Military research is extremely important. The use of military tech in civilian applications is the reason for a lot of stuff we use daily, as I'm sure you know.

There's no reason that technological progress from the US government couldn't be driven by NASA rather than DARPA. I suspect many peace-loving people would prefer to see that.

"No reason", other than the massive budget constraints NASA faces, and has been facing yearly since the end of the Apollo program.

https://static.nationalpriorities.org/images/charts/2015/tot...

See that Science heading there on the chart? It's hard making the world a better place on a 0.7% budget. DARPA, however has access to that Military heading, 16.3%.

Perhaps you're missing my point. I'm suggesting that money from the military spending budget could be moved over to NASA without losing any ability to drive forward new technology.

That is exactly the point the TS was making, spending the money on NASA instead of DARPA would be a huge improvement, shifting the focus away from war.

Not that that is ever going to happen.

Not enough peace-loving people to vote for a NASA-science-centric government vs the Military-Industrial government we already have.

I'd say that even if there was, that message wouldn't get through. There are many reasons that people vote for one party over another, there's nowhere on a ballot paper to indicate why the vote is being cast.

If you were running a political party, the most logical assumption to make (in the absence of richer feedback) was that the people that voted for you did so because they liked your manifesto and/or believed you'd be more competent than your competition.

With that in mind, an election doesn't really allow any meaningful influence on policy, it has to come in a different form (direct democracy, for example).

I'm not a US citizen, but from what I've read the laws on direct democracy are set at the state level, is that correct? Are there any mechanisms in place to propose policy changes at the federal level (aside from lobby groups in Washington)?

Everyone has an opportunity to vote for more than just a party. There are primary elections where specific candidates with specific policy positions can be selected. Unfortunately, most voters don't bother getting involved with the primaries so we end up with candidates that are selected by the "establishment".

In many states, there is an opportunity for direct democracy to have an effect. Specific initiatives are put on the ballot. In practice, though, specific ballot initiatives are still implemented by the same politicians that tend to bend things to their will anyway.

If we had less war on this world, I would be glad to have a few stuff less we use daily.

Seriously.

In a peaceful world, advanced military tech would be solely used as a metric of a country's progress and a deterrent in the worst case. That's my opinion at least.

As a followup, I'm a heavy proponent of military research. I'm planning to somehow start a research lab or something (think MIT's Lincoln Lab) in my home country Tunisia. Now that we have democracy, it's time to build our own infrastructure and industries, and I think military should be at the forefront of such a movement.

There's still ways to go.. I still need to finish up my BSc, get a PhD in EE, and finally gain solid experience abroad :)

I find it amazing coming from such a background how you can remain enthusiastic about technology for warmaking.

Imagine if your country had basically no military technology or ongoing research. Well that's how my country Tunisia is, and of course the rest of Middle East and North Africa. It's easy to say "military funded research is bad" when your country (ex: USA) is at the top of the world when it comes to defense and state-of-the-art weaponry.

By developing our own tech, we can avoid depending on foreign suppliers, at least in some areas. This will help with improving national security and decreasing the obscenely high maintenance costs imposed by these suppliers in the long run.

Advancement in military technology will then allow us to apply the lessons learned, supply chains developed, factories built, and so on, to the civilian space. Look at Israel for example. They have an entire startup scene growing around the military. Many of the people who work in the military go on to start their own defense companies. These companies then give back to both military and civilian tech (Microsoft Kinect, for instance).

Is it ironic that I only saw this comment because of DARPA funding?

Otherwise you might have seen the comment because of some other funding (for example ITU). Arpanet wasn't the only development of its kind at the time, it just was the one that came to dominate the market.

Some CERN funding as well... :-)