[quote=@NecroKnight]
[@Dinh AaronMk]

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

We humans are rather resilient creatures - and we have yet to scratch some avenues of research and technology. Due to either moral, religious, economic or political reasons. 

In all honesty, conflict breeds progress - and once the initial shock is survived, mankind would usually either find new ways. If something proves costly or unable to be reached - say coal or land - then you adapt and start developing new ways or you die.

When basic survival is on the table - you either adapt or you don't survive.
[/quote]

Communication also creates progress, much less conflict. We got what we have today because of large international networks of dynamic character. We all share our own progress in fields to others who find the areas to re-investigate. Not that we've been at war with one another that demands progress, that a broader field of researchers was thrown together to see this progress happen.

But also what is important is the social environment progress takes place in. The reason Europe wasn't a hotbed of scientific or even philosophical advancement for the centuries in the middle ages wasn't that they weren't actively competing with one another; they will killing themselves for centuries. But that there was no solid grounds under which anyone could carry out progress-minded policy and development. And that on top of that, the social conditions of medieval society meant that very few people had the means to pursue education, the church didn't actually have that big of an effect.

The same conditions can likewise be reflected on Africa, where with much longer human habitation than the rest of the world and some of the wealthiest land in terms of agriculture and raw material has been at conflict with itself for thousands of years, which surely has not lent itself to great leaps in technological progress. And while areas of the continent did experience sudden lurches "forward" it was never a permanent experience and either stayed put or withdrew.

The following shock too of a great crisis would also do little in way of being another means of advancing humanity either. After being sacked and invaded, and subject to its own natural disasters Rome and Italy became - and in a way, still to this day - are a shell of Italy's former glory. Since the dissolution of the German Kingdom of Lombardy in 774 and clear into the mid 19th century Italy has only ever been a conglomerate of petty princedoms and Republics without any regional cohesion, this with the legacy of one of the most advanced societies of the classical period: of Rome.

The Maya too, which built a society [url=https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/03/scientists-discover-ancient-mayan-city-hidden-under-guatemalan-jungle]whose complexity has only recently been revealed to be far larger than we anticipated[/url] fell quietly out of its greatness into the soft night of unrealized calamity before the Spanish even arrived and the Maya community has not yet re-asserted its former greatness and scale, human improvisation and adaptability aside.

Charlemagne's Empire has never been realized again since the fall of the Karling dynasty and Western Europe is still now a handful of independent nations despite short-term successes at matching that scale (Napoleon).

Great Empires have rarely ever been realized after their fall at the hands of even human calamity, let alone natural. What you're really saying trivializes the matter to suit specific ends to power on your side of the equation and still overlooks the immense complexity of the global trade networks and industrial complex in any field that allows the present world to exist. None of which came about with the Second World War as the sole reason, but of the birth of and the development of international partnerships of scientists, engineers, and economic groundwork over an area far larger than a single country. And that over this past hundred years the economic development of these countries has progressed beyond the rigors of an agricultural economy into a middle-class industrial or service economy.

One of the particular stunning characteristics of Europe during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment periods was the closing of the gaps between the wealthy feudal nobility and the former serf population to expand the bourgeoisie middle class, newly minted wealthy farmers or merchants able to gobble up the wealth lost by a dying upper-class at the end of the middle ages. If conflict breeds innovation than the middle ages should have seen leaps to the scale of rocket science across all areas of society. But when the old warrior elite began losing its relevance in European society and the material needs were met for broader literacy, so to did Europe's development towards modernity and its own investigations into the natural science, its charting of the world, and its expansion of markets to bring in more materials for its burgeoning and exploitative middle class to utilize. And this done in the 12,000 years since the collapse of the classical equivalent of the modern world: the Roman Empire.