How will war affect technology

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by apendrapew, Mar 11, 2003.

  1. apendrapew Oral defecator Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    577
    So many inventions we have that we take for granted are created by a necessity, which increases during wartime. TV and internet are a few big ones. I know there are some really scary new weapons coming into existence now. For an example, there are already prototypes of railguns, which can fire a projectile about 3 miles per second, making the projectile able to easily penetrate almost anything in its path, including tanks. There are also microwave guns for the military that superheat the water molecules in a person's skin, which causes pain and submission. I could go on. So it has been in the process, but that stuff was before we were under real threat. If the war gets really bad, scientists and engineers will have to work overtime to make our technology better. To pay for the war, we're going to be paying a lot more on taxes. Imagine what impact it's going to have on the prices of gasoline. We've procrastinated long enough, and soon it's going to hit us. Americans will again experience necessity. What do you see necessity doing for us?
     
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  3. spacemanspiff czar of things Registered Senior Member

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    well if gas prices go completly to hell then maybe this will lead to a better push for alternate engery. which in the long run is a good thing.
     
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  5. gendanken Ruler of All the Lands Valued Senior Member

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    The fact that you are seated comfortably whiling the hours away over a keyboard when hoardes of others while their's on starvation and poverty is the only proof you need to see that all we do in troubled times is live them out by proxy.

    Say the scientific community comes out tomorrow with a fashinable line of ultra-weapons that with a secret code and the push of a button will blow all Africa and all Japan right off the globe. Fine.
    We're big. We push all that weight around.
    Now say on top of all this that secret code were implanted in 2 year old boys globally. This war would stop COLD if Bush had to blow that boy's brains out and gut him to get to that code.
     
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  7. apendrapew Oral defecator Registered Senior Member

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    Ahhh.. that's what necessity will do for us.
     
  8. shadows technocrat:Teach me Registered Senior Member

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    were in an era of continuous change and conflict. It is only nature that technical pregression be extremely fast as it is now. I think it will be communications and energy technologies that will get the boost now.
     
  9. wet1 Wanderer Registered Senior Member

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    8,616
    War has always been a technology pusher. From days of the balista and the seige engine to present day.

    Only now a days, it comes faster. What took years and generations to figure out and perfect now takes weeks and months. Face it technology is on the fast track.

    Much of what we enjoy as present day life style was developed from war research or from space exploration research. Now the problem is more to find what someone else has done on the subject rather than discovering some new field or application. That indicates that we are progressing faster than we can apply the what has been discovered. In other words, everything is not explored to it's final applications before something new is discovered. We are finding faster than we can assimulate what has been found.

    The computer has done a lot towards locating what research has done on a particular field. It is far easier to locate than looking through a libarary for some selected work. That too is bogging down. As the data to be located is immersed in the equivalent of many libraries of data and spread across the globe. The search takes longer, the data is legion in amount. There will come better methods and computers with ever greater speed and data holding abilities.

    Something I wonder about now is that most of our data is in electronic form. Much of histories data is being converted. At some point our sum of knowledge will rest within electronic media. Should someone discover the way to pull the plug on all power sources, where will that leave us?
     
  10. Gifted World Wanderer Registered Senior Member

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    2,113
    If it weren't for WW2, we might have had the transistor years earlier than we did. When the war started, Bell pulled the funding to do other stuff deemed more important to the war.
     
  11. Vortexx Skull & Bones Spokesman Registered Senior Member

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    2,242
    On the other hand, the enigma codecracking issues of WW2 gave a push to number crunching machines / turing / von neumann concept etc... the framework in wich you could actually use the transistor...
     
  12. gurglingmonkey More Amazing in RL Registered Senior Member

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    137
    It's the whole Technological singularity thing. Each invention brings us closer to the next invention. Every time we invent or learn or discover, we close that gap between us and the next breakthrough.

    Gurglo
     
  13. cyberia Lounge Act Registered Senior Member

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    169
    If necessity breeds invention why don't we make inventions we actually need.

    I think we have enough weapons to kill people with why not working on the necessity of saving people.

    There are so many more devastating and world wide wars that I think the government should focus on rather than say Bombing the shit out of Iraq for paper thin reasons.

    Cancer

    Sars

    AIDS

    Stupidity!!

    Seriously!
     
  14. JoojooSpaceape Burn in hell Hippies Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    498
    Effectively one can say that war alwasy effects technology, if many could simply stay the same, and not have to worry about guarding his crops or hise land or anything else then war would probably not exist, however you have to take in to mind that greed is everywhere and every man , city, country, nation, and continent has to be better than the other, and better than the next
     

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