WAR! What is it good for?

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

Still, advances in tech are usually made during wartime. It sucks, but it's still true.

a reply to: Blue Shift

Should have read your post before posting. You say everything I wanted to say, but better.

a reply to: Autorico

None of that list needed / had anything to do with war.

I'll bet if one really took a good look at it they were merely proliferated in pursuit of war. Wars that cost money and plunder everyone on every side. Meaning if people werent being robbed by their governments to fund war, they'd have had more money to proliferate it themselves.

If you look at the Law of Accelerating Returns you'll see technological progress moves at its ever expanding and increasingly fast rate, just like Moore's Law for computers, but for every kind of technology. Just because humans someplace on Earth somewhere are always fighting doesnt mean it has a causative effect on the Law.

I've never bothered reading a puff piece on the 'war gives us technology myth', but I predict that if there even exists one that mentions the Law it gets it bass ackwards.

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

I'm just going by what I was taught in school. I don't think ALL advances are made during war, although, some really important ones were.

a reply to: Blue Shift

War forces us to innovate. Our present technological society exists largely due to advances we made in 20th Century wars.

War forces us to waste our time and thoughts and energies on groupthink mass murder machinations. All the resources & energy wasted, those lives snuffed out, those people that spent all their time training to fight instead of to innovate, all those things built for those 100% expendable purposes, all those structures blown to pieces that we would waste time rebuilding, all those family trees and passed down knowledge & wisdom snuffed out, those libraries destroyed, those entire nations & regions destablized completely for generations, those crops destroyed and the famines they produced...

That old urban myth you have there is a losing argument!

a reply to: Autorico

School. Heh.

They also taught us that there are 7 continents LOL.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

Things change.

a reply to: Autorico

I say China should get to be the eighth "continent", and India the ninth! What? EU gets to be one. F.

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

North and South America should really be considered 1 continent since they are joined or were joined before the Panama canal.

originally posted by: IgnoranceIsntBlisss
That old urban myth you have there is a losing argument!

Still better than your completely fantastical argument where you give way too much credit for advancement and innovation to people and things that were destroyed.

Yes, if Little Jimmy had not died in the war, he would have certainly invented warp drive! See the logical problem there?

a reply to: Blue Shift

Because a handful of victors on each side spent time developing weapons, so that the masses could build and use them to defeat the other side, to the tunes of tens if not hundreds of millions DEAD or at least lives destroyed per century, well since we know it happened like that then surely it just makes total sense and was without a doubt the most efficient road to utopia!

Just look at all the time everyone in here spends bickering about Two Party Politics melodrama BS, an then others diverted from snip that has actual meaning in the world, like sports fanaticism proliferation, and American Idol obsessionism, and on and on the myriad armada of Breads & Circuses employed towards keeping everyone distracted and confused, and for what? TO keep us all diverted from the reality that the US has become the very imperialist war mongering machine that we deserved to defeat in World War 1, WW2, and the Cold War.

All that time, energy, resources, passions etc wasted down pipedream waterfalls of delirium. Meanwhile half the rest of the world kept in the stone age at 'the business end of the gun" (that is the United States).

All that waste, suffering, poverty, here, there, almost everywhere, so a handful of war profiteers can make bank and keep half the public stoked in "our" magnificence.

But NOPE, all that thousand fold ten times over waste of everything didnt set us back none, as a species, none at all!

originally posted by: IgnoranceIsntBlisss
But NOPE, all that thousand fold ten times over waste of everything didnt set us back none, as a species, none at all!

It might have "set us back." But you can't be sure, because the wars happened and peace did not. You're presenting a false dichotomy. It might also have been that we would have rapidly overpopulated the world while still living in mud huts, worshipping our old gods, and then been wiped out by a plague that would have easily been eliminated if only our medical knowledge had the chance to develop through serial wars.

You want to go back in time and be a hunter-gatherer who dies from a small cut, please feel free. That is if your mother and you survived childbirth.

I personally never started a war, so you can't blame me for all the wonders people might have accomplished otherwise.

originally posted by: Blue Shift

You're presenting a false dichotomy.

Incorrect!

I'm presenting an alternate dichotomy. The false dichotomy is this idea that perpetual war is the most efficient means of technology merely because that's how we got here and we have lots of tech.

That fantastical dichotomy is a cruel rationalization.

originally posted by: IgnoranceIsntBlisss
I'm presenting an alternate dichotomy.

It never happened.

I will say, though, that now that we have developed a strong technological society, it makes more sense for us to move away from internal conflicts and work to consolidate humanity and move it forward into the future while concentrating on threats that could affect the entire planet -- asteroids, comets, alien invasions, whatever -- because thanks to war we finally have the means to both spot the threats and put up a potentially effective defense.

originally posted by: Blue Shift
I will say, though, that now that we have developed a strong technological society, it makes more sense for us to move away from internal conflicts and work to consolidate humanity and move it forward into the future while concentrating on threats that could affect the entire planet -- asteroids, comets, alien invasions, whatever -- because thanks to war we finally have the means to both spot the threats and put up a potentially effective defense.