[Terr_]

If you mean like jetpacks and robots, it would probably look the same as our current timeline, given that "nowadays" is 70 years later plus the global diffusion of technological progress.

Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars.

[binary132]

The world wars advanced science and engineering enormously. Aeronautic, nuclear, medical, radio, computer, mass production, logistical, and space technologies were all powerfully driven by wartime demands. Innovation might have been pushed by capital and human needs, but I would think it would probably look very different than it does today.

[aftbit]

Or did the wars actually lead to progress? A challenging question. Strife breeds strength, but stability breeds prosperity.

[inglor_cz]

I wish could answer that.

On one hand, the fact that a lot of smart people are trying to kill you is a great motivation for rapid technological advance and reduction of red tape.

On the other hand, many of the young men in uniform who were torn apart by shells and mines could have been new Einsteins.

[kaashif]

> many of the young men in uniform who were torn apart by shells and mines could have been new Einsteins.

The problem of geniuses dead in wars pales in comparison to the number languishing in poverty or ignorance. These may number in the billions right now.

How many potential Einsteins are miserably toiling away in dead end jobs? How many Ramanujans are eking out lives in villages in India? So on and so forth.

And another issue: if 100 million die in war or 1 billion aren't born due to fertility collapse, which is worse for progress?

[inglor_cz]

Or how many really brilliant people spend their lives trying to push even more ads on the population at large, for good money and good living standard, but mostly harming humanity instead of helping it with their talent.

Waste of talent doesn't necessarily take the form of poverty and danger. We should be aware of the other part of the scissor, because it means that improving living standards aren't a panacea for this problem.

Hungary 100 years ago, a fairly backward and mostly agricultural country, somehow produced a long string of incredible geniuses that contemporary Dubai cannot.

[Anotheroneagain]

I think the relentless push for progress leads to wars.

Think about it: You have a top 0.5% intelligent person. You can influence his carreer choice. You can either pay him a good wage to become a detective, or he can become scientist. If he becomes the former, a few good papers on horse fly entomology won't be written. If he becomes the latter, a dumb detective will cause an injustice that will escalate into an assassination, and a world war.

You got your cars, you got your airplanes, but you got a society in a state of disorder, that lead to the sciences getting taken over by morons as well, and made further progress impossible, with the east asian countries competing over technological superiority.

[mxkopy]

Industrial or technological progress, sure, but at the expense of cultural and societal progress.

Tech trees are straightforward to visualize but I challenge you to think of a law tree or social norm tree as well.

[dotnet00]

Isn't a lot of the initial progress of women being treated as equals in the workplace in the US related to their work in factories during WW2?

IIRC the end of colonialism and thus the end of the associated oppression, is also associated with the world wars, as they left the colonial powers too exhausted to retain their overseas empires.

[aftbit]

Perhaps, although perhaps cultural progress as well. For example, perhaps the hippie movement of the 60s was enhanced by the threat of draft in the Vietnam war.

[__MatrixMan__]

> Perhaps the real question is how much incrementally-better everywhere would be without old wars.

Agreed. How many years does each war set us back? And are there hurdles in our future that we will be unable to clear if we too often let war impede our progress.

[ScoobleDoodle]

There's an alternative as unfortunate as it may be of: how many years does each war move us forward. Or how many years behind would we be without the war having occurred.

[__MatrixMan__]

Hmm, yeah maybe it sort of breaks the before/after model. We're over here because the war happened, and would be over there if it hadn't.

Sorta depends if progress means being ready to repel a hostile alien invasion, or if it means being capable of large scale cooperation on geoengineering projects in the face of biosphere collapse, or you know... whatever other can-you-survive-this test comes our way.

[grujicd]

You can also wonder what would happen if Gavrilo Princip missed Franc Ferdinand in 1914? Single bullet could completely change world history. Would Austro-Hungary declare war to Serbia over some other cause? Or would some other incident start war between other two countries, leading to the same worldwide havoc? Some say that history is inevitable since it's result of massive forces which are similar to laws of nature. I'm not that sure. Tensions can be defused, diplomacy might work, some other incident could lead to different kind of conflict at different location. What is pretty much sure is that there would still be wars since they seem to be inevitable.

But if that one shot missed, perhaps we wouldn't have WW1, and without WW1 there wouldn't be WW2 as circumstances would be completely different. Was there a single development as small as firing a single bullet that affected world's history this much?

[greedo]

Nationalism was coming alive as a powerful political force in the second decade of the 20th Century, so it's hard to estimate what would have happened had Princip missed. Odds are the Black Hand would have simply kept trying to kill the King as a means of obtaining independence.

Even had the Balkans not been the powder keg, I think there was not much doubt that there would be a conflict on the Continent between a unified Germany and either Russia or France. Germany was trying to compete for colonies, for resources, and even without the web of treaties that lead to WW1, would have found a reason to flex their muscle.

[dotnet00]

IIRC all of humanity outside of Africa has gone through a tight population bottleneck at some point, such that a massive portion of human history can probably trace its root to a group of early humans managing to survive a certain encounter, none of which would've existed if they hadn't survived.

[hollerith]

The severe bottleneck 800,000 years ago includes the ancestors of all modern Africans.

[dotnet00]

Yeah was just coming back to edit after reading up on it. A bottleneck from 100k to 1000 human ancestors ~800,000 years ago for ~100,000 years.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487

"Population size history is essential for studying human evolution. However, ancient population size history during the Pleistocene is notoriously difficult to unravel. In this study, we developed a fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent this difficulty and calculated the composite likelihood for present-day human genomic sequences of 3154 individuals. Results showed that human ancestors went through a severe population bottleneck with about 1280 breeding individuals between around 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. The bottleneck lasted for about 117,000 years and brought human ancestors close to extinction. This bottleneck is congruent with a substantial chronological gap in the available African and Eurasian fossil record. Our results provide new insights into our ancestry and suggest a coincident speciation event."

[crote]

I'm not convinced it's that simple.

Take a look at the very first Nazi book burning, for example, which targeted Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. It was the leading institution of its kind, and the complete destruction of its archive and community not only set back the LGBT community in Germany (and to a large extent the rest of the Western world) some 30 years - it didn't really recover until at least 1970!

If it can cause that much damage there, imagine what it would've done to the wider scientific community.

[jackcosgrove]

I think the trick is to either get governments to fund basic research for a reason other than national defense, or get them to fund it for that reason but then never use the weapons.

[shiroiushi]

>get them to fund it for that reason but then never use the weapons.

That's basically what happened during the Cold War. Aerospace technology and others were advanced incredibly (e.g., the Apollo moon missions).

These days, we don't get this so much, so we have to rely on advertising companies to give us innovation...