Working together for the benefits of all

Last month I was thrilled to follow the progress of the United States’ InSight probe as it made a perfect landing on Mars. This was after a six-month journey, ending in seven minutes of drama as it made the final plunge to the surface of the Red Planet. 

The landing was the best National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) staff could have hoped for. Despite the vast distances involved InSight kept in radio contact during its descent and within minutes was sending back pictures of its landing site.

It was a triumph deservedly celebrated at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, but it was far from just a US achievement.

Now that it is on the surface, InSight is deploying a package of Franco-British seismometers to listen for ‘Marsquakes’; a German-developed ‘mole’ system will burrow up to five metres into the ground to take the planet’s temperature, giving a sense of how active Mars is.

This kind of international cooperation in space has been going on for decades and is the only sensible way humankind can explore the cosmos. The most prominent example is the International Space Station, which has pushed the frontiers of science in so many areas during experiments and research conducted by 230 individual from 18 different countries.

It is not only in space that technological innovation thrives on international cooperation. The internet itself originated in the US, but much early development was carried out in the United Kingdom, followed by contributions from a host of other countries, notably Australia.

Significantly, its earliest use was to link researchers in defence and universities around the world, allowing cooperation to be carried out over great distances in real time.

Facebook’s initial purpose was to allow students from US universities to keep in touch after graduation wherever they were in the world.

The free flow of ideas across national boundaries has been behind technological progress for at least the last two centuries. Without it much of what we take for granted today, from motor cars to mobile phones to transplant surgery would not have appeared or been developed so quickly.

It is therefore alarming to see growing movements around the world that seek to withdraw behind traditional tribal boundaries; to raise barriers against contact; to turn inward.

Worse, viewing their neighbours only as a source of exploitation, from which to bludgeon concessions in order to benefit themselves.

History gives plenty of examples of what happens when this becomes the normal way nations deal with each other. The establishment of international organisations in the middle of last century was in a direct response to two ruinous world wars brought about by the failures of that old order.

It was hopelessly idealistic, as some suggested at the time, that these new global institutions would bring about an end to warfare and the misery it created, but compared with what had occurred previously, these bodies, United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the World Trade Organisation and others, have achieved moderate success.

And, as I never fail to point out, in the European Union’s existence, no wars have been fought by countries within its borders.

Dismantling them because they have not achieved all their founders hoped for is idiocy. Seeking to destroy them in order for the powerful once again to bully and dominate those less fortunate is downright evil.