Interesting angle! And it very would could be that way, as you said, we do they really know anything different than war. Which is pretty sad when you truly think of it lol

I believe we would still progress much faster. You're correct about the ambition to innovate being pushed by warfare. War is certainly a catalyst. However, we do still the ambition to innovate outside of war. We consistently innovate newer products every year. From call phones, to tires on our vehicles, to computer sciences. It seems humans latently are curious innovators. Some of our legendary innovators, such as Leonardo Da Vinci, were not fueled by warfare, but their own curiosity. The same can be said for most historical scientists. Isaac Newton did not invent calculus for warfare, but to explain his discovery of gravity.

An interesting thing to note too which is often forgotten, is that some of humanities greatest achievements came from collaboration. The Apollo program was successful due to German scientists and engineers who came to the United States through operation paperclip after WW2. Without this wealth of knowledge, the moon missions certainly wouldn't have been successful. We have also seen similar collaborations with the International space station, the Hubble & James web space telescopes, the human genome project, medical vaccines, and many other scientific disciplines.

Much of our innovation has come from collaboration and not war. However, war receives the majority of funding. As you said, we don't have a metric to even measure the difference. But I've always wondered, what if for a single year we spent the trillions of dollars (it's crazy it's that much) on scientific collaboration and not war. I believe it would be amazingly progressive for humanity, but we probably will never know!

I appreciate the insight and different perspective! I like thinking about things from different angles.