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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
by 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 agoBut 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 agoI 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)