Then we better find other ways to motivate humans. War is getting more risky with each technological advancement. We have not even seen the really dangerous stu

Then we better find other ways to motivate humans. War is getting more risky with each technological advancement. We have not even seen the really dangerous stuff yet. We are lucky it requires a lot of expertise, equipment and raw materials to build a nuclear device. Chemical attacks, even though it can be done much more cheaply and by moderately educated people, has the disadvantage of any weapon in that it does not scale. If you only have half a ton of chemicals the danger only is local. Now, the real danger is when home-grown biology-tech becomes more and more feasible. Because you can do this in a basement - and, most important, it scales! Because that stuff replicates itself! You only need to create the "starter pack". In such an environment, the more people you piss off/make aggressive, the higher the chance of severe undesirable consequences. Right now it is still kept in check because of the amount of skills and organisation it requires, even the suicide attackers can't achieve all that much. But technology works without looking at who uses it, and biotech in particular, with its unique self-replication feature... Well, I think that making the world more peaceful might become a necessity at some point. If you are right and we as a species require war to achieve great progress we might be walking on a knife's edge because of escalating uncontrollable consequences. Or maybe I'm wrong and it won't be a big problem (on "mankind scale") and we can have our little and big wars so that people remain willing to spend money on R&D. I must say I agree that this seems to be the case - try to get the US to vote for a party that promises to spend a fuck ton of money on civilian R&D, or on the military. Civilian spending seems to be very hard to get accepted, but military spending works every time. So I blame the electorate, the politicians as far as I can see actually truly represent the wishes of the voters in this regard.