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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Most of the good things in the modern world come from repurposed military technology - microwaves, computers, space exploration, satellites, GPS, modern mining & construction techniques, jet travel, interstate highways, antibiotics, synthetic rubber, encryption, the Internet.

While I get why some people don't want to work on things that could potentially be used for evil, the dividing line between good and evil is often a lot blurrier in hindsight than it seems in the moment. Many of the most valuable technologies (see above) have come from the desire to kill people and not be killed in return, while many of the ideas that have killed the most people (communism, Nazism, eugenics, manifest destiny, crusades) have come from the desire to make a more perfect world.

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(communism, Nazism, eugenics, manifest destiny, crusades)

None of these are tech products, so it's apples to oranges.

Additionally, just because most good things have come from military in the past doesn't mean that's the best way to produce good things, now or in general.

It is an especially bitter irony of history that only the necessities of wars and conflicts provided the resources to make certain leaps in tevhnological progress. Wartime economy allocates resources where they would never be directed in peaceful times.

We all look back at the Apollo program with a kind of a nostalgic sorrow because many of its achievements have not been surpassed yet. We would be capable if we put the resources into a worthy successor project. But the truth is that Apollo was a cold war project intended as a propaganda campaign against the Soviets. It would never have happened without that conflict (including the Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan wars).

> ...Apollo was a cold war project intended as a propaganda campaign against the Soviets.

I've also read the hypothesis that the Apollo project also served as a peaceful demonstration of ICBM capabilities without expending (and revealing actual capabilities of) real ICBMs. Kind of like applying an added layer of assurance in MAD, by demonstrating through technological affinity the missiles aren't duds and the claims of performance not fabrications. If so, then that's one helluva diplomatic gesture for the history books to cover in the future.

> It is an especially bitter irony of history that only the necessities of wars and conflicts provided the resources to make certain leaps in tevhnological progress.

I think this continues in US in some degree. US military gets as much money as it wants. Military spends how much money it wants on whatever research it wants.

For me that's the secret weapon of US science. Other countries struggle to allocate any significant portion of the budget to research while in US it's easy because it goes through army under the guise of protecting the country.

And when DARPA was ARPA (name has switched a couple times), the Pentagon funded lots of pure research and research that would prevent wars. Afaik, DARPA projects have to a lethality metric for all research.

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