HorseloverFat writes:
> Working 15 hours days as a serf just to make enough calories to work again
> tomorrow didnt really lend itself to such flights of fancy.
The average working hours of a peasant in the Middle Ages was, if anything, less than the average working hours of a person today. It was in the early part of the Industrial Revolution that people worked extremely long hours:
The Mayans believed that four apocalypses had already happened, at that the fifth, whopper apocalypse was still yet to come.
The 7th Day Adventists made some more-believable-than-most predictions. They envisioned a future where things are simply much dirtier, people are compelled to be vegetarians because meat tends to be contaminated, that kind of thing.
Europeans at the turn of the century, but before WWI, believed that the world was entering into a grand golden age for humanity. Boy were they surprised!
The Hesiod scheme of history envisions decline over time, the contrary of progress. Perhaps the biggest conceptual break with humanity’s past was when the future replaced the past as the golden age, and the teleology of history did a 180. I think Christianity was the first ideology to promise a better world in the future. When secularism replaced theology as the dominant paradigm, science and technology replaced God and Jesus as the saviors of the world and the source of a brighter future.
God was dethroned. Now Technology in its turn has been dethroned too. What’s left? Drugs? Mysticism? Neo-primitivism?
But that is how it goes with many things: I have the strong suspicion that a lot of interesting inventions would have developed much more slowly if the military hadn’t got their hands on them.
The airplane, for instance. I am sure that if the military hadn’t seized on the possibilities of heavier-than-air vehicles (and two world wars, in this respect, helped concentrate the mind wonderfully, so to speak), airplanes wouldn’t be now nearly as advanced as they are.
Not to mention space exploration: Rockets as we know them are, essentially, tweaked ICBMs.
There is also a counterexample of a technology that began as a military thing and spread out mightily: The ARPANET, the fore-runner of the internet, began as a project to keep military computer networks functional even in the event of the Russians nuking the place.
Yes. The medieval mindset had no concept that the current state of things would change, particularly the relationships of classes of people to each other and to organizations. Individuals could sometimes rise and fall, although fate would almost always force them back into their proper role; but there was no concept that class structure could or would change. A popular concept was the Wheel of Fortune – the Wheel rewarded some individuals and brought about the downfall of others, but the emphasis of the concept was on circularity and inevitability in a fixed worldview. Technological change was present in the medieval world, but they literally tried not to think about it (examples: the Pope outlawing the use of crossbows except against non-Christians; blank areas of maps filled with “here there be dragons”).
What defines the Middle Ages is the mindset, really, not the technology per se. Once the concept of progress (social and technological) entered general use, the Renaissance had begun. The Renaissance was an intellectual transformation, not only in specific ideas, but in the general idea that change itself was not necessarily heresy.
The concept of “medieval futurism” makes no sense because anyone able to think about future change is, by definition, already outside of the medieval mindset.
Heh. Lends an even more sinister meaning to “Blue Screen of Death.”
Most visions of “the future” occur in fiction, and their purpose is to tell a story, or at least to make a point, rather than honestly to attempt a serious prediction. A noteworthy exception is the book One Hundred Years Progress of the United States, available in full text at One Hundred Years' Progress of the United States ...: With an Appendix ... - Charles Louis Flint, Charles Francis McCay, John C. Merriam, Thomas Prentice Kettell, Linus Pierpont Brockett - Google Books, which has an appendix projecting the year 1970. It’s quite specific, with populations, numbers of farm animals, and so forth. It’s a fascinating read.
As you might expect, an effort like this is strikingly insightful at times and amazingly blind at others. In one key respect, though, it was neither: The author assumed that the geographic expansion of the United States would continue. The author had no way of knowing that the recent acquisition of Alaska represented the culmination of American expansion, and that further expansion would be limited to a few islands. Since the actual United States is smaller than projected, naturally its growth did not keep pace with projections.
But, the inventions I mentioned were not technology, particularly the the compass and gunpowder; they were along the lines of voodoo dolls until a practical application by the military took them to the level of an engineered technology and development.
I am certainly no gung-ho pro military man; quite the opposite, but I do recognize how better and bigger ways to snuff out human lives have managed to take scientific application far beyond what would have been developed in a peaceful world, or at least at a comparitively breakneck speed.
As I was reading some of the other posts, though, I began thinking about weapons: boomerangs, yo-yos, slingshots, etc. that have become childrens toys. I hardly think their inventors envisioned the amusement factor of their newest finds. 
Be careful to distinguish real military technology from grant proposals funded by the military. When I first used the ARPAnet in 1974 or so I was at one university talking to another. I’m not sure any military people were even connected.
Most of the rockets used for the early satellites (except Vanguard) were not adopted from ICBMs - they were ICBMs. However, remember that before there was military use of rockets there were the civilian inventors, most notably Oberth in Germany.
As to the ARPANET, I will yield to your experience as an early user of it (Heck, in 1974 I was 7… :P)
However, regarding rockets, I have to say that, had it not been for the military taking those early civilian inventions in hand, rockets would not have become what they became, with the efficiency they have.
Not that I am a gung-ho military man … But, as ajdebosco said, it was the military who took those technologies and developed them into a high and practical level.
Another one I am thinking of: DARPA paying for the development of autonomous, self-driving cars. The technology has been there for a while (when I was studying for my Ph.D. there were guys in one of the labs at the university who were dealing precisely with that problem), but I think that it is the military taking an interest in it what will push it to a practical level.
Or the pervasive use of GPS, which began as a purely military thing for better guiding cruise missiles and planes to their objectives. The theoretical basis for GPS has been there for quite a while, but it took the military to make it into a practical technology (the Russians had -and have- their own system, GLONASS, although this one, as far as I know, is only for the use of their military).
So, I guess that what I am saying is that even though many technologies ultimately originated in the civilian sphere, it is the military application of those early technologies what gave them the “push” to become really practical.
Snack cakes.
I would like to be the first to welcome our Giant Twinkie Overlords. All hail their golden splendor!
I wasn’t arguing that this wasn’t the case–simply nitpicking that the military did not develop-in-the-sense-of-originate, but rather developed-in-the-sense-of-expanded-on-and-found-further-applications-for.
Yes, I’m old. 
Absolutely. The German military got interested in the club, put money and resources behind it, and redirected the rockets from the start to London. A lot of the launches in the late '40s for scientific work were done on captured V2s, before we developed our own.
I don’t know how autonomous the drones being used in Afghanistan are, but that’s an example where the military is far ahead of the civilian world because of need.
There is movement both ways. In the old days pretty much all the components in military electronics systems were Mil-Spec special builds. Now there is lots of COTS (Commercial off the shelf) hardware, because the commercial market is way ahead of the military market. I’ve gotten myself a little involved in the military electronics world, and the difference between it and the commercial world is amazing. Each side is ahead in certain areas.
There is no god but god, and Little Debbie is his mother.
I thought it was Sara Lee, Suzy-Q or…:smack:
This is how schisms happen. Dibs on burning the infidels!
mmmmm - infidels.
We still have all sorts of “bold” designs from <insert-x-trendy-architectural-slash-design-movement>, but people have demonstrated that they just generally don’t want them. Sure, government structures and office buildings and so on get the post-modernist treatment, but people seem to be very conservative in their dwellings – albeit with minor trends over the decades, iof course.
Count me as one who finds a lot of Modernist architecture (at least the Corbusier-type concrete blocks of the 60s) to be eyesores, so I think people stick with the Colonials because…they’re timeless.
A common myth. Here is a debunking from an authoritative source:
And another, from the director of ARPA in the relevant timeframe:
Sadly, it seems this myth will survive a nuclear war just fine.