Pete Clarke Wrote:
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> Hi Kenuchelover,
>
> Nope I won't go with proliferation - the idea of
> only the US having the bomb is even more scarey!
Why? Irregardless of who had it, unilateral possession "at most" would mean world domination..... while proliferation "at most" means total extinction of life on earth.
And as far as only the US having the bomb, FAR better than it be possessed by a democrary with generally humanitarian impulses (even if it HAS often failed in the application) than by anyone else.
> I still stick by my point - I agree with
> everything you've said about lives saved during
> WWII etc. However, we're playing "what ifs" - no
> Trinity, no MAD, no nuclear arms race - how many
> trillions and trillions opf dollars would that
> have freed up for other science, food development,
> etc?
None. Because WITHOUT the technologies & resuling spinoff industries/economies created by the arms race (which INCLUDED the space race, remember) we'd likely have had something like 500 trillion dollars LESS to spend since WWII.
(I went looking for world GNP data covering different decades & centuries, noted the "increase in the rate of increase" during the post trinity era, then chopped it in half to allow for "other" causes.... although I find it hard to imagine such making up a large portion of the increase, given the role arms race derived technologies play in our current economy. Feel free to chop my figure down if you think I'm overestimating, you might like to play around with the raw data from sites like [
www.j-bradford-delong.net] . As an aside, I found it interesting to note that world AND average personal incomes, adjusted for inflation, etc, started taking off during the looting/Genocide of the Americas/African slave trade.... but didn't REALLY start jumping till the 1880's or thereabouts (not coincidentally, when the U.S. finished stealing land from the Indians & started exploiting resources on an unprecedented scale, and about the time that European colonialism was hard at work in Africa & elsewhere, exploiting natural resources & native workforces....... or maybe it's just the impact of Native American crops spreading worldwide?) and then.... after a slowdown(?) caused by the Great Depression and WWII, the figures started rising faster & faster..... exactly corresponding to post-Trinity.
> The discovery of America by Europe - I'm not
> denigrating the cost to native Americans at all -
> I'm not convinced though that, world wide, it is
> as devastating as other events.
>
>
> Pete
Set aside costs to Native Americans, and instead look at OTHER costs. Without the labor sink of the Americas (and without Native American crops to fuel population growth in West Africa), you'd not have had the transatlantic slave trade with it's estimated 60 million dead and/or doomed to a lifetime in cruel bondage.
Without the economic edge (precious metals, food crops, medicines, expanded land base, natural resources ranging from better timber for bigger ships to large deposits of coal & high grade industrial metals, etc) obtained from the Americas, Europe wouldn't have been able to gain world domination. Ergo, no world wide colonialism & a quieter Europe (less internal strife, without fighting over who gets to steal/exploit what part of the rest of the world).
Less globalization.... likely resulting in no world wars, and definitely resulting in less transport of diseases & exotic species. It's NOT just the Americas that ended up with major ecological damage.... invasive species (plants, animals, insect pests, pathogens) are a HUGE problem world wide & are significant contributors to the massive extinction problem we're facing.
Without a sudden "age of exploration" (AKA "age of exploitation & colonialism"), New World crops (more productive, and more labor efficient than their Old World rivals) & medicines would have spread slower, societies would have had time to adjust to higher fertility & lower mortality, and we wouldn't have the current overpopulation problem.
Need I go on?
Kenuchelover.
