The Internet has its roots on a network developed by the US department of defense.
The first nuclear reactors were a byproduct of the development of the atom bomb.
The first computers were developed during WWII to perform cryptanalysis and solve military problems.
I'm sure opposite examples can be found (mapping the human genome ?) but I doubt they would make a vast majority.
Einstein, Salk, Tesla, Marconi, etc.
These people were't competing with other humans. They were competing with and seeking some dominance over NATURE.
Competing with other humans is a very tribalistic primitive behavior. Like gangs of chimps in a forest.
We need some outer force to compete against instead of turning on each other.
Competition is very much alive and well (not to mention quite vicious) even in the pursuit of knowledge.
Seems like you may need a bit of healthy competition to make the breakthrough, but afterwards cooperation is crucial otherwise the gains of the breakthrough are never realized.
I think it's just a product of the societies we've had. In all those cases it was the cooperative aspect that made the breakthrough. The competition was only needed to allocate the resources for it, though, given the nature of our society.
Far from me from not giving collaboration its due, but it is undeniable that the prime mover of many a human achievement was due to competition.
The real challenge for constant progress, I think, is to make this competition "healthy", as in "not depending on a world war or the threat of nuclear annihilation"...
The desire to survive against a perceived threat may have been the impetus for all of these but immediately beyond that, all of these could not have been possible without the collaboration between scientists.
If we could but discover a new motivation for technological innovation besides murder, such innovations could occur at a fraction of the time and cost and not run the risk of being used to suicide the entire species (i.e. nuclear weapons).
Additionally, when taking into consideration the existential threat of climate change, the survival of the species may now depend on a status quo of mutual aid rather than mutual sabotage.
I suspect much of our current technological age has its roots in the aftermath of the Manhattan project. Bombs led to use, led to other countries developing bombs, drove surveillance, drove space travel, drove the miniaturization of electronics in cycles that eventually gave us Hacker News on a smartphone [2].
[1] Richard Rhodes, 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' [2] Steve Blank, 'The Secret History of Silicon Valley', https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
More like the aftermath of WW2 - radar, jet engines, guided missiles, ballistic missiles, computers, nuclear power...
In a militarised competitive culture there's a huge "tax" on innovation, because maintaining a competitive posture is so incredibly draining and expensive that it starves all but a handful of possible projects of oxygen.
So instead of a tiny collection of stand-out military-sponsored projects you'd get a broad spectrum collection of equivalently powerful breakthroughs in many more areas.