6 ms·

I wonder just how advanced Germany would be nowadays without the World Wars.

Terr_ 3y ago
If you mean like jetpacks and robots, it would probably look the same as our current timeline, given that "nowadays" is 70 years later plus the global diffusion of technological progress. Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  > Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars. Agreed. How many years does each war set us back? And are there hurdles in our future that we will be unable to clear if we too often let war impede our progress.
  - ScoobleDoodle 3y ago
    There's an alternative as unfortunate as it may be of: how many years does each war move us forward. Or how many years behind would we be without the war having occurred.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      Hmm, yeah maybe it sort of breaks the before/after model. We're over here because the war happened, and would be over there if it hadn't. Sorta depends if progress means being ready to repel a hostile alien invasion, or if it means being capable of large scale cooperation on geoengineering projects in the face of biosphere collapse, or you know... whatever other can-you-survive-this test comes our way.
- aftbit 3y ago
  Or did the wars actually lead to progress? A challenging question. Strife breeds strength, but stability breeds prosperity.
  - mxkopy 3y ago
    Industrial or technological progress, sure, but at the expense of cultural and societal progress. Tech trees are straightforward to visualize but I challenge you to think of a law tree or social norm tree as well.
    - aftbit 3y ago
      Perhaps, although perhaps cultural progress as well. For example, perhaps the hippie movement of the 60s was enhanced by the threat of draft in the Vietnam war.
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      Isn't a lot of the initial progress of women being treated as equals in the workplace in the US related to their work in factories during WW2? IIRC the end of colonialism and thus the end of the associated oppression, is also associated with the world wars, as they left the colonial powers too exhausted to retain their overseas empires.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    I wish could answer that. On one hand, the fact that a lot of smart people are trying to kill you is a great motivation for rapid technological advance and reduction of red tape. On the other hand, many of the young men in uniform who were torn apart by shells and mines could have been new Einsteins.
    - kaashif 3y ago
      > many of the young men in uniform who were torn apart by shells and mines could have been new Einsteins. The problem of geniuses dead in wars pales in comparison to the number languishing in poverty or ignorance. These may number in the billions right now. How many potential Einsteins are miserably toiling away in dead end jobs? How many Ramanujans are eking out lives in villages in India? So on and so forth. And another issue: if 100 million die in war or 1 billion aren't born due to fertility collapse, which is worse for progress?
- jackcosgrove 3y ago
  I think the trick is to either get governments to fund basic research for a reason other than national defense, or get them to fund it for that reason but then never use the weapons.
  - shiroiushi 3y ago
    >get them to fund it for that reason but then never use the weapons. That's basically what happened during the Cold War. Aerospace technology and others were advanced incredibly (e.g., the Apollo moon missions). These days, we don't get this so much, so we have to rely on advertising companies to give us innovation...
- crote 3y ago
  I'm not convinced it's that simple. Take a look at the very first Nazi book burning, for example, which targeted Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. It was the leading institution of its kind, and the complete destruction of its archive and community not only set back the LGBT community in Germany (and to a large extent the rest of the Western world) some 30 years - it didn't really recover until at least 1970! If it can cause that much damage there, imagine what it would've done to the wider scientific community.
- grujicd 3y ago
  You can also wonder what would happen if Gavrilo Princip missed Franc Ferdinand in 1914? Single bullet could completely change world history. Would Austro-Hungary declare war to Serbia over some other cause? Or would some other incident start war between other two countries, leading to the same worldwide havoc? Some say that history is inevitable since it's result of massive forces which are similar to laws of nature. I'm not that sure. Tensions can be defused, diplomacy might work, some other incident could lead to different kind of conflict at different location. What is pretty much sure is that there would still be wars since they seem to be inevitable. But if that one shot missed, perhaps we wouldn't have WW1, and without WW1 there wouldn't be WW2 as circumstances would be completely different. Was there a single development as small as firing a single bullet that affected world's history this much?
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    IIRC all of humanity outside of Africa has gone through a tight population bottleneck at some point, such that a massive portion of human history can probably trace its root to a group of early humans managing to survive a certain encounter, none of which would've existed if they hadn't survived.
    - hollerith 3y ago
      The severe bottleneck 800,000 years ago includes the ancestors of all modern Africans.
      - dotnet00 3y ago
        Yeah was just coming back to edit after reading up on it. A bottleneck from 100k to 1000 human ancestors ~800,000 years ago for ~100,000 years. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487 "Population size history is essential for studying human evolution. However, ancient population size history during the Pleistocene is notoriously difficult to unravel. In this study, we developed a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent this difficulty and calculated the composite likelihood for present-day human genomic sequences of 3154 individuals. Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction. This bottleneck is congruent with a substantial chronological gap in the available African and Eurasian fossil record. Our results provide new insights into our ancestry and suggest a coincident speciation event."
- binary132 3y ago
  The world wars advanced science and engineering enormously. Aeronautic, nuclear, medical, radio, computer, mass production, logistical, and space technologies were all powerfully driven by wartime demands. Innovation might have been pushed by capital and human needs, but I would think it would probably look very different than it does today.
newsclues 3y ago
The wars were a driving reason for a lot of technology and innovation, and at the least accelerated some important technological advances.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  the amount of destruction and financial ruin that comes with war makes it a very negative outcome
  - newsclues 3y ago
    If you sell arms to both sides and no fighting occurs on your territory… No one has said there should be aggressive intervention in Ukraine or Middle East to minimize the environmental damage and financial impact of war.
wongarsu 3y ago
The lingua franca in many sciences might still be German instead of English. But for the most part the technology level of Germany is coupled to that of the rest of the world. It's hard to tell how that would have evolved. Maybe keeping the existing research clusters in Western Europe intact would have lead to faster advances in chemistry and particle physics. On the other hand we probably wouldn't have a space station today if it weren't for the Nazis bankrolling a rocketry program, the two world wars leading to the creation and rise of the Soviet Union as well as the ascension of the United States to superpower status, and those two bankrolling competing space programs in the aftermath of WWII as a way to show the superiority of their respective ideological systems. No WWII would have also meant no Manhattan Project. Even a more limited WWII where only the Pacific Theater happened wouldn't have lead to Manhattan Project since the fear of a German nuclear weapon was a major driver. Without nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles make little sense. Which both means that rocketry is even less likely to get off the ground, and that bombers would play a much bigger role (US firebombing on Japan had similar devastation as early nukes, at the expense of needing a lot more bombs for each attack). This would probably mean more advanced aviation than in our timeline. Without WWII decolonization might not have happened. Not a major impact on Germany as they only had few colonies even before the wars, but the impact on their neighbors would be profound. Without the world wars leading to the US rising to power and the cold war and nuclear threat the arpanet wouldn't have happened. Would Germany have created something similar, and would it be as decentralized without the defense department backing and threat of nukes taking out key network interchanges? Maybe French Minitel would still have happened and the internet would have been French?
- Ringz 3y ago
  During my studies of computer science, a professor told me that Germans might have programmed in Latin if the war had not intervened. Simply programming in German would not have been „scientific“ enough. Think about it. Latin is highly defined and static. But German could be great for imperative programming /s
- csomar 3y ago
  You are assuming that without wars, all these achievements wouldn't have happened. Sure, that's one possibility. The other possibility is that people do them regardless. We have the iPhone today. A quite advanced device. We didn't need a war for that; but only the people willingness to connect with other people. In fact, most things we have from war are meaningless for everyday life. Man to the space has a certain grandeur to it but it didn't fill soviet shelves with food.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
xhkkffbf 3y ago
Some suggest that war focuses the economy and drives it forward. How quickly would atomic power evolve without WWII?

If you mean like jetpacks and robots, it would probably look the same as our current timeline, given that "nowadays" is 70 years later plus the global diffusion of technological progress. Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
> Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars. Agreed. How many years does each war set us back? And are there hurdles in our future that we will be unable to clear if we too often let war impede our progress.
- ScoobleDoodle 3y ago
  There's an alternative as unfortunate as it may be of: how many years does each war move us forward. Or how many years behind would we be without the war having occurred.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    Hmm, yeah maybe it sort of breaks the before/after model. We're over here because the war happened, and would be over there if it hadn't. Sorta depends if progress means being ready to repel a hostile alien invasion, or if it means being capable of large scale cooperation on geoengineering projects in the face of biosphere collapse, or you know... whatever other can-you-survive-this test comes our way.
aftbit 3y ago
Or did the wars actually lead to progress? A challenging question. Strife breeds strength, but stability breeds prosperity.
- mxkopy 3y ago
  Industrial or technological progress, sure, but at the expense of cultural and societal progress. Tech trees are straightforward to visualize but I challenge you to think of a law tree or social norm tree as well.
  - aftbit 3y ago
    Perhaps, although perhaps cultural progress as well. For example, perhaps the hippie movement of the 60s was enhanced by the threat of draft in the Vietnam war.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    Isn't a lot of the initial progress of women being treated as equals in the workplace in the US related to their work in factories during WW2? IIRC the end of colonialism and thus the end of the associated oppression, is also associated with the world wars, as they left the colonial powers too exhausted to retain their overseas empires.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  I wish could answer that. On one hand, the fact that a lot of smart people are trying to kill you is a great motivation for rapid technological advance and reduction of red tape. On the other hand, many of the young men in uniform who were torn apart by shells and mines could have been new Einsteins.
  - kaashif 3y ago
    > many of the young men in uniform who were torn apart by shells and mines could have been new Einsteins. The problem of geniuses dead in wars pales in comparison to the number languishing in poverty or ignorance. These may number in the billions right now. How many potential Einsteins are miserably toiling away in dead end jobs? How many Ramanujans are eking out lives in villages in India? So on and so forth. And another issue: if 100 million die in war or 1 billion aren't born due to fertility collapse, which is worse for progress?
jackcosgrove 3y ago
I think the trick is to either get governments to fund basic research for a reason other than national defense, or get them to fund it for that reason but then never use the weapons.
- shiroiushi 3y ago
  >get them to fund it for that reason but then never use the weapons. That's basically what happened during the Cold War. Aerospace technology and others were advanced incredibly (e.g., the Apollo moon missions). These days, we don't get this so much, so we have to rely on advertising companies to give us innovation...
crote 3y ago
I'm not convinced it's that simple. Take a look at the very first Nazi book burning, for example, which targeted Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. It was the leading institution of its kind, and the complete destruction of its archive and community not only set back the LGBT community in Germany (and to a large extent the rest of the Western world) some 30 years - it didn't really recover until at least 1970! If it can cause that much damage there, imagine what it would've done to the wider scientific community.
grujicd 3y ago
You can also wonder what would happen if Gavrilo Princip missed Franc Ferdinand in 1914? Single bullet could completely change world history. Would Austro-Hungary declare war to Serbia over some other cause? Or would some other incident start war between other two countries, leading to the same worldwide havoc? Some say that history is inevitable since it's result of massive forces which are similar to laws of nature. I'm not that sure. Tensions can be defused, diplomacy might work, some other incident could lead to different kind of conflict at different location. What is pretty much sure is that there would still be wars since they seem to be inevitable. But if that one shot missed, perhaps we wouldn't have WW1, and without WW1 there wouldn't be WW2 as circumstances would be completely different. Was there a single development as small as firing a single bullet that affected world's history this much?
- dotnet00 3y ago
  IIRC all of humanity outside of Africa has gone through a tight population bottleneck at some point, such that a massive portion of human history can probably trace its root to a group of early humans managing to survive a certain encounter, none of which would've existed if they hadn't survived.
  - hollerith 3y ago
    The severe bottleneck 800,000 years ago includes the ancestors of all modern Africans.
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      Yeah was just coming back to edit after reading up on it. A bottleneck from 100k to 1000 human ancestors ~800,000 years ago for ~100,000 years. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487 "Population size history is essential for studying human evolution. However, ancient population size history during the Pleistocene is notoriously difficult to unravel. In this study, we developed a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent this difficulty and calculated the composite likelihood for present-day human genomic sequences of 3154 individuals. Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction. This bottleneck is congruent with a substantial chronological gap in the available African and Eurasian fossil record. Our results provide new insights into our ancestry and suggest a coincident speciation event."
binary132 3y ago
The world wars advanced science and engineering enormously. Aeronautic, nuclear, medical, radio, computer, mass production, logistical, and space technologies were all powerfully driven by wartime demands. Innovation might have been pushed by capital and human needs, but I would think it would probably look very different than it does today.

newsclues 3y ago

The wars were a driving reason for a lot of technology and innovation, and at the least accelerated some important technological advances.

ekianjo 3y ago
the amount of destruction and financial ruin that comes with war makes it a very negative outcome
- newsclues 3y ago
  If you sell arms to both sides and no fighting occurs on your territory… No one has said there should be aggressive intervention in Ukraine or Middle East to minimize the environmental damage and financial impact of war.

wongarsu 3y ago

The lingua franca in many sciences might still be German instead of English. But for the most part the technology level of Germany is coupled to that of the rest of the world. It's hard to tell how that would have evolved. Maybe keeping the existing research clusters in Western Europe intact would have lead to faster advances in chemistry and particle physics. On the other hand we probably wouldn't have a space station today if it weren't for the Nazis bankrolling a rocketry program, the two world wars leading to the creation and rise of the Soviet Union as well as the ascension of the United States to superpower status, and those two bankrolling competing space programs in the aftermath of WWII as a way to show the superiority of their respective ideological systems. No WWII would have also meant no Manhattan Project. Even a more limited WWII where only the Pacific Theater happened wouldn't have lead to Manhattan Project since the fear of a German nuclear weapon was a major driver. Without nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles make little sense. Which both means that rocketry is even less likely to get off the ground, and that bombers would play a much bigger role (US firebombing on Japan had similar devastation as early nukes, at the expense of needing a lot more bombs for each attack). This would probably mean more advanced aviation than in our timeline. Without WWII decolonization might not have happened. Not a major impact on Germany as they only had few colonies even before the wars, but the impact on their neighbors would be profound. Without the world wars leading to the US rising to power and the cold war and nuclear threat the arpanet wouldn't have happened. Would Germany have created something similar, and would it be as decentralized without the defense department backing and threat of nukes taking out key network interchanges? Maybe French Minitel would still have happened and the internet would have been French?

Ringz 3y ago
During my studies of computer science, a professor told me that Germans might have programmed in Latin if the war had not intervened. Simply programming in German would not have been „scientific“ enough. Think about it. Latin is highly defined and static. But German could be great for imperative programming /s
csomar 3y ago
You are assuming that without wars, all these achievements wouldn't have happened. Sure, that's one possibility. The other possibility is that people do them regardless. We have the iPhone today. A quite advanced device. We didn't need a war for that; but only the people willingness to connect with other people. In fact, most things we have from war are meaningless for everyday life. Man to the space has a certain grandeur to it but it didn't fill soviet shelves with food.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

xhkkffbf 3y ago

Some suggest that war focuses the economy and drives it forward. How quickly would atomic power evolve without WWII?