Not to shoot the messenger, but it annoys me when these things are viewed through the lens of artificial divisions such as nations. I understand that space exploration has been used as a tool to further many political machines, but it seems silly to me, especially when staring at a picture as beautiful as this from a distance that makes Earth seem so small, to think about the people living on this planet as anything other than humans, rather than citizens of different countries. It just feels divisive where it should really feel uniting. (Kumbaya!)
I really hope we someday get to the point where no one really cares what "country" achieved the next space exploration milestone.
edit: To be fair, I am really heartened when I see how international the teams that do work in the space station generally are. We've come a long way.
I agree with you in the sense that space exploration is at its core a human, not national, achievement. National divisions are silly when seen in the context of the vastness of space. In a similar vein, I think Gene Roddenberry was right in thinking that true elimination of national boundaries will come after we meet sentient aliens for the first time - with an alien to compare ourselves against, we all see our common humanity much more clearly.
We're partway there. As you say, there is cooperation on the Space Station. Cooperation between the various space agencies on missions from telescopes to probes is commonplace. Look at Cassini: a NASA probe with a ESA lander. The Curiosity rover has a Russian instrument on it.
But we haven't reached the point yet where nationalism is no longer a part of the drive behind space exploration or other 'big-science' projects. I see competition for scientific glory as a healthy and productive form of competition, so I don't think we should completely shy away from it. It's akin to rival schools competing for academic glory - a kind of tribalism that results in achievements which benefit all.
(It may lead to increased levels of backstabbing, but that's hardly innovative.)
Humans are a social species, so also have an innate nature to cooperate.
Also, the concept of 'country' is a rather recent invention. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state#History_and_origi... for some context. It's certainly possible that kohanz's "hope [that] we someday get to the point where no one really cares what "country" achieved the next space exploration milestone" can be true yet still have competitiveness.
Perhaps space exploration of 100 years from now will be lead by volunteer teams based on, their WoW clan membership. While preposterous, the teams could still be competitive even if they are not organized by nations.
That's a very narrow and technical view of what constitutes a state, to the point of excluding ancient empires and nations like Greece, Rome, Egypt, Israel, China and others. They wouldn't meet the standards of modern statehood insofar as they lacked rigidly-defined borders or fully-developed civic institutions, but I think it's a mistake to imagine that they lacked any sense of national identity.
I certainly agree that competition can be wasteful, but proxy conflict can be healthy, eg the space race as proxy competition for the Cold War which almost nobody wanted to see played out as an actual military conflict. Private competition will undoubtedly exist the future (and is already coming into being today) but the capital and infrastructural requirements of space exploration are such that only nation states can command the resources for large-scale projects at present. You might be interested in this comparison of how Apple, the world's most valuabel company, stacks up against actual countries, which suggests it could be considered in the same league as Azerbaijan, Belarus, or perhaps Norway, depending on what metric you use - impressive, but still small potatoes in the overall scheme of things: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/01/28/2103622/if-apple-were-...
There was no ancient Greece nation. I suspect you mean it as a placeholder for the Hellenic era, or perhaps the kingdom Macedonia.
But as to the issue, I recently listened to a lecture about the process of deciding what the European nations would be after the First World War. The different nations had wildly different ideas of how to decide what was their national territory and people. The people of Alsace speak German, but the French said (and I paraphrase) "look at their love of wine and joie de vivre - they are French, but were forced to speak German".
Or of a farmer in central Europe, when asked "what are you?" answered "farmer", and then "where are you from?" brought the name of the local town. When asked more insistently, he said "Catholic". The concept of nation made no sense to him.
The concept of nationhood is quite complicated. Is Scotland a nation? India during the British Empire? It's more complicated than I want to get into. But in the context of the tgcordell comment, which tries to connect species imperatives with national competition, I mean to point out that the concept of 'nation' is too new to really have an evolutionary component. (And if it does, it's built on cooperation.)
I don't deny that proxy conflict can be healthy, though proxy conflict in Korea wasn't all that healthy for those involved. Is it possible to determine the healthy conflict beforehand, or is it something that's mostly done after the fact?
I agree with your general points, but while many people would certainly have been unaware of or indifferent to a national concept I think people in cities on major trade routes or in power centers like Rome would certainly have been aware of other places and would have been broadly aware of their own significance (although this awareness was doubtless concentrated among a social, military and business elite).
I think of this like local vs. global maxima. Competition is one local maxima, but personally I believe cooperative systems are the global maxima. However, cooperation is more complex, more difficult, and perhaps contrary to human nature. Difficult, but not impossible.
I really hope we someday get to the point where no one really cares what "country" achieved the next space exploration milestone.
edit: To be fair, I am really heartened when I see how international the teams that do work in the space station generally are. We've come a long way.