[wongarsu]

The lingua franca in many sciences might still be German instead of English.

But for the most part the technology level of Germany is coupled to that of the rest of the world. It's hard to tell how that would have evolved. Maybe keeping the existing research clusters in Western Europe intact would have lead to faster advances in chemistry and particle physics.

On the other hand we probably wouldn't have a space station today if it weren't for the Nazis bankrolling a rocketry program, the two world wars leading to the creation and rise of the Soviet Union as well as the ascension of the United States to superpower status, and those two bankrolling competing space programs in the aftermath of WWII as a way to show the superiority of their respective ideological systems.

No WWII would have also meant no Manhattan Project. Even a more limited WWII where only the Pacific Theater happened wouldn't have lead to Manhattan Project since the fear of a German nuclear weapon was a major driver. Without nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles make little sense. Which both means that rocketry is even less likely to get off the ground, and that bombers would play a much bigger role (US firebombing on Japan had similar devastation as early nukes, at the expense of needing a lot more bombs for each attack). This would probably mean more advanced aviation than in our timeline.

Without WWII decolonization might not have happened. Not a major impact on Germany as they only had few colonies even before the wars, but the impact on their neighbors would be profound.

Without the world wars leading to the US rising to power and the cold war and nuclear threat the arpanet wouldn't have happened. Would Germany have created something similar, and would it be as decentralized without the defense department backing and threat of nukes taking out key network interchanges? Maybe French Minitel would still have happened and the internet would have been French?

[csomar]

You are assuming that without wars, all these achievements wouldn't have happened. Sure, that's one possibility. The other possibility is that people do them regardless. We have the iPhone today. A quite advanced device. We didn't need a war for that; but only the people willingness to connect with other people. In fact, most things we have from war are meaningless for everyday life.

Man to the space has a certain grandeur to it but it didn't fill soviet shelves with food.

[wongarsu]

There are plenty of business use cases for computers. Before the invention of electronic computers companies employed rooms full of people to do math by hand, so there was obvious economic incentive to automate this. Every step after that, including smartphones, had obvious economic incentives. Sometimes war helped it along, like demand for better weather simulation or the Apollo program kickstarting demand for silicon chips, but the advances would have come either way.

The same isn't true for rocketry. Communication satellites are nice, but took decades of massive investment, no private enterprise would bankroll this. Space stations still haven't really paid off, they will see (private sector) return of investment once we have figured out some kind of resource extraction (mining of asteroids, the moon, mars, or wherever). With advances in computer technology, metallurgy, etc these technologies got cheaper, so we might have rocketry by now, but I believe space stations would have happened at least a century later than in our timeline without the world wars and the cold war.

Similarly, the incentive for nuclear power is pretty weak. Civilian nuclear reactors aren't a great technology, half a century later we still struggle to make them make economic sense. Without the massive military backing kickstarted by WWII they wouldn't have happened. And that military backing might have eventually happened, but not at nearly the same pace without the threat of nazi nukes and soviet/us nukes.

[Ringz]

During my studies of computer science, a professor told me that Germans might have programmed in Latin if the war had not intervened. Simply programming in German would not have been „scientific“ enough. Think about it. Latin is highly defined and static. But German could be great for imperative programming /s