[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.