some browsers also support onion, ftp, or other protocols

Who created https?

Netscape IIRC

HTTPS encrypts internet traffic.

With HTTP your browser may send a request to example.com/login with the below data

{username: 'picman', password: 'penis'}

Hence, if I (as an attacker) captured your wifi traffic, I could steal your website pasword

With HTTPS, the message would be encrypted, like so

W32jxx7nKW7W68Hqqw3VJMOaWdHNAAc2I0jy7hnGywzkhAjzXC2box00NYclj3h6

With HTTPS if I stole your wifi traffic, I still couldn't see your login information.

if it is http then anyone connected to your wifi can read whatever you send online.

if it is https then it is encrypted by this shitty windows program that the NSA have built backdoors into. However normal hackers can't read the data sent over the internet.

hyper text transfer protocol secure

So your browser knows what communication protocol to use.

There are a lot of communications protocols but for web browsers and HTML https is typically what you want. FTP, and SFTP are file transfer protocols for instance.

I don't remember who created HTTP but HTTPS would be a collaboration, several versions of SSL and now TLS have been released and they were not all created by the same individual or even team.