Thread: Technologically speaking, how would the world be different if war was unknown to humankind?

Warfare is so profuse throughout human history that I think it?s safe to say that our situation today is either in part, or wholly the result of our conflicts. So, I propose this question; if the human race had never known war, how would that change our technological development? Without fighting, would we have shared ideas and worked together resulting in more rapid technological developments or would the lack of conflict and its causes stagnate technological development?

Well, we'd have lots more convenient birth control, or we would have starved off by now.

Alot different, wewould have been running on nuclear power for over decades since we dont fear of its destructive sidem since the bomb was never invented, there wouldnt be and high tech weapon besides certain ones for hunting.

we wouldn't be as advanced because wars have helped spurred invention in every war. war creates the need for inventions and technological advancements. if we didn't have war, there wouldn't be as great of a need to invent and create new things.

Nothing speeds advancement along like war. It took us thousands of years to get the plane, but it took two world wars and 40 years for us to get jets.

It wasn't until a couple years after the second world war that we broke the sound barrier. The Germans were months away from completing a prototype and would have had it at least two years before it was later created if the war had lasted longer.

I believe that we would have a more grass roots approach to technology without knowing war. The main reason for our advancements have been because governments invested trying to find the next big thing that would win a war for them.
On the other hand, NASA was created not from war but rather from a curiousity about space. Man's curiousity always propells him forward so even without war we would still be making strides.

I think we would still be in the stone age.

Most of mans technical,scientific, medicinal and business breakthroughs have come from the result of technology designed for war or as a result of war.

an example is If it wasn't for the German V2 rockets America would not have a space program,

Difficult to say. People always need ways to resolve serious issues. No one is willing to share or give up land and resources to an unknown people to can hardly communicate with (this is speaking from the past)

But say people where just extra nice and shared everything we would have run out of resources and died out by now.

It's the competivity that keeps us striving for more and for better.

But in the fairy tale that things turned out in the best possible way from this niceness I'd say we'd help each other out and share ideas increasing the development of mankind globally. Thus boosting the rate of technological development.

good question. lots of people can say they wished we had world peace, they wished that war never existed, but what if sometimes war IS the only way to solve a certain problem? and to the techonological part of your question, i was watching a show on world war 2 the other day (no i dont normally spend my free time doing that--i wasnt feeling well and it was the only thing on tv) but it actually turned out to be pretty interesting. it focused less on the war itself, and more on the things accomplished because of the war. competition is good for people sometimes, with sports, academics, technology, etc. our communications wouldnt be near where they are today without war, nor would transportation (airplanes, etc.). radio waves were a concept developed by britain in the war, and those are only a few examples. so, in short, if we could live in a theoretical world without war, it would be a world far behind technologically than we are today.

Technology always moves forward faster in time of war. It's a sad commentary, but true. Governments have more funding available during wartime and it seems to evaporate during times of peace. Whether some of the high tech gadgetry we have today would have evolved without the stimulus of wartime needs is hard to guess. Perhaps humans would have evolved in other, more peaceful ways - we might have learned to empathize to the point where we could pick up each other's thoughts and wouldn't need cell phones - and wouldn't that be a lovely world! You wouldn't have the person standing in line next to you at the cash register blathering away in a loud voice, you wouldn't have kids muttering into their cell phones when they were supposed to be listening to lectures in college, you wouldn't have -- oh, well, you can probably fill in a few of these blanks for yourself.