Would science and technology improve/advance faster if more countries are wealthy and educated.

NiGHTS

Nowadays, a lot of new technological inventions and scientific discoveries come from places like China and Japan, and one could argue that the world would not be as advanced if it weren't for their recent contributions.

So say, if Brazil, Mexico, and other countries with various political and economic issues were doing as well as say Canada or Italy, would the higher number of educated individuals lead to more advancements?
 
Tripledot

Tripledot

I think this is fairly obvious. Having more capital to invest in projects and more educated professionals would obviously lead to more innovation, everything else being equal.
 

NiGHTS

So, with that established, how more advanced would the world be if say South America and Mexico were wealthy and able to give more contributions to the world ( That's not to say they already don't, according to my Mexican mother, color TV was invented in Mexico.)
 
Yun-shuno

Yun-shuno

Banned
That's like asking if you have big log and asking more people pushing it will get in farther.

In other words rain makes the ground less dry.
 

Lampiao

Yes and no, the current national expenditure on R&D (both gross and per capita) doesn't necessarily follow a country's HDIhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_and_development_spending
 

Arkenfolm

Faeelin said:
If they're wealthy, they probably aren't all fighting. Look at all the innovations we got from WW2!
Click to expand...

Which we couldn't have got without a giant war, 100 million+ dead (many of the dead who could've been innovative in their own way) why? We'll still have computers, spaceflight, etc. WWII or not, and probably just as fast.
 

Just a Rube

Faeelin said:
If they're wealthy, they probably aren't all fighting. Look at all the innovations we got from WW2!
Click to expand...
Plenty of wealthy countries fight as well (including during WWII). For that matter, even if you insist on conflict as a driver of innovation, the Cold War saw plenty of advances even from peacetime competition between the superpowers.

But yes, more wealth means and education means more people with the ability to do serious research (modern science has gotten far beyond what the ordinary hobbyist with a few books can generally do), and thus both more researchers and a bigger base.

As to how far ahead we would be? That's almost impossible to guess; technological predictions tend to be really hard to make. As an example, read any mid-20th century science fiction, and note what they generally have (space colonies, flying cars, etc.) vs. what they don't (anything related to the internet, computers in general, GMOs). It's not uncommon to come across works (e.g. the Lensmen Series) where people are flying through space at many times the speed of light, while doing the relevant calculations with a slide rule. And the old joke about fusion power (among many other technologies) is that it is 20-50 years away...and always will be.
 

Kyro92

I'm not sure if I really believe this, but I'm taking the devils advocate argument against it(science and tech being more advanced) since there seems to be a consensus in favour:

Consider that a lot of science and technology is "built on top of" previous scientific/technological advances. Depending on how much you buy into the deterministic theory of scientific advancement over the "great men" theory, this might suggest that a "broader base" would mostly mean duplication of theories and inventions, but only a very limited acceleration.

In fact I can see three semi-plausible arguments that it would be less advanced:

Firstly consider that the international scientific community has typically rallied behind a lingua franca/s(English today, although German played a big role in the past). If a more egalitarian present means a more egalitarian past, and therefore no lingua franca, then the international scientific community might be less international. Also consider that you'd see far fewer scientific geniuses emigrating to other countries(Tesla to America, for example)- so we might be looking at a greater number of scientific geniuses, but more diffuse so that they're fewer in number then they historically were in any of the scientific centers. This would be less of a concern in Modern OTL with internet and broad English fluency- but in the pre-internet era, and with broader linguistic diversity, it could lead to the whole being lesser then the sum of it's parts.

Secondly, consider nationalism. Science has often been perverted when it crosses paths with nationalism. See the German rejection of "Jewish physics" or the Russian rejection of antibiotics and insistence on Lysenkoism. Historically such bullshit hasn't been common outside of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, no doubt at least partly because scientific/tech progress has been concentrated in the more liberal-cosmopolitan parts of the world and because America ended up conquering/influencing most of the world. If however countries being wealthy and educated doesn't necessarily lead to liberalization and cosmopolitanism(I wouldn't have even considered that a decade ago, but looking at Russia, China and Turkey now...) and given the historical bastions of liberal cosmopolitanism(UK, France and America) are by definition less able to influence or conquer the world in this scenario... well, we might see more derailment of science by nationalistic dick-waving and ideological objections.

Thirdly(and this is sort of bullshit, given the "wealthy" stipulation in the OP), a wealthier Earth is likely to wreck it's environment more quickly. And since this is probably a world without hegemonic European imperialism derailing the regional conflicts outside of the West followed by the Cold War derailing regional conflicts in Europe, we might see a much broader distribution of WMD. Point being that Earth might have been crippled by an apocalyptic crisis decades ago even if it was at a higher point then OTL before that.

This was just a devils advocate before, but I've sort of convinced myself with my own argument. Now for someone to unconvince me ;)
 
Last edited:

BigDestiny

Kyro92 said:
Depending on how much you buy into the deterministic theory of scientific advancement over the "great men" theory, this might suggest that a "broader base" would mostly mean duplication of theories and inventions, but only a very limited acceleration.
Click to expand...

I think this would happen no matter how widespread the scientific community was. The only difference is instead of having four people simultaneously invent string theory, we currently have one person inventing string theory and three people reinventing irrigation.
 

Amazon

If there are competing scientific paradigms, perhaps not. Cultural differences c/would beget fundamental conceptual differences, especially in medicine, social science, and engineering that produce divergent, competing sets of knowledge.

It will depend a lot on the divergence, though. If we're just talking a stronger west (or Latin America, per OP), there's a conceptual base in common that would lead to a unified scientific community. A surviving Inca Empire (which arguably had more advanced science than contemporaneous Europe in several areas), a modernized Africa state, an uncolonized Indian state, or an unclosed China/Japan -- not so much.
 

Oceano

Banned
There will always be winners and losers, and simply not enough market-places for the products of all that science.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top
Top