UKC

With the centenary of WWI upon us I was thinking today about where we would be if there were no wars. Don't get me wrong, I don't condone war and it's a terrible thing to go through. However, against all its horrors would mankind have made the same advances in things like aviation, communications and medicine, especially the treatment of injuries.

ps
I've not started this thread to argue about the rights and wrongs of war, just a consideration about whether there are any benefits in areas such as those mentioned above.

In reply to FesteringSore:

It does seem to be true that war can be a driver for technological advances.

In reply to FesteringSore:

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

Cormac Mccarthy. Blood Meridian.

Not exactly 'war', but the threat of war, the urgency of impending disaster, suddenly lines of credit are opened that previously were not available and you can bring bright and capable people together united in a common purpose - survival.

Medical advances are definitely one thing that happen during conflicts but I think they are often overplayed.

It took years before stuff like MERT started to happen in Afghanistan. The french have been doing something similar in civilian situations for decades - SAMU.

D

In reply to FesteringSore:

if you buy into a certain strand of Marxist thinking, wars are just another way of advancing capitalism (more production, more stuff, better ways to redistribute wealth from poor to rich)

In reply to FesteringSore:

My take on it would be that;

If the 100 million+ souls who perished in the two World wars had not died ,the world would probably be even more technologically advanced than it is now.

In reply to andymac:
I hadn't thought of that, when you think of the number of creative people and potentially good ideas which were lost, it's quite thought provoking.

In reply to andymac:

If the 100 million+ souls who perished in the two World wars had not died ,the world would probably be even more technologically advanced than it is now.

Except, that the overwhelming vast majority of those would have had little or no influence on anything, whether it was in the past, present or future.
It was the ones 'responsible' for their deaths that were the driving force behind the technological advances.

In reply to FactorXXX:
I guess the key question is 'How does one know?'

Bill Gates comes to mind as somebody with an outstand mind which changed things in peacetime, we'll never know what talent was lost, and civil completion led to the development of aeroplanes in the form of the racing seaplanes which competed for the Schnieder(sp) Trophy before WW2, and the space race in the 60's was motivated by national pride, rather than war.

You might be right, it's definitely something worth pondering, what human potential can be lost in wars.

In reply to FactorXXX:

Thats a pretty dark weird and deterministic take on social darwinism. 100 million lives is a rich substrate with which to melt down and mould the fantasies of power.

Not another Einstein, Mach, a Watson or Crick, Rontgen, Bequerel or Curie amongst them?

D

In reply to Dauphin:


That's what I'm thinking. We know about the poets who died in WW1.

In reply to Timmd:

Nah, the space program was a result of the cold war. The Apollo program cost circa 25 billion on its own - in the sixties. Quick calculation allowing for inflation = a f*ck ton of dollar bills in todays money. I think I read that at its peak the total space program was costing the U.S. taxpayer 5% of GDP. For national pride? You have got be kidding, bread and circuses come much cheaper than that.

D

In reply to Dauphin:

Thats a pretty dark weird and deterministic take on social darwinism. 100 million lives is a rich substrate with which to melt down and mould the fantasies of power.
Not another Einstein, Mach, a Watson or Crick, Rontgen, Bequerel or Curie amongst them?

Not weird or dark at all.
All the nations involved had most certainly removed every single person that had scientific/technical knowledge and wrapped them up in cotton wool in their respective labs.

In reply to Timmd:

That's what I'm thinking. We know about the poets who died in WW1.

What have poets got to with technological advancement?

In reply to FactorXXX:

Poets apart ,an entire generation of bright young things left Britains Universities at the outbreak of War. To do their bit.

It was their duty you know.and chivalrous .and it was all going to be over in a few months.

Statistically ,the scholars turned soldiers (officers) paid a high price and few of them survived the hostilities.

In reply to andymac:


>

The so called "Lost Generation". The War undoubtably left a big hole in the country's stock of intelligencia but the band was relatively narrow, restricted to a percentage of 4 years "worth" of bright students. There were still those who were too young to fight, who followed their footsteps into the universities. Also, although there were much fewer women in our universities they were largely unaffected* by the casualties. Undoubtably we lost some very bright people, but nature is remarkable in it's ability to recover surprisingly quickly from such seemingly large losses.

The dead were gone forever, but at the end of the War many ex soldiers returned to their studies as mature students.

* I mean physically, emotionally it was a different story for the women of the time.

In reply to Timmd:

True. But then if you took all the money spent on war and instead spent it on technology, you would probably see an even greater advancement because you wouldn't be wasting cash and effort on the fripperies of blowing people up. See Apollo space programme for example.

In reply to FesteringSore:

Really interesting question.

Not that I agree with the quote, but I always liked it:

"You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Orson Wells, The Third Man

In reply to Timmd:

Technological advancement is of no value whatever if it is used for barbaric ends and leads to the collapse of civilisations. Poetry is one way to help lead us back to the path of civilisation.

'Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.'

In reply to FactorXXX:



Nothing directly, but they're an example of lost talent. I'm prone to thinking along tangents.

It's another contribution to society.

In reply to FactorXXX:


Perhaps true for people who had high level technical training at the point the rest were packed off to slaughter, some of those that went to die would undoubtedly have had outstanding capability, they were just born in the wrong year so never got to develop it.

In answer to the original question: Would we be where we are today without war? No but we'd have got here eventually. Not that it matters since war seems to be a state of being we're naturally drawn (or driven?) to, it's not going anywhere in a hurry.

jk

In reply to FesteringSore:

What about Antoine Lavoisier, he was murdered during the French revolution (are you classing that as war / conflict)

Who know what else he might have discovered.

And Pythagoras and Archimedes