Alchemy was regarded as science in the past times. A lot of alchemical predictions were right - like turning lead into gold, but the problem is the gold is VERY radioactive and costs of doing that exceeds the value of gained "treasure".
Regarding FMA, alchemy there is way less generic than generic magic, being more shady practice not always wanted by everyone. Unlike magic in other media, FMA alchemy is quite believable to some extent, as it tries (and kind of succeeds) to follow physics.
Not to remind you that physics itself was also disregarded as child's play or even satanism, mind you.
AND GOING BACK TO THE TOPIC, it would be neither of all these choices. I believe we would end like humanity in hard sci-fi novels (e.g. some of Stanislaw Lem's ones), in which humanity did not contact any aliens and is rather developing slowly, barely reaching outside the Solar System.
We can only pray that Russians would share their prototype engine fueled by water. In fact, to construct reliable spaceship, we would need to unite a bit, with Russian, European, Chinese, American (nowadays also Indian) and Japanese technologies and ideas regarding space exploration.
However, if someone is going to Mars first, it would be either a private space company or PRC.
