The foundations of the Internet, the jet age and nuclear weapons are a direct result of the military funding during WW2 and the Cold War, which lead me to think, if these two conflicts didn’t happen, and without the impetus to fund research into things like this, what would everyday life be like now?
I think that things like Rocketry, Space Sciences etc would have occurred, perhaps at a slower more sustainable pace. The internet? Hard to tell, military need for communications are not going to disappear with WW2 and the Cold War, so I think it would have been developed.
The antibiotics revolution might never have gotten off the ground without WW2. The industrial infrastructure needed was too big and complex and hideously expensive and no private company would have bothered with it and neither would the Governments without the push of war. Post war it was possible because the groundwork had already been laid.
Nuclear weapons would not exist I think we can say confidently, they too required too much of an investment in research and infrastructure that a nation not faced with a World War would have bothered with.
I would say that TV and Jet engines actually were delayed due to the war as research went elsewhere. Frank Whittle had the Jet engine ready in the 1930’s, but war focused research on more immdiety rewarding prop designs. TV pretty much lost 10 years.
Nuclear weapons would surely exist. In the 30s before the war the groundwork for nuclear reactions had been done. Of course there wouldn’t have been the Manhattan Project, but people would have started building reactors in the early 40s, and at that point everyone would speculate about how a nuclear weapon might be constructed. And they’d conclude that it would take an unreasonably large amount of enriched Uranium, and the expense to create a system of centrifuges to enrich it would be staggering, but that it could be done by a government willing to spend billions on it.
Then we just wait until we get a government willing to spend billions on enriching uranium to create such a theoretical weapon. Nuclear power is on the horizon and you don’t need stupidly enriched uranium for it, and you probably breed plutonium from your reactor program. Dirty bombs are envisioned at this time.
By the late 50s there would be enough nuclear infrastructure that building a bomb would be easily possible for Germany, the US, or Russia. Then the device gets tested somewhere, and everyone starts getting nervous. It becomes clear that every country must have a stockpile of these things as a deterrent. Just because we’ve avoided WWII and the subsequent Cold War doesn’t mean we have a world of pacifists, we can avoid most of WWII just by sending Hitler to art school in the 20s. We’d still have the Japan-China war, but horrible as that was it’s still not WWII. If Germany keeps most of their Jewish scientists, then Germany is probably the leading nuclear power on the planet by 1960.
Yeah, I think the war accelerated a lot of research, but not much that wouldn’t have been developed eventually. And it hindered research in other, nonmilitary domains. Unless the US stays isolationist (and they wouldn’t, unless the rest of the world was), you’re still going to have the equivalent of a cold war, and generals and defense contractors are going to want to stay ahead of everyone else technologically.
The money (and breakthroughs) might come slower, but maybe not. The war destroyed a lot of minds and wealth that may have otherwise been used for technological research.
I think there is a fair chance that nuclear weapons would be banned if the politicians could ever be convinced that they were practical and not weird Buck Rodgers stuff.
Not sure about rockets. It would depend on whether an application could be found worth the money to replace the very high return one of hurling bombs across the planet. Maybe Comsats would have been justification.
Lots of research got done sponsored by the military - how we would have done would depend on what percent of the money funneled into weapons in our world would have been redirected into R&D.
I do think the internet would still exist, maybe funded by AT&T. While it was justified by a military application, it got through more because Prof. Licklider was at ONR. Anyone who has read or written grants knows that they have all sorts of justification requirements, which are met by fantasy which would make George R. R. Martin blush. I read one proposal for yacht-polishing robots which explained how these would help social justice.
Here is another advantage of no Cold War. During it those in Eastern Europe were stuck in societies where copiers were scarce and decent computers rare. Unleashing the very excellent brains there would have been helpful to making progress. I know some excellent researchers who could not have done their work in Cold War days.