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Comment by vtange | Hacker News Reader

It's funny you end your comment with that remark on war...

The Internet you mentioned at the top of your comment saw its roots as a DARPA project called "ARPANET". That's right, it was a Department of Defense project.

During the Cold War and the Space Race, the military was heavily tied with "general science and technology research". Aerospace, materials, you name it, if it had some sort of military application it was looked into.

So yeah, war sucks and the military might waste money in some projects but it's unwise the look at military and science in black-and-white, this-or-the-other terms.

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DARPA just funds research. There's no reason that has to be done through the military, that's just the way it is right now. If DARPA had the same funds but was part of the department of transportation or something, we still would have gotten the internet.

We still need defense research, but the fact that a lot of our advancements have come through the military doesn't mean that's the only way it can happen.

Wasn't ARPANET started as a project where individual communication nodes could fail, and the message could still arrive? Military technology generally needs to be reliable, which makes it a good fit for civilian use as well. Of course, there are plenty of aspects of military technology that isn't as necessary in civilian life.

It was originally an internal tool for ARPA researchers to collaborate. It had very little to do with the military, and ARPA scientists were not the only ones working on something like this. It absolutely would have happened somewhere else around the same time if the defense department wasn't interested.

This is very true, however DARPA was not prosecuting wars -- it was doing, well, general science and technology research intended to assist us in prosecuting wars.

Ultimately we reaped benefits far greater than those intended.

So maybe if the military merely shifted more of its budget from actually dropping bombs over to R&D, we would at least be making progress.

Sometimes I wish the military could only start R&D projects for things they can find civilian applications for.

That way we wouldn't need an actual shooting war to reap the benefits.

Yes, the concept that military research funds other innovations is just all backwards and silly. It's just like when they justify the space program by saying "we invented Tang!" Really? Because it would have been cheaper to just invent Tang, then.

Well, it's also possible that without the space program we never would have invented Tang at all. This scenario seems more realistic when you apply it to the Internet, the design parameters were pretty nuts -- they were trying to come up with a communications network which could survive a nuclear war. And no one was really saying that we needed the Internet until we already had it, but afterwards it was obvious how great it was. Without DARPA who knows if we would have gotten anything like the Internet we have today.

Point is having lots of people out there doing very random and diverse research is a good thing. It may not be the most cost efficient path from A to B, but serendipity provides for some remarkable outcomes we might never have achieved otherwise.

It can unearth "unknown unknowns" to borrow from Rumsfeld. Or "black swans" to steal from Taleb.

You're overlooking the counterfactual here. The fact that ARPANET was a Department of Defense project doesn't mean that defense spending itself caused it to come to fruition, and similarly it doesn't mean that without war (and defense spending), something like the ARPANET would never have been invented.

Separately, it seems far more significant that the early ARPANET was composed of networked computers based at universities.

Its common to credit the military with scientific advances. But when you spend a trillion dollars, and get non-stick skillets, you start to wonder if there was a cheaper way.

Its like, "I don't like being an assassin, but at least I get to meet new people".

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