Hacker News Reader

Hardware development was accelerated by games, too.

And software accelerated by the military (tcp/ip).

Now with drones, I think the military are accelerated by video games.

With a pathetic ROI: Had these trillions been invested in academia or startups, the world would surely be much further.

Not sure if I entirely agree with this. A lot of the luxuries we have now were enhanced for the military. For instance, airplanes (aileron and jet turbine development), internet, semiconductor, and even PCBs (or mores specifically, the predecessor Hybrids ICs). A good amount of grants actually come from the Navy and Army for research grants in the academia. Though I did go to grad school for Mech Eng so we probably saw more grants from the military because of that.

That is a logical fallacy. Sure a lot of things happened because of the military, but what didn't happen because we were busy on the military things. There is no way to know.

If we had spent as much on genetic research as we did on the moon landing we could have had fire breathing dragons. Think of all the spin offs from that that we are just starting to see now, we could have had them sooner.

It’s true that military necessity has spurred a lot of things, but it sure would be nice if we had the same cultural agreement around basic research without that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com