Would another cold war + space race be a bad thing?

[Naxere]

One can tell your general education stems mainly from video games and cinema.

He's right. The necessities of war spur innovation.

[Deleted]

The Space Race of this century is to get rid of fosil Energy because it will run out in this timeperiod.

[Reeve]

In the long run I think pulling out from the "world culture" would be good for the USA, it would let us heal from our self-inflicted wounds and reconnect with who we are.

Who are we? I'll bet my idea and your idea of who we are don't match up very well.

[Masark]

No it wouldn't be a bad thing, humanity progresses much faster in a state of war.

He's right. The necessities of war spur innovation.

Progresses at certain things, yes, such as trauma medicine, weaponry, means of information gathering, means of information concealment, etc.

While those may have spinoff benefits outside of warfighting (e.g. antibiotics, rocketry, microwave ovens, satellite imagery, modern cryptography, etc.), it still incurs a large amount of waste (in equipment/infrastructure/people destroyed) and keeps resources from other fields of progress (e.g. medical research funds that would otherwise go to cancer research instead fund trauma medicine research).

[Fahrenheit]

While the incredible advancements during that time were awesome for humanity as a whole, the real threat of nuclear annihilation was not so much. Sure, we can still do that (annihilate ourselves and turn back the clock on human civilization dozens if not hundreds of years), but in reality that was the closest we came to doing such.

When you read works by astronomers and astrophysicists, saying that there are likely hundreds if not thousands of intelligent civilizations scattered through out the cosmos, but maybe the reason why we've not seen any so far is because a good portion of them annihilated themselves in a fit of sheer stupidity. That's the moment so far in our history that we've come the closest.