It’s a Small World
The world is shrinking. No, I don’t mean the size of the planet is literally getting smaller. I mean that places far away from each other are in contact with each other more than ever.
100 years ago, if someone told you they knew someone from Japan, you would expect an amazing story to explain it. They sailed across the whole world for months and months to do something important in Japan. Today, the story can be as simple as “I was in a chat room” or “We played a video game online together”.
All of this easy communication is making “foreign” countries feel a lot less foreign.
How do we meet people? Here are some basic conditions needed to meet a friend:
- They need to live a short enough distance away so that you could visit them in a reasonable amount of time.
- They need to share something in common with you.
- They need to speak the same language as you.
All of these conditions used to limit you to meeting people in your neighborhood. Once the car was invented, that vicinity expanded. The same goes for the airplane.
Now that we have the Internet, meeting people from anywhere in the world is easy, and maybe even easier than meeting someone from your town. Normally if you meet someone online or in a video game, you already share an interest: whatever “place” you met them or what kind of games you like to play. You have easy access to the person, because they’re so close to you that you don’t even need to leave your house. Throw in a common language and you’re all set.
Right now, new airplane technology is being developed, which would shorten the amount of time a trip would take by hours. Imagine flying across the world in a few minutes, or maybe an hour. Suddenly, someone who lives across an ocean takes you just as long to visit as someone who lives a few towns over.
As technology grows, societies grow closer. The only way for this planet to become truly peaceful is for people to learn from each other. If we keep talking to people who are different from us, we’ll learn that we actually have a lot in common.
I see the future as a place where race is no longer an issue because we will all reproduce with people who are different from us until there is only one race left: the human race. I only wish I could live to see that future.
3 years ago