With the Chinese it was partly their favouritism of tea. With tea they kept pottery, but we made glasses for our alcohol, this glass enabled us to make things like light bulbs, while the chinese were still using paper lamps.
thank you
Put it this way, without war the world would be overpopulated and food sources could sustain the amount of people. We’d also have a lot less technology.
Essentially war is one of the beneficial things in the development of the world.
Having said that, if Roman technology was allowed do develop further we would probably be a lot more technological by now. But that is all speculation and based on the assumption that inventions like electricity are based on development of technology and not the human brain being capable to envision and develop it.
Holy shit it’s Kester.
It depends. A lot of the technology that we take for granted now – electricity, radio, etc – could have developed a lot sooner had the shackles of religious conservatism not been in place. Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton etc were the lucky ones, they largely escaped religious persecution, whether physical or social, for their “blasphemous” research into “ungodly science”.
But conflict has also led to a lot of other advancements in technology. A lot of medicine practices and technology come from attempts by armies to better help wounded soldiers. The need for better weapons than the enemy’s led to advancements into tooling and machinery, first to build better weapons but then to build other, more advanced things. The internet we all know and love for instance is an offshoot of attempts to greatly increase military communications and information technology.
Capitalism (that is, the quest for munnies) is similarly both a good and bad force of progress. It is good in that throughout the industrial revolution, men eagerly looked for better ways to produce and distribute goods. Largely throughout this process these advancements which made producers and businessmen richer also brought more commodities to the general public, improved standards of living as everyone competed for the best products in order to make the most profit. However, there always comes a point where the improvement of technology meets the dead-end of decreasing profit margins; make things TOO good, develop technology TOO advanced, and you risk sabotaging your own business interests (imagine, for instance, how many billions upon billions of dollars are spent because of cancer throughout the world – if a cure for cancer was ever found it would, overnight, bankrupt a massive sector of the health industry, from the people who build and supply the machines to detect and diagnose and treat it, to the pharmaceutical companies that produce cancer treatment drugs by the truckload, to the specialized doctors who practice in that field).
Space technology is another good example. From 1957 to 1969, 12 years is all it took between the first satallite in space to the first man on the moon. At that rate we should’ve had people on Mars in the 80s – but with the Soviet Union gone, the space race pointless, nobody is willing to spend the billions needed to continue on from where we left off – even if today Obama declared we’d go back to the moon it probably wouldn’t happen for another 30 years (assuming the US doesn’t explode into Civil War over it with Republicans clamoring about “space communism”).
So yeah, are we ahead, are we behind? I get the idea of what you’re trying to ask but I don’t think it’ll ever be possible to make anywhere near an educated guess as we have nothing else to compare to. Perhaps in a few hundred years when we meet buttloads of alien civilizations we can be all giddy and compare notes on how we did and shit but until then it’s all just completely uneducated drivel.
That said, I think we’re behind. Since the collapse of the Roman Empire to today there have been far more years of regression than there have been of progress.
Right now science is mostly held back by ethics, and people are not ready to give those up just yet.