I disagree.Case in point,Africa.We have droughts,poverty,disease,politics...we're needy and I can't see any innovation or inventions changing that.

@Chessmaster a drought is a "once in a time" phenomenon unlike eg winter which is guaranteed every year!

And using your case in point; the countries in Africa with the harshest weather & conditions ie southern and northern Africa are still the most developed on the continent!

This brings me back to necessity!

Even in east Africa.. countries like Uganda, Tanzania, and Congo are still very poor due to abundance whereas the barren land in Kenya has caused its people to be very hard working and industrious!

Btw poverty, disease & politics come from human behavior and not the natural environment!

The time reference. Too short. Africa, by the 'global' yardstick is young. Only 50 to 100 years old. In the 50's most of Kenya was just vast forests and plains. We are in the nascent stages of the West-dictated world order. The organized Roman empire dates back to the BC's,..the Mongolian Empire to the 13th Century AD ...by 1500 London was already a huge, organized metropolis.
All civilizations start like this, poor, diseased, disorganized, with bloody uprisings and conflicts until the intense pain and suffering systematically reduces the collective foolishness of a population. In fact, Africa's rise has seen less bloodshed than other places ...things like the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, these were nasty pieces of business. Check this: http://en.wikipedia.org/..._of_conflicts_in_Europe
That is a looong list of wars.
Europeans and others like to sneer at Africa, but they were in a similar spot, actually worse, a few centuries ago. The only thing is that Africa was interrupted from charting its own destiny, and other people's civilization rudely thrust upon us (as well as getting robbed and enslaved in the process). We live by a Western socio-economic model of development now, so this is a phase, a bad one with poverty and suffering, but it will pass (or abate) after another lengthy period of time.

thanks quicksand for bringing up the temporal angle. We forget that Africa had civilizations before what we currently refer to as African nations that were drawn up recently. The Malian empire reigned vast vast regions of what is now the Sahara desert (13th to 16th century). There also were the Songhai, Mali and Dendi kingdoms which eventually disintegrated. The Ghana empire was there even 1500 BC in present day Muaritania before the advent of Islam in Africa. Somalia had a thriving civilization back in 13th century, actually there is evidence of civilization in Somalia from back in 4000 BC. The question now is when did the rain start beating us? why did we slip so much back to be the poster child for backwardness and lack of development?

We even have our very own Gede ruins before vasco da gama 'discovered' our a$$ in Malindi
We can blame the west all we want but are we doing things any differently now that we are 'independent' (sic)?

I tend to agree that influence from the West causes poverty. Countries that have recently cut off Western Influence such as Brazil, China, Russia, Middle East, Argentina e.t.c have of late made huge leaps in reduction of poverty. Countries still flirting with the West such as Most of Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda ,TZ, Chad ,Indonesia,have very high poverty levels.