Did wars helped us advance in technology?

[jagadeesh]

Here I am not supporting wars. This is just my theory (could be a foolish one). I always think that wars have made us more intelligent. It is the need to defend ourselves we advanced in technology (or is it the other way around). We started with weapons like swords and moved upwards. We came up with radios, planes, Turing machine which led to advancements in computers.

 

As we advanced in computer technology, mastered its language we started to get many answers for a lot of questions. I also feel like if we find some new language (like computer language) we get all the answers to the questions about our universe.

 

So my question is, are wars a reason for our advancements.?

[MigL]

Problems led to the solutions which result in advancement.

War provides a lot of problems.

[swansont]

Wars (or preparation for potential wars) have a way of creating specific needs coupled with motivated sponsors who provide the money to do the research.

[iNow]

The question here is whether or not we'd have made these advancements without wars to facilitate them, or if we'd instead be stuck where we are and nearly stationary had the same money and focus been applied without our wars. I think the answer to that is easy. We do advance in other ways even absent a war, though it's hard to see the type of paradigm shifting / orders of magnitude changes without it.

 

I know that I, for one, would be curious to know what could have been done to advance our culture and civilization along other paths (sustainability, health, etc.) if that motivation and spending existed absent the desire to kill each other / defend ourselves for tribal/nationalistic reasons.

 

Absolutely, many of our advancements came from wars, but I'd position this slightly differently. War is not the relevant metric or variable here, IMO. Investment with clear objectives and focus and large numbers of people driving toward a common purpose are.

 

Now... If we could only have a true war against the anthropogenic drivers of climate change and drought. Imagine.

[DimaMazin]

So my question is, are wars a reason for our advancements.?

We can use wars for our advancements, but wars aren't reason for our advancements. Because war can kill us without creation of our advancement.

Edited April 3, 2015 by DimaMazin

[Phi for All]

Whenever a heavy investment is made in one area, it almost always benefits others as well. War might make a sniper's scope necessary, but a modified version of that can help an engineer be more accurate too.

 

But I think a much smarter investment is space. NASA, ESA, and others come up with some of the greatest stuff for working in space, and much of it benefits many different industries on-planet as well. It's a smarter across-the-board investment than war, imo, since efficiency improves in industry when you're not killing people.

[Airbrush]

The life or death struggle of war is a powerful motivator for people to come up with better ideas.

[pavelcherepan]

But I think a much smarter investment is space. NASA, ESA, and others come up with some of the greatest stuff for working in space, and much of it benefits many different industries on-planet as well. It's a smarter across-the-board investment than war, imo, since efficiency improves in industry when you're not killing people.

 

But much of that stuff also came from war, from developing long-range delivery systems for nuclear weapons. When Americans found out that there was a metal ball beeping in space did the rejoice in celebration of this tremendous achievement or did they think that now commies will pew-pew them with nuclear bombs from space?

[DimaMazin]

The life or death struggle of war is a powerful motivator for people to come up with better ideas.

Archimedes created more useful things at peace time than at wartime. And at all when war kill scientists then it isn't useful for our advancement.

[imatfaal]

Archimedes created more useful things at peace time than at wartime. And at all when war kill scientists then it isn't useful for our advancement.

 

Exactly - Archimedes was a sad case of this; killed by a Roman soldier when his hometown was overrun.

 

And think of where we might be if the brains and resources of the Manhattan project had been focussed towards energy production rather than destruction; perhaps safe controlled fusion would be twenty years in the past rather than always twenty years in the future

[swansont]

 

But I think a much smarter investment is space. NASA, ESA, and others come up with some of the greatest stuff for working in space, and much of it benefits many different industries on-planet as well. It's a smarter across-the-board investment than war, imo, since efficiency improves in industry when you're not killing people.

 

Just had a conversation along these lines with a retiree, who worked on the GPS constellation before becoming a coworker. He pointed out that a significant kick-start to miniaturization of electronics such as integrated circuits was reducing payload, because it's so expensive to launch satellites.

[John Cuthber]

It seems to me that almost any human endeavour produces scientific or technological progress.

Whether we are trying to feed ourselves cure illness or even build cathedrals, we use those goals as a springboard to new ways of working.

The thing that's notable about war is that people are prepared to put a lot of effort and resources into it so it's likely to produce a lot of research and development.

 

On the other hand, if the whole world woke up tomorrow and realised that war is a fundamentally silly way to go about things, the same resources would be available to employ on other things- healthcare is an obvious example- and I suspect that the overall rate of "inventing new stuff" would not fall due to the lack of war; it might even rise.

[swansont]

 

On the other hand, if the whole world woke up tomorrow and realised that war is a fundamentally silly way to go about things, the same resources would be available to employ on other things- healthcare is an obvious example- and I suspect that the overall rate of "inventing new stuff" would not fall due to the lack of war; it might even rise.

 

One drawback of that is the emphasis on short-term thinking in the commercial arena that's arisen over the past few decades. It seems that nobody does research anymore unless there's a clear way to monetize it. You have to have a "business case". (Government sponsored research is even feeling the pressure, but there is still some support for basic research, and a fair fraction of this is via the military.) So even if war went the way of the dodo, you'd have to convince the private sector that basic research is a worthwhile endeavor.

[MigL]

I would say the biggest driver for miniaturization of electronics was not payload reduction ( just to be contrary swansont ), but rather power draw and switching speed.

[iNow]

They're not mutually exclusive.

[Ten oz]

If we use WWI and WWII as our examples then the answer would seem to be yes. However there has been many more wars fought throughout history. Many wars have actually resulted in technological decline. Despite all the discoveries and piratical uses of science by the Greeks and Egyptians we still had the Dark Ages following the collaspe of Rome. War during the crusades did not help advance Arab technology. Arguably it ultimately set them back.

IMO what changed the world in the 20th century was electricity and the combustible engine. Neither were specifically developed for or in response to war. Nikola Tesla and Tomas Edison did limited work for the government but I think it is fair to say their contributions to technology were not driven by war and would exist today without any of the wars of the 20th century. Same can be said for Siegfried Marcus and Henry Ford. The Wright Brothers as well did not develop flight as a solution for war.

[swansont]

I would say the biggest driver for miniaturization of electronics was not payload reduction ( just to be contrary swansont ), but rather power draw and switching speed.

 

You're being contrary to the person who was involved in the satellite launching game. As iNow notes, these aren't mutually exclusive — if you reduce power draw you solve weight issues, too, but the story he told me (the discussion was in the context of the difficulty in predicting future technology) was that they were specifying requirements and the answer came back that they could do the circuitry but it would weigh 10x the payload limit. So there was a drive to reduce payload. Payload is what costs the big $$

 

And think about it. The personal computer wasn't the drive for integrated circuitry — nobody thought there was a market for them when ICs were being developed. Home electronics didn't need further miniaturization — what's the business case to make a small radio marginally smaller?

[MigL]

You're right.

Back in the 70s, when discrete logic was used ( 74Sxxxx series ), any complex digital circuit would have been very heavy ( and large ). But with the advent of the microprocessor and other large scale integration, more integration meant more performance/weight and performance/price, in accordance with Moore's law.

It was only in the middle to late 90s that ICs started running into heat and/or switching speed issues ( one drives the other ).

[randomc]

You're right.

Back in the 70s, when discrete logic was used ( 74Sxxxx series ), any complex digital circuit would have been very heavy ( and large ). But with the advent of the microprocessor and other large scale integration, more integration meant more performance/weight and performance/price, in accordance with Moore's law.

It was only in the middle to late 90s that ICs started running into heat and/or switching speed issues ( one drives the other ).

Is there any part of your post except the identifiction of 74sxxx series (i don't pretend to know what that is) that isn't redundant?

 

I hate to be a snip, but i feel like i spend a lot of time seperating the wheat from the chaff, as it were...

 

Your not making this easier

Edited April 6, 2015 by hypervalent_iodine
Expletive removed

[MigL]

Oh I don't think you hate it.

I think it comes naturally to you.

[hypervalent_iodine]

!

Moderator Note

randomc, try and keep your language family friendly, please.

[MigL]

My apologies if my previous post was redundant.

My point was that although size/weight were the drivers 30-40 yrs ago, they are not currently.

Sub-micron design rules, 3d gates and transistors, etc., are all in response to power and switching speed issues.

 

Or is this also redundant ?

[swansont]

My apologies if my previous post was redundant.

My point was that although size/weight were the drivers 30-40 yrs ago, they are not currently.

Sub-micron design rules, 3d gates and transistors, etc., are all in response to power and switching speed issues.

I agree, because now there's a much larger market driving advancement, only some of which is military. Once the notions that businesses only wanted word processing and nobody would want a home computer went away, we got into a cycle of computing improvement driving more powerful programs driving computing improvement, etc. And portable computers took off once processors got fast and power-friendly enough, and we bridged the mental block many businessmen had.

[jeffellis]

I say "No." Wars are not the reason for our advancement. In fact, the opposite is probably true--wars prohibit us from advancing. Many Indigenous peoples Codecs were destroyed by conquering Europeans. Who knows what was lost? In fact throughout history many cultures and much knowledge has been wiped clean because of wars. Christianity alone has raped us on so many levels. Reason for advancement?---creative minds inspired by our star, Sun.

[Bill Angel]

One technology that has not been mentioned yet is steam power. The use of steam power was initially devoted to peacetime persuits: pumping the water out of coal mines, spinning wool and weaving cloth. The use of steam engines to power battleships or to manufacture armaments came later. A good book on this subject is “The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention” by William Rosen.