Personally, I think its the lack of 'taking a risk' attitude. Everybody wants a sure thing these days and overcautiously goes about getting there. Thus when something goes wrong in a project and somebody dies, they decide its not worth it and cancel it. People forget how many pioneers of technology died to see their experiments succeed.
Yeah, but an important thing to note is that it's not the pioneers that you'd have dying; they'd be the last people you'd want to die, because they'd be the only ones who understood how the person died or how to fix it. So what are you going to do to get that person, who doesn't have any personal stake in the project, to be willing to die for the project to succeed? How do you do it while still respecting life (since that is one of the general ideals of big countries today.)
If nothing else, making human lives disposable would have an adverse effect on experimentation; researchers would get sloppy. This being in response to the argument that an individual life is not worth more than everyone else's, so sacrificing them for the good of humanity is justified if the project/experiment has that kind of impact.
But in the end, isn't a lot of technology based on paranoia or fear or unhappiness? Even space exploration - people don't want to do it just because they want to see something cool. At some point we'll have the technology to do all that and take pictures and not have to go anywhere. We can already do that with interplanetary distances, although it's a massive undertaking each time.
There's overpopulation, darwinism, adventure, etc. But all of it comes down to taking some effort to expand or strengthen the human race, which goes back to evolutionary roots (any organism that betters itself is more likely to overpower an organism that doesn't). If we really wanted to just be happy or live in pleasure, we'd just make electrodes to stick in our brain and live in bliss for the rest of our lives through direct stimulation of the neural centers of the brain and have all our bodily needs get taken care of by IV tubes.
No real point here, just thinking 'aloud' as it were...it's ironic to thing that unhappiness might be advantageous to drive progress.