The Big Brother

The US needs a competitor. With the fall of the Soviet Union, there is currently no large power in the world to compete with the United States, at least not technologically. This, in turn, poses a serious threat to technological progress. Most advances in the past have been made under pressure from other countries, in a "who gets there first" race. Probably the best example is the race to the Moon. The effort that was made was enormous in scale and breadth, covering dozens of fields that all benefited from the reasearch put into landing a man on the Moon. In only a decade, the United States went from 15-minute suborbital flights with questionable chances of success to landing a craft on the Moon and bringing its pilots back to Earth safely.

Without the Soviet Union pushing for the same goal, it is doubtful that we would have gone to the Moon, let alone in a single decade of tireless effort. Today, with the US being the only technological superpower in the world, such leaps in progress are unlikely. The technology exists to fly to Mars and beyond, but without competition, the interest is simply not there, at least not the political interest. And without the politicians on board, there is little hope for a mission to Mars to materialize soon.

It's probably a simple matter of economics, or even biology. Without commercial or evolutionary pressure, organizations and organisms get to be "good enough" and stagnate in their development. Without a close competitor, the US gets to just play big brother and bully other countries, instead of racing for some elusive goal.

Things may change soon however. Out of the competitional void that was created after the fall of the Soviet Union, at least two technological powers will emerge: China and India. When they do so, it may well be that the US will be caught off-guard, unsuspecting of the tremendous steps forward these two countries will have taken. China is already preparing to put a man in orbit, and India will undoubtedly follow suit. Perhaps soon thereafter we will witness a second race to the moon, this time between countries that would have never appeared worthy of attention in 1969 and that are still not granted the attention they deserve. And who knows, maybe in the 2020s, the decade during which we currently expect the US to have its first mission to Mars, the first flag to fly on the Red Planet may be red.