I’m always impressed and educated by Dopers who have extensive historical and contemporary knowledge about weapons, from atlatls to space lasers. Does anyone care to speculate on what the planet would look like if all the resources put into war weaponry, from design to manufacture to use, had been used to develop society?
And yes, I’m aware of the Simpsons episode where Moe chases off the aliens with a stick with a nail in it. But could we even do the math to calculate how much has been spent and what opportunities lost because of military spending on design and procurement?
Inspired by the quote from Eisenhower, to wit, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
On the flip side, I would be taking a look at what opportunities were gained due to military spending on design and equipment. . .
- Commercial and civil flight borne of WWI-era technological advances and interest
- The Internet, originally developed as a network to share data between DoD sites working on weapons development.
- Rocketry and spaceflight, again, as part of an ‘arms race.’
- . . . the list can go on and on. Ultimately, I say that everything can be traced back to some military spending, if you go far enough back in history.
I reckon if we, as a human race, didn’t put any resources into war weaponry, we’d be a planet of boring agrarians.
Tripler
We’d still have war–albeit with sticks and stones. No gettin’ around that.
Now flip it back!
Its a difficult question to answer because we didn’t just to decide one morning as a species we were going to spend a huge percentage of our global time and resources researching and building new and inventive ways to kill each other. We spend such a large percentage of our global time and resources researching that, as we spend an similarly large percentage of our global time and resources actually killing each other (or have done historically). In order for the former thing to go away it would require the latter thing to go away too, which would mean a completely different human society which large scale violence didn’t exist. That would be awesome and a huge win for mankind, but it wouldn’t really answer the question.
Didn’t we try diverting military spending to something else in the 1990s when the Cold War ended? What did we spend it all on? Pets.com and Napster?
Who is the “we” here? No one asked me what to do with it.