There is a technological plight that is rarely seen, it lurks around every corner and in every technological niche.
It is government secrecy, one government hiding potential technologies from other governments. It is our clearance for physics for nuclear reactors, it is our classified projects on radar.
The technological plight is simply a government influenced curb in the funding and sharing of technological advances because we are bickering and fighting over one piece of land or that we are better than another. How far would our technology be if we would just work together? Instead of fighting over a piece of land here on earth, why not go fight over minirals on mars, why not start harvesting the methane from neptune? We are all one species, territorial and agressive, use that agressiveness to advance technology and shoot for the stars.
What would happen if we all just shared our information with one another? Dropped the secrecy and just worked together?
Imagine, if we were able to have supercomputers analyze the data recieved by telescopes all the time.
Like have a whole system of alaytic equipment attached to every observatory. We could take the data recieved by observatories and analyze every aspect of the light, X-ray, Infra-red, ultra-violet, and compute this with large databases of known compounds. Have the supercomputers match the data with spectroscopy of the databases. We would know a hell of a lot more about our solarsystem than we do now.