Collective Achievement

Sometime during the 1970s and 1980s a hairdresser from Hartlepool in England named Maurice Ward created a substance known as Starlite.  The substance remained quite obscure until the early 1990s when he received much publicity.  Starlite was a polymer designed to be heat resistant.  This concept wasn't anything new, what was new however was how remarkable his invention would prove to be.  It was examined by NASA, the Atomic Weapons Establishment, and a chemical company named Imperial Chemical Industries all of which verified the substance was effective.  Demonstrations showed the substance being applied to delicate objects including an egg and a human hand which were then subjected to extreme heat via a blowtorch.  The substance not only shielded the objects, in the case of the egg it was shown to be cool to the touch and remained uncooked.

In 2011 Maurice Ward died, and with him the formula to produce Starlite also died.  Despite the three organizations above having had access to the substance for testing, they were not permitted to keep samples and were not permitted to reverse engineer their own versions.  We can debate whether or not they actually conformed to that mandate another time, but suffice to say to date the substance has not been reproduced.  There have been others like it, but none that can be linked to Maurice Ward's invention.

What this curiosity demonstrates, is the idea that the advancement of human technology is not universal.  We may have put men on the Moon and consider that an achievement for all mankind but in reality it was an achievement for a very select few of elites, paid for primarily by one government - the USA.  No other nation has replicated the achievement, with only 12 white men all American having walked on the moon, only 4 remain alive today [at time of writing] not every nation on Earth could even create spacecraft to orbit the moon.  4 people out of the 7 billion people on Earth, therefore have walked on the Moon.  Only 12 people out of the estimated 100 billion people who have ever lived have walked on the moon.

If an alien race were to visit Earth and stand in judgement of what we have achieved as a race, there are very few achievements we could actually claim to be Universal.  Beyond the individual this is true of nations too, and even of supranational states that combine the resources of more than one country.  This begs the question, what can we truly claim to be achievements of "mankind" as opposed to achievements of individuals or small groups of people - even if that "small" group encompasses a few thousand people involved in the projects.

The fact that Starlite was created by one man, shared for examination but not reproduced, and even now over 20 years later, approaching 30, we still can't replicate the achievement demonstrates the limitation of human knowledge - it is exclusive.  Knowledge is not shared nor is it collective.  We can only consume that which those who discovered it choose to share.  That opens up a question of how to actually define how advanced humanity really is.  What capacities do we have that only a few, even only one person possesses, and what capacities do we have that everyone can possess.

There are a number of companies now which are striving to make commercial space flight a reality.  There have been significant advances in this field.  The price tag for this endeavour however is incredibly high.  Even when it becomes safe enough to become possible on a commercial scale, you will still need a lot of money to experience it.  Money which the majority of people won't have.  Whilst the achievement in itself would be impressive, if it can't be replicated and accessed on a wider scale, can you really claim it to be the level of technological advancement of "mankind" as a whole?

Turning back from the future and looking at the present as it stands, one can look at the world and see the divide between countries that are developed and those that are emerging markets of developing countries or as they used to be called, Less Economically Developed Countries.  This divide isn't an even split.  India is considered a developing country and has a population of 1.3 billion people, above it is China which whilst more developed than India is still not considered developed by most measures, it has a population of 1.4 billion.  Together these two countries account for 2.7 billion people, that represents almost 40% of the world's population.  Yet the divide between them is sizeable, and the divide between both and some of the other nations in the world is also mammoth, although that gap is closing.

If you were to ask me, what has mankind achieved, the only answer I can honestly give is war.  This seems to be the only achievement that is Universal that every nation in the world has been involved with in some form or another throughout history.  It is the only thing that every nation can do, although not every nation could actually win a war if they waged one against another.  Having said that, my answer was simply war, I didn't say who with, and many nations have proven time and again they don't need an enemy beyond their borders to fight, they are perfectly capable of waging war against themselves.

The reason I would say war, and nothing else, is because I do not see humanity as a collective.  I concede the point that it is bound by the universality of the human condition but I insist humanity is not a collective.  The fact that this planet as a whole has no single government to represent it as a whole demonstrates this fact.  Whilst the United Nations is the closest thing we have to a United World Government it has no executive power, it has no real power to enforce anything it convenes to discuss.  The United Nations Security Council is viewed by some as a "World Police" or a body tasked with policing compliance with the UN as a whole but if recent years have been anything to go by, the UNSC is incapable of directing any real control over individual nations.

Earth is divided, by culture, by race, by economics, by (mostly) invisible lines that outline the boundaries of each country, by language, and by many other things.  For me to give an answer other than war, I would need humanity to actually come together and work as a collective and there's no sign whatsoever of that happening.  Returning to the idea of an alien race visiting Earth, if such an event were to ever happen, who would represent us as a Planet?  Would you actually feel comfortable with <insert any world leader here> representing you?  I've deliberately chosen not to specify an individual here because I have no idea what country you will be from reading this post but pick any world leader, excluding your own country's leader, and ask yourself how comfortable would you be with them representing you?  For many of you, even picking your own country's leader might be something that is hard to stomach.

What has humanity as a whole achieved if humanity never acts as a whole?