The Last Global Era

posted on 2019-03-26

Assuming the singularity either doesn't happen before we go interstellar, or doesn't fundamentally affect how humans interact with one another,

assuming faster-than-light travel and communication are impossible or hard enough, including cheating solutions such as the Alcubierre drive or such as running an exact simulation of the universe up to where and when you want to go, and then uploading yourself into that simulation,

assuming acausal conversations are sufficiently impossible that we still need to communicate with other humans far away to know things about them,

assuming either no existential catastrophy occurs before we get our space colonization momentum going, or aliens occupying the rest of the galaxy are relatable enough to be considered people for the purposes of this article,

assuming interstellar or interuniverse colonization happens, and humans or human-enough entities still exist in those times,…

…we are living in the last global era, where almost any human community can have real-time conversations with almost any other human community, or even meet them in real life.

That's very weird.

The vast majority of human existence will happen over an interstellar community, where if anything interesting happens somewhere, other people won't learn about for a very long time, and – eventually – when humans live in places that are going away from one another faster than the speed of light, other people won't ever get a chance to learn about it.

Right now, if someone makes the greatest video game of all time, we all have a chance to learn about it. That won't be the case for the vast majority of human existence. Even you, reading this right now, unless you're unfortunate enough to die before we invent immortality, will probably live the vast majority of your life in that post-global era.

It's kinda sad. But it's also a great reason to invent great things right now. Whatever we make of the culture and society we have now will be what colony ships take on board with them, and any change to global human culture after that will be extremely hard to make, if possible at all.

Part of the work i'm doing and the things i'm thinking about right now are based on realizing how lucky i am to live during the last global era of society. Please take that into consideration for what you do with your life as well.

posted on 2019-03-26