Aliens? Who cares. Yes, lets give up war. The reason for giving up war is a secondary concern.
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This guy seems like heād be a real hoot at parties. Iād totally sit and listen to his wacky stories, because I have a soft spot for crazy old dudes.
Also, yes to this:
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I was thinking about aliens hanging out on Jupiterās moons or something like that. Light from the Atomic Bomb detonations have not reached many other planets outside of our solar system anyway. This presupposes an alien overseer watching over the planet and presumably deciding when to announce themselves/destroy the potential threat.
Iād be inclined to agree (though not to necessarily assume that there are the fields of science necessary to be an intergalactic species). Just by looking at the math on how slowly even fairly crazy uses of nuclear propulsion gets you much of anywhere, it seems fairly clear that somebody with a thermonuclear starship is rather less well prepared to travel beyond their solar system than someone with a wooden raft and a supply of dried fish is to travel across the Pacific.
The only question is whether we are in fact missing something, or if dying withing spitting distance of where you evolved is just how things go in this universe.
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What if the aliens just want a specific demographic for bad thingsā¦ such as:
Or:
Has anyone noticed these are very similar storiesā¦
I hate to pop your balloon, but if you examine the facts, itās been wars and military research that have lead to advances.
Transistors and Integrated Circuits ? Developed under DoD funding for the ICBM development effort.
And might I remind you, the INTERNET, and the TCP/IP protocol, were developed as a survivable network in case of nuclear war. . . .
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It was definitely a UFO, because it could change position in the sky by 3 or 4 degrees in 3 or 4 seconds. ā¦ There was no other explanation for it except that it was the real thing."
Or, you know, the ISS, which travels across the sky at about that speed.
I donāt think thatās necessarily always trueā¦ while the Cold War did contribute to modern technology, I donāt think you can say the same about 19th century technological innovations always (though the American civil war did speed up some developements underwayāspread of railroads in the north for example, or canned foods). Iād say maybe the key is not War/DoD per se, but government underwriting for technological innovation?
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While itās undeniable that military research has led to technological advances, itās hardly the only source, and I donāt think thereās any reason to assume itās necessary to have wars for that sort of thing to happen. Whatās needed is motivation- and right now humanity has plenty of reasons to innovate for its own survival that are much more dangerous than a hostile foreign power.
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And WHY do governments underwrite research ? Heck, who underwrites most US Federally-funded research now ?? The greater National Security apparat. (i.e. DOD, Homeland Security, and the Intelligence Agencies). Even our research into infectious disease is funded by USARMIID. . .
Thatās a textbook example of damning with faint praise.
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Sure, but my point was that not all technological innovations are tied to military spending, and this was less true before the second World War than it is now. Governments have been known to invest in things that donāt kill people once or twiceā¦
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There ARE vast fields of science that we donāt even know we lack yet.
They donāt kill people. . . .today. (Cue James T. Kirk, . . . .)
When TCP/IP was invented, nobody considered it could be weaponized. . .
āI like to go to the park and watch the children scream and jumpā¦ they donāt know Iām shooting blanksā¦ā
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No, Iām afraid thatās an urban legend.
The Internet was purposely designed to withstand local administrative cluelessness and telco incompetence, both of which are (potentially) more devastating to computer communications than war. Until fairly recently you could knock out the Internet with exactly two low-yield nuclear devicesā¦ however, with the globalization and commercialization of the 'Net, and the corresponding increase in redundant connections, itās probably becoming fairly war-resistant these days.
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Which is a great side effect of war.
But neither of us know if there were no war that we couldnāt or wouldnāt have achieved the same things, with masses of spare change left over. Itās not like these things were devised by soldiers. Scientists would still exist, it would just be a different industry bank rolling them.
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Thatās kind of true. The big advantage of the Internet wasnāt that it was immune to disruption from someone blowing away a few central backbone links, it is that when someone stands up a replacement link the network heals itself quickly. This is as opposed to the manually configured routing solutions in previous networks that would require operators to update many nodes by hand if a big backbone link went down.
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Have you read Paul Edwardās The Closed World? It discusses the relationship between the military āclosed worldā and the emergence of computing (developed both within the military and in academic settings). But he discusses how even technologies not specifically developed as weapons had war time uses, or at least were imagined to have such. I canāt remember if he discusses TCP/IP protocols or notā¦
And donāt forget that there were technologies adapted by the military from the civilian world, too (planes, the internal combustion engine). Iād say both of those are just as if not more world changing than internet and the technologies that go along with itā¦
