This month has seen the bursting of the Chinese space program into public consciousness with the first Chinese astronaut launched into orbit of the Earth. They have also stated their intention to pursue a manned Lunar mission, and possibly a Lunar base.
Why do I admire China's ambition yet at the same time find it's plans strangely disquieting?
I think its because it feels like us Westerners are abandoning Industrial scale enterprises and projects in favour of post-industriality.
The Chinese economy is growing at more than 8%. China's vast population is slowly but surely working its way towards the comforts and possessions that the average Westerner takes for granted. Chinese manufacturing - particularly in high-tech areas such as microchip production - is growing in efficiency, scale and competitiveness. In a couple of decades China could overtake Japan as the world's second largest economy. Not tomorrow, to be sure. But it's on the horizon.
Given all this, one can't help but feel a bit frustrated that China seems to be making such headway in Industrial enterprises, when our own Western countries seem to be allowing our own to languish.
Take, for example, manned space travel. The momentum of the Apollo missions sadly drained away. No-one has been back to the moon. Even the space shuttle has been stalled due to tragic accident. No other county is willing or able to expend the resources needed for manned space exploration. Apart from the gesture of the International Space Station, manned space exploration seems something that belongs more to our recent past than our near future.
Have we really become so insular, risk-averse, cost-cutting, unadventurous and unimaginative to loose our appetite for sending men out into space beyond a near Earth orbit? In purely technical terms, we could have had Lunar bases and a manned mission to mars by now.
But manned space exploration stopped there. And it isn't particularly hard, technically speaking, for China to catch up. By all reports, China didn't work out the mechanics and technology of launching a manned space mission themselves, they simply bought some old Russian technology, took it apart, studied it, and made their own. Yes it's an expensive project, but resources and willpower are the two main obstacles facing any nation's chances of manned space missions, not technical know-how.
However, its not just manned space missions that we seem to be abandoning, but the other great technical, industrial achievement of the West in the later half of the 20th Century: faster than sound civilian air travel.
In the early 1960s, Great Britain and France joined together to solve one of the greatest technical challenges of all time: transporting ordinary civilian passengers in safety and comfort at beyond the speed of sound. The prototype craft was operational by the end of the '60s, and began its passenger service in 1976.
Concorde, the Supersonic passenger jet that enables travellers to get from London to New York in three hours was decommissioned last week. As transport journalist Jeremy Clarkson wrote recently: "Friends at NASA have told me that the technological challenge of making a Mach 2.2 passenger jet was greater than putting a man on the moon." Safely transporting civilian passengers through the shockwave of exceeding the speed of sound was an achievement decades ahead of its time. And now its been abandoned. It was a technical achievement so ahead of its time that there is no company or government anywhere in the world currently willing and able to replace it, and experts say air passengers are unlikely to again travel at such speeds within most of our lifetimes.
This is one giant leap backwards for mankind.
The promise of Concorde was that of greatly shrinking our world. But, like the Apollo missions, its success was never built upon any further.
Yet the flip-side of all this is the power of the West's tradition of a capitalistic free-market which allows provides an environment of competitiveness and free-experimentation which encourages good technological development. Sometimes big state spending can give us a one-off ahead-of-its-time industrial triumph (true of both Apollo, and Concorde) but in the long term I would argue that Capitalistic free-markets are the superior environment for developing and implicating new technologies. And, in turn, because free-market cultures best develop technologies, they gain a leading competitive edge against more communist, socialist or authoritarian style cultures.
For example, I would argue that along with Mr Reagan and Mrs Thatcher, there was a third reason that we won the cold war: the microchip. How could the rigid, state controlled system of communism ever hope to wield and exploit the power of computers that was growing to a crescendo in the 1980s? To do so required the sort of widespread, fluid experimentation that could only be achieved by a capitalistic free-market, as symbolised at its zenith by Silicon Valley.
In the end it is not the ideology per se that matters, it is merely the needs of technology. And at it's best, technology promotes freedom for ordinary people, and it usually thrives in conditions were people are most free, and this has meant free-market capitalism. Computing, like filmmaking, is a particularly entrepreneurial activity, and as such it thrives best in environments where ordinary people have a strong entrepreneurial drive (such as India and America, which both have a prodigious output of both film-makers and software programmers).
One example of how the private sector is more successful and efficient
in spending money is the area of developing new technology. This is
an important area for generating consumer products and for a country's
wealth. In fact, in 1957 the M.I.T. economist Robert Solow calculated
that technology is responsible for about 80% of a nation's economic
growth. But does the free-market private sector always make for the
best environment for technology to flourish in? Government investment
in applied science and technology has -on the surface - been successful,
particularly in the case of the NASA Apollo program.
However, much of the success of government research has either come
from the extraordinary pressures of war (e.g. the Cold War: the Apollo
program and the infrastructure of the Internet; the Vietnam War: medical
trauma treatment) or has been heavily dependant on private contractors.
Also, when government bureaucracies attempt to carry out big projects, they end up costing much more than they would in the private sector. For example, at the beginning of the 1990s President Bush Senior tried to replicate Kennedy's famous 1962 "We choose to go to the moon!" speech and kick-start a NASA manned mission to Mars. But his ambitions were cruelly cut-short when a NASA report claimed it would cost $450 billion. Yet a senior engineer from Lockhead Martin has claimed it could be achieved for as little as $4 billion if it were not for the excessive overheads and bureaucratic waste inherent in a traditional NASA plan. A sobering thought considering the current costs of the reconstruction of Iraq.
Another reason why the free-market is superior for technological
development is because it stops ideology getting in the way. Physicist
Freeman Dyson points out that ideology is bad for the development
of new technologies. Technologies that are driven by government bureaucracies
are obliged to succeed because they carry the reputation of the state.
Any failure would be a symbolic failure for the power and competency
of the government. In contrast, technologies developed in the private
sector are subject to a more rigorous and realistic standard: they
must work efficiently. He gives the example of air travel.
In the 1920s and 1930s the development of flight was taking two separate
routes: the aeroplane and the airship. The monolithic airship was
championed by the British Empire as a means of flight worthy of transporting
key politicians across oceans. Whereas the aeroplane was small, cheap
and within the grasp of individual inventors and experimenters. "The
aeroplane grew out of dreams of personal adventure." Says Dyson
"The airship out of dreams of empire."
Although the airship initially had technical advantages over the
aeroplane, the fact that the aeroplane was subject to widespread experimentation
led to over 100,000 models being tried and tested. Of course, only
a tiny minority of these succeeded. But the rigorous Darwinian selection
ensured that planes advanced technically while airships were a disaster.
An early example of the market developing better technology than government.
Similarly, other technologies such as nuclear energy and artificial
intelligence attracted vast research budgets from governments with
an almost blind faith that the pay-off would be extraordinary. Both
technologies have under-performed compared to expectations, yet the
funding continued because they weren't allowed to fail. It is difficult
to imagine a private corporation lavishing research funds for decades
on such inefficient projects.
Of course, the power of governments to spend money on behalf of its citizens is dependent on its ability to tax those citizens. Despite the success of the free-market model, it is taken as a given - by all political parties in the UK - that around 40 per cent of GDP should be spent by government. In many countries this percentage is even higher. However, once again, technology may threaten the success of this model. Just as the printing press undermined the absolute authority of the church 500 years ago, the Internet could threaten to undermine the nation state's power to tax its citizens. If people started getting conducting monetary transactions (such as getting paid) over encrypted online connections, then governments would start to loose tax revenue. Equally, plans for giant floating cities, either moored or in the form of huge cruise-liners, could become tax-haven magnets for the rich. Once again, the implications of technology may win out over the desires of our rulers.
China can learn from us the power of unleashing people and technology to be free and productive. The West can learn from China that industrial enterprises are not dead, the wheel still spins, and the rockets still fire and ignite the spirit and imagination. Technology can be a gift from God. It should be allowed to develop and spread as freely as possible. Political ideologies per se don't drive Human progress; it's the appliance of science, stupid!
