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The modern world is also powered by technologies invented because of various wars. Duct tape / super glue / rockets / radars which led to the microwave over / .

The modern world is also powered by technologies invented because of various wars. Duct tape / super glue / rockets / radars which led to the microwave over / .. Wasn't the Internet initially a distributed communication network that would still operate under nuclear attacks?

hrktb 8y ago
I don't think it's fair to say 'because of war'. Many if not all of those could have been discovered in any other circumstances, or equivalents would have been found. I mean that anything we find useful now could have been discovered for their sheer usefulness. War accelerated the process, and prioritised some kind of discoveries, but it's not a source of discovery in itself.
- folli 8y ago
  But I think it's fair to say that our current technological progress would at least lag a couple of centuries behind without armed conflict and the resulting need to be faster/more destructive/better protected/better armed/... than your respective enemy.
  - hrktb 8y ago
    I see your point, but we had tremendous progress in the last half of the 20th century that was not a consequence of direct armed conflicts. I agree that political tension and the threat of conflict (in particular the whole Cold War dynamic) helped push a lot of innovations, but it's only tension, not bombing or killing of whole populations (it also happened, but I can't see any huge progress coming directly from that)
KineticLensman 8y ago
> Wasn't the Internet initially a distributed communication network that would still operate under nuclear attacks? Not really. The original ARPANET [0] didn't connect military command and control systems but four different universities. However, the packet-switching concept that underlies TCP/IP was informed by purely RAND theoretical studies, conducted by Paul Baran [1], that looked at building resilient communications systems. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran
- Wohlf 8y ago
  While you are technically correct, ARPA and RAND both being military focused research organizations, the parent comment is correct in spirit.

hrktb 8y ago

I don't think it's fair to say 'because of war'. Many if not all of those could have been discovered in any other circumstances, or equivalents would have been found. I mean that anything we find useful now could have been discovered for their sheer usefulness. War accelerated the process, and prioritised some kind of discoveries, but it's not a source of discovery in itself.

folli 8y ago
But I think it's fair to say that our current technological progress would at least lag a couple of centuries behind without armed conflict and the resulting need to be faster/more destructive/better protected/better armed/... than your respective enemy.
- hrktb 8y ago
  I see your point, but we had tremendous progress in the last half of the 20th century that was not a consequence of direct armed conflicts. I agree that political tension and the threat of conflict (in particular the whole Cold War dynamic) helped push a lot of innovations, but it's only tension, not bombing or killing of whole populations (it also happened, but I can't see any huge progress coming directly from that)

KineticLensman 8y ago

> Wasn't the Internet initially a distributed communication network that would still operate under nuclear attacks? Not really. The original ARPANET [0] didn't connect military command and control systems but four different universities. However, the packet-switching concept that underlies TCP/IP was informed by purely RAND theoretical studies, conducted by Paul Baran [1], that looked at building resilient communications systems. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Baran

Wohlf 8y ago
While you are technically correct, ARPA and RAND both being military focused research organizations, the parent comment is correct in spirit.