Greetings and Felicitations,
I combined several posts on violence as relative to space travel to eliminate the need for several replies to cover the same topic.
There are several problems with the line of reasoning that violence is a driver for future space exploration.
1. I will agree that violence and war has driven technological progress but many things that worked in the past don't work now. Just because we used something in the past doesn't necessarily mean it was the best method. Our progress as a species would have been slower if we hadn't relied on violence but that might not have been a bad thing. Perhaps if we had progressed a little slower technologically we would have had time to progress in social areas that cause a lot of problems today.
2. We have reached the point where the tools of violence have reached the point of negative return. The limits of our ability to destroy each other has reached the point where a small number of people can have a widespread impact on the live of people.
3. The expansion into space will create immense buffers between groups. Conflict within a group or within a ship will have great dangers to the crew and passengers. You simply cannot wage battles within a closed system and not destroy the system. For example, two people deciding that fighting is the best way to solve a problem will damage valuable property and endanger the entire colony.
Sincerely Yours,
C. David Neely
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Originally Posted by drgoodtrips
Well, it is basically irrelevant. The human proclivity for violence hasn't stopped any of our technological progress so far and, if anything, it's helped our exploration progress.
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Originally Posted by Captain Trips
Maybe thats how WE started.
It's NOT "irrelevant." It's "relevant" in that it has slowed and hindered things. Quite relevant.
Study history.
It's what is hindering things today.
Quite relevant.
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Originally Posted by drgoodtrips
You're making a case that violence has hindered technological process? Perhaps you should take your own advice about studying history. I think Medieval Europe and perhaps metallurgy in general would be a good place to start.
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Originally Posted by Tautog
Arguably our tendancy to kill each other is a plus to scientific advancement. At no time is new technology developed quicker than at time of war, usually in the form of weapons or weapon defences, but easily converted to more productive technologies in times of peace. A good example of this is Hitlers V2 rocket - while origionally designed as a weapon to defeat Britian,
the plans were captured by the Americans after the war and were used to build our first space rockets. NASA still uses the V2 rocket design to this day.
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