Europe benefited significantly from fertile crescent innovations: irrigation, writing, metallurgy, the wheel, animal-powered transport, horseback riding, etc.
By the time of the conquest of the Americas they also benefited from additional foreign innovations: steel metallurgy, gunpowder, the precursor to the sextant, the compass, mapmaking...
However, in the end what inflicted the most damage were the diseases and plagues that emerged by bad sanitary practices like living in proximity to animals: smallpox, cholera, typhus, etc. Those plagues practically emptied the American continent and the Caribbean. Meanwhile the only American disease passed to Europeans was possibly syphilis.
Andean cultures did not develop such level of technological advance in great part because their lifestyle and survival did not require it. Potato, quinoa and corn agriculture, combined with llama and guinea pig farming effectively supported their large populations to the extent they had no famines. Then, Andean geography is not a good use case for wheeled transport.
My source is “The Emperor of all Maladies”
Aside from Italy's campaign of Ethiopia and Germany's campaign against a variety of civilian groups, I'm not familiar with chemical warfare being used in WWII. Was it discovered as a result of one of these?
Use of mustard gas in WW1 led to post-war research into its effects. By 1942 the US was conducting human trials of nitrogen mustard for treating lymphoma. Separately, a German air raid on US ships occupying a port in Italy during WW2 resulted in the release of mustard gas that was aboard one of the US ships. Autopsies and tissue samples from that incident also pointed to the potential medical uses.
History section explains NCI screening in the 60s
What horrifies me would be the horrendous loss of cultures that we will loose access to.
Also, sometimes people don't want to cooperate, but rather to out-compete their neighbors. Learning English or Chinese is more difficult than learning an artificial language -- but if you have already paid the costs of learning them, you have an advantage over your neighbors who got worse education. Making international communication too simple would take away the relative advantage of those who have already invested in the current one.
The spirit of the desire to render a world language is a good one. There are many ways this can be accomplished; at a personal level, it is made through the decision to honour every word, every symbol, every sign on Earth, with equality.
Few people in the rest of the world are attempting to learn Mandarin, because it's a very difficult language to learn and it has a limited cultural projection. The use case to learn Mandarin is primarily restricted to a subset of a subset of business. More people speak English in Asia outside of China, than speak Mandarin.
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2018/0...
China is a region with a far greater linguistic diversity than europe.
The CCP is trying to wipe out the other dialects as soon as possible, anyway.
What we call "chinese language" has historically been cantonese as that's what we are mostly familiar with ( mostly via immigration ).
Most of us don't even know there are different chinese languages. I know I didn't until someone corrected me on social media.
Those who have the technical skill to go to Mars, are probably among the first examples of colonists/empire-builders who won't be trampling on the natives; a truly revolutionary moment for the human species in that regard. At least, one can hope ..
A bunch of axioms. A bunch of backstories justifying the axioms. A system for deriving good ideas (from axioms, observed phenomena and other ideas). A mountain of ideas derived from the axioms and observed phenomena, ideas derived from those ideas, and so on.
We call these epistemology blobs things like "scientific culture", "western culture", "Christian culture", "Inca culture" and so on.
Epistemology blobs appear to be invariably mutually antagonistic. They can't suffer each other to exist. They compete and self-preserve with a nigh biological zeal.
It's weird.
Charles Fort discusses it a bit in his "Book of the Damned".
I’d love to read more about it
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e4nc6Ke...
There are a few other studies out there on this issue .. quite revealing.
EDIT: a nice quote which highlights the issue:
Colonist and author Dame Mary Gilmore stated in her reminiscences of growing up in rural New South Wales that:
… the white forgets the uncounted ways in which he [was] … unintelligent (and still would be unintelligent) but for what the blacks taught. As parallels to the treatment of snake-bite by sucking, take the use of eucalyptus, the application of weak wattle tan-water for burns and blisters, of clean mud as poultices, of native gums in dysentery, the eucalyptus beds and steam pits for colds and rheumatism, and ask was it a black or a white intelligence that was first to find and apply these(Gilmore 1935: 232).
She stated that a whole industry in making medicines owed its existence to Aboriginal practices:
It is true there is a eucalyptus extract industry now; but the knowledge that led to that was originally derived from the natives, who used eucalyptus leaves in steaming, and for wounds. For rheumatism steam pits were made, heated by fires, raked out, lined with leaves and then possum-rugs laid over the top. Another use of the leaves was as a strapping for wounds that needed closing in order to heal. These uses came to the pioneers from the blacks (Gilmore 1935: 226).
The Australian aborigines knew about anti-septics and anti-biotic preparations hundreds of years before we, in the West, claimed the victory for ourselves. They even had a Hippocratic oath hundreds of years before Western physicians, who were still practicing blood-letting as a norm. Colonists arrived, and those injured who stayed in their camps for treatment by the blood-letters, died. Those who consulted the locals, learned bush medicines, were healed and survived.
If only some rational souls had been there to observe, we could've had antibiotics a hundred years sooner. One wonders what sort of world it would've been if we'd paid more attention to the aborigines, rather than massacre them.