not to mention the wartime technological breakthrough that occurred. we might still be flying around in single prop planes and never landed on the moon!
Its mentioned in the piece:Say whoever replaced him was ineffectual and the war ended with reduced loss of life and destruction. In this timeline, maybe no German rocket scientists ended up in the US. The space programme loses some of its best minds, and happens more slowly (or not at all?) The space race resulted in a breath-taking amount of scientific advancement and spinoff technology,
To this I say so? I would trade NASA for just Bruno Schulz .
Do you drive on Radial tires? thank NASA. So much of what we use today or consider normal is part of the inheritance of the space program.
I would not trade 6 million lives and the destruction of multiple cultures for radial tires. I stand on my statement. Have you read the street of crocodiles? Way better than the moon landing. I would rather have another book by Schulz than Nasa. You throw Israel into the deal if you want.
I guess the point I'm trying to put forward is that we can't make those kinds of trade-offs and comparisons. Or, we can, but it's a fruitless exercise. We can't know how many things would be different, or how much better or worse circumstances would be with the removal of an event as significant and world-changing as WW1 / WW2 (the first affects the second significantly). Maybe there would be a rise in anti-semitism elsewhere in say, the US, and it results in the death of millions more jewish, LGBT and black people than occurred under the Third Reich. Maybe The cold War turns hot and there's total nuclear destruction wiping out the entirety of human life. Maybe things are great, Germany manages to pull itself out of the greatest economic depression ever and they become an agrarian society. Bruno Schulz survives, but his next book kind of blows. There's no way we can say what would happen, nor is it possible to follow the butterfly effect and see what would happen if these events occur. instead we have NASA, founded with a group of people who weren't necessarily good people (indeed, Werner Von Braun is an incredibly problematic figure), but ended up doing a lot of great things and influencing the world in what I consider a pretty positive way. but that's just, you know, my opinion, man.
Agreed but to think how the world turned out is good is a value judgement and to me a bit of a Just World fallacy. There is no bomb without WWII. We don't know that NASA influenced the world in a positive way we only have a sample of one. We do know That Mr. Bruno is incapable of writing a bad story. (edit removed a phrase I put in to show that I am not trying to be unpleasant because it made me seem like I was trying to be unpleasant)