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Well let's revisit this statement in 500 years. Every decade has brought the world closer. Even the recent developments (brexit, trump) are reactions to increas

• lenkite 7y ago
  Of-course you are right: there are likely to be several major wars in 500 years where smaller and poorer nations get annexed or more likely - simply subjugated by sheer economic dominance. The winners who perform this 'integration' will definitely be in charge of the space missions.
• roenxi 7y ago
  " A 1910 best-selling book, The Great Illusion, used economic arguments to demonstrate that territorial conquest had become unprofitable, and therefore global capitalism had removed the risk of major wars. " [0] If you assume that the world order should look like America in charge, everyone else playing quietly in their own garden then everything is fine. If you assume that the Asian, African and European powers might see the world differently, there is a lot of potential that the last 60 years are not the inevitable tide of history but a happy anomaly while everyone stood back up from WWII. [0] http://blogs.reuters.com/anatole-kaletsky/2014/06/27/world-war-one-first-war-was-impossible-then-inevitable/ http://blogs.reuters.com/anatole-kaletsky/2014/06/27/world-w...
  • rayiner 7y ago
    > If you assume that the Asian, African and European powers might see the world differently And if you’re an American, the prospect of that single national government being say Bangladesh (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/asia/bangladesh-statue-justice-supreme-court-islam.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/asia/bangladesh-sta...) should be pretty scary! Star Trek style global government seems attractive to many people because they assume it’ll be “America in Space.”
    • TeMPOraL 7y ago
      More like Europe in space (more socialist/democratic) and I wouldn't mind it - but then I guess I'm biased, as a European (and I half-seriously fly the flag of United Federation of Planets). Still, I don't think we can face planetary-scale challenges much longer as a bunch of competing nations; some form of global governance will be necessary for humanity to move forward. As for culture difference, this may be unpopular opinion, but I do hope things will homogenize further over time. The driving aspect towards cultural unification even today is that people copy what works.
      • rayiner 7y ago
        Europe is not socialist. The government does not own the means of production.
        • jfk13 7y ago
          I very much doubt that's what TeMPOraL meant by "socialist/democratic". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_(disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_(disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
    • WanderPanda 7y ago
      @TeMPOraL Yeah a "Great Leap Forward" kind of moving forward for humanity? Sounds good, works bad. Capitalism looks bad, but works good. I once also wanted a kind of world government but as I grew more knowledgable this Idea really started to terrify me. A decentralized world of competing small units with a small set of (trade) rules seems like the best option mid- to long-term. In short term of course socialist type of governance gives stability. Just 2 cents from a fellow European
• Barrin92 7y ago
  It's certainly odd to measure the closeness of human societies by the proximity of coca cola dispensers. Humanity is scientifically and materialistically closer and that will certainly continue, but the world is not closer in terms of modes of governance or ideas of how society ought to be organised. On the contrary, 30 years ago after the fall of the Soviet Union that sentiment peaked and Fukuyama's end of history seemed plausible. Today with the nationalisation of cyberspace, we can see countless of new divides. The US is rapidly withdrawing from global affairs, China is emerging with a competitive, alternative mode of organisation, a distinct European identity is beginning to form as a response to this particular in France, India is slowly emerging (see the very thread we're in), and Africa is a whole other matter. But by no means does it look like the world is converging, as it did in the 90s and early 00s when we were all listening to corporate world music and cheering for Blair.
  • JohnStrangeII 7y ago
    The convergence is massive and even faster than in the 90s. Languages die nearly daily (a language dies when its last speaker dies) and with them their culture, and people consume the same media and news all of the world. I'm not going to dig up some links on the net, you can do that yourself, but these are measurable phenomena. You're thinking in short, next twenty years or so. A resurgence of nationalism is a response to globalization, but unless we give up our ways of living entirely (no capitalism, no markets, no growth) these movements will have practically no effect. Mass media alone ensure that, let alone the nature of global trading and social mobility. Think about the next two hundred years and there is no way culture on earth will not be vastly homogeneous. Whether that's good or bad I will leave open, my personal view is that all massive shifts in human development are accompanied by positive and negative effects.
    • balt_s 7y ago
      > You're thinking in short, next twenty years or so I suspect the drawdown of easily-accessible, dense, cheap fossil fuels will spell the end of global integration; consider a very low-energy future where most communication takes place via radio and travel for 99% takes place at a fraction of today's rate. We would expect regional differences to increase as groups adapt to local areas, ideally while carrying out extensive sharing of e.g. practices and techniques.
• emanreus 7y ago
  Trash food and beverage franchises brought us together? I don't think so.
• Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  Sounds like proof that cultural imperialism is a valid complaint for much of the world. Is it a bad thing that some of the previous worst offenders are starting to pull back?
• coldtea 7y ago
  >Every decade has brought the world closer. Well, (1) there are more sovereign nations now than ever, (2) all the big empires (from Babylonian, to Alexander's, to Roman, to Byzantium, to Persian, to Incas, all the way to the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British and French colonial empires, USSR, and more) -aside from the Chinese and Indian who are more homogenous racially/culturally - have collapsed (3) there is way more infighting that on any time in the previous 40 years (4) nations that were held together for half a century as a single country have nonetheless split at the first chance, often under fierce wars (e.g. Yugoslavia), and even centuries old countries like Canada, Belgium, UK, Spain, etc, still have infighting, and even votes to break up... (5) a worsening of climate change and economy will more than likely see every-nation-for-itself than some unity, even if there's a coordinated effort to reduce emissions and so on, there will also be huge pressure to ascertain certain resources, safety, etc at a country by country level (sharing is only good for those that need it. For those that have the power to avoid it, or even grab from others, it just gives you moral points) >You can find kfc, coca cola in societies as diverse as Mongolia and Madagascar. Yeah, that's a huge cultural (and dietary) destruction...
  • Razengan 7y ago
    > aside from the Chinese and India Do you know how many different empires, rulers, internal wars and government systems China and India have gone through in 2000 years, and how many "races" and "cultures" they have?
    • coldtea 7y ago
      >Do you know how many different empires, rulers, internal wars and government systems China and India have gone through in 2000 years, and how many "races" and "cultures" they have? Yes. Still more homogeneous and stable than most other empires...
      • Der_Einzige 7y ago
        Oh you mean like that time when the Mongol conquered and ruled china for like, 100+ years, ushering in the largest case of minority rule the world had ever seen to that point. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_dynasty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_dynasty
• ekianjo 7y ago
  I love the fact that people always bring stuff like: > hey you can find McDonalds and Starbucks even when you don't expect it, so it means the world is closer than it has ever been right? You could find pottery exported in multiple places even in antiquity, that did not mean they had a single culture or single belief system in place. Do not equal exchange of goods with the assumption of a mono-culture.
  • rjf72 7y ago
    Tea is also a phenomenal example here since it's been so globally traded that it no longer even has a cultural identity. And then when you get into the age of sail you suddenly see a massive intercontinental trade of sugar/cotton/tobacco/coffee/etc. I also never understood why people seem to think that a multinational corporation selling stuff to different cultures is somehow doing anything but increasing the corporation's profit margins.
    • ganeshkrishnan 7y ago
      Interesting fact: if tea arrived via land, it's nomenclature is rhyming with chai. If it arrived via the seas, it rhymes with tea.
      • lovemenot 7y ago
        Japan, an island nation, seems to be an exception. Ocha rhymes with chai.
• rjf72 7y ago
  Integration is such an interesting term. Before we got to see what the internet actually became, it was a realm of endless idealism. It was going to be something that would finally unite people across cultures and any sort of boundaries. People would be able to share ideas, communicate instantly, and effectively turn humanity from a disparate group of people separated by arbitrary lines into simple a group of diverse and interesting people all sharing and communicating among one another. Instead we used its filtering ability to break down into even smaller groups than before. Before the internet Americans were mostly unified by an American identity. Now instead we've splintered off into a whole host of little subculture identities driven by the great ability of the internet to unite niches and expel the nonbelievers. But this isn't about the internet. It's about people. Birmingham is one of the most "integrated" cities in England. This [1] page has heat maps showing the various religions there. There's basically no overlap. Instead of integration you have the Muslim section, the Christian section, the Jew section, etc. Even the Sikhs have there own little section, though granted they do share it a bit with the Hindus. Now instead of having one mostly unified city you now have a half dozen cities that have some very sharp cultural conflicts. The irony that literally bringing people closer together can, figuratively, do the exact opposite. Even the notion that we're becoming more integrated is something I'd question. This [2] is a video showing the borders of the world over time. The surprising thing you'll notice is that, over time, divisions between society have actually been accelerating. Check out the mid 1200s. The Mongols created a single unified empire than stretched from western europe to eastern asia. Very near the entire known world at the time. No need for borders when there's one world government, and one that was also extremely tolerant of foreign cultures. Can you imagine living in this time and then somebody saying that within a couple of centuries the entire empire would be scattered like ashes in the wind? And like nearly all the empire collapses you can see in that video, it was caused by internal culture clashes. Should the Mongol empire adopt western traditions and become a sedentary settled empire, or should it remain a putative Mongol empire? One side said x, the other said y, lots of people died, the empire broke up. A story told a million times on various scales. Of course even if they had chosen one direction or another, it likely would have had the same ending because once one side or another reached a critical mass - you'd see the emergence of internal insurrections. Of course we've had a pause in open war since 1945 but nuclear deterrence isn't going to last forever. Imagine there were no nuclear weapons today. Do you think China, the Mideast, the United States, China, Russia, Europe, etc would still be maintaining the already tenuous peace we have? Without nuclear weapons the Cold War would not have been the Cold War, it would have been World War 3. And as soon as nuclear deterrence can be nullified by technological means, I expect we'll be quite quick to pick right back up. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Birmingham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Birmingham [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6Wu0Q7x5D0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6Wu0Q7x5D0