I'm pretty sure there is a significant amount of cooperation when it comes to space exploration. Space missions often carry instruments from different countries. For example, the lunar probe that discovered water on the moon, Chandrayaan-1, carried instruments from different countries. Curiosity carried instruments from other countries too, if I'm not mistaken.
It's just that you don't read much about this in the newspapers, because newspapers would rather make it look like there's a space race going on.
Doesn't look like they're ignoring sterilization techniques.
Quote from an interview with an ISRO scientist: “Maybe it’s because we spend a lot of time working in clean rooms with full suits on, so you can’t tell who is male or female.”
http://qz.com/270346/20-of-isros-staff-you-rarely-hear-about...
We have an extreme case of the merit system here in India. Students who are trying to get into the IITs are judged solely on a composite score of their IIT entrance test results + school final exam results.
There are many 'coaching centres' all over the place that aim to teach students how to crack the entrance test. Students pretty much spend 3 hrs/day at these coaching centres, and more during the weekends. When I was in school, you had to pass an entrance test just to get into these coaching centres. Now, they even target younger kids from 8th grade onwards.
Unfortunately, all of this just distorts meritocracy in a different way. Obviously, these coaching centres are very expensive, and their students come from families that can afford it. These students get upto 4 years of coaching to teach them to pass the entrance tests. A poor, but intelligent student (who probably attends a sub-par school) does not have access to facilities like this and is at a disadvantage compared to his/her less intelligent peers.
Whatever we do, the elite of a generation from now will consist largely of the children of the current elite. The path to the good life is challenging because there is a lot of competition, good advice and careful preparation help a lot in getting there, and the people in the best position to provide that advice and preparation are the ones who have already made it.
But I do think we can tune the parameters a bit. We can make sure that everyone has access to decent-to-good education, so the talented poor have a fighting chance. We can make the admissions based on some reasonable proxies of ability so the biggest boneheads among the sons of privilege get sorted out. And we can make the system as transparent as possible, so everyone knows what is expected.
With that in mind, I think the current system in the US fails pretty hard on the first criterion -- the worst schools are just awful. It could also improve on the third; what the elite colleges are looking for in admissions, such as "service", isn't at all obvious.
My sense is that the US has constructed a very complicated system that in the end delivers pretty much the standard result. A simpler, clearer system based on plain tests, such as India's, just might be a better solution in the end.
It's not as simple as the right-wing boomers dying. There are a few things we need to keep in mind:
- People become more conservative as they age.
- The political right receives more support from crony capitalists.
- Crony capitalism is what's causing problems for these doctors in the first place.
It's happening all over the world. There's a general trend where the right-wing trolls are aligning themselves with the cronies. While the next generation wants to fight the nastiness in racial/sexist/homophobic discrimination, they're not too enthusiastic about doing anything besides paying lip service to structural problems in the way the world works economically.
It's just that you don't read much about this in the newspapers, because newspapers would rather make it look like there's a space race going on.