Of course, pictures like this are more profound for what you don’t see: country borders.
I don't know why the author thought that was so profound. Did he really expect the borders to be outlined with lights?
I don't know why the author thought that was so profound. Did he really expect the borders to be outlined with lights?
But if enough people can get to space, they’ll see the planet for what it is: a fragile, magnificent ball with a thin shell of atmosphere protecting it from the entire Universe… and no artificial boundary lines to be seen. We made those ourselves, and we put an awful lot of stock in them. Remembering that fact might also be an important way to make sure our species endures.
Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel argues that Western Europe became more advanced than China despite a head start in China because there were so many countries, so one country's government couldn't ruin things.
Nuclear weaponry is but one of a number of salient examples. Even such staunch realists as Kissinger have come to recognize that they must be eliminated, and that intense international cooperation will be necessary to do so:
http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/610...
Our pretty fragile species. As a ball of rock going through the solar system, the earth itself will keep going until the sun blows up, and so will life itself more than likely. But we don't live in the whole planet, the biosphere (and even more so the section of it we can in) is a fragile shell and its destruction will translate in ours.
One of my favorite shows is The Sons of Anarchy, a modern day take on Hamlet with a motorcycle club as the back drop. The club was established on the principles of anarchist writer Emma Goldman, and it's interesting how they portray the world of anarchy. As a biker gang, they reject the laws of the world at large, but they seek order at a tribal level, with a president and VP of the club. They want to maintain peace in their hometown, but their quests are geared toward survival and prosperity. It's just a TV show, though. It's not profound. But as a microscopic view of what a borderless world might look like, it's a better starting point that a night photo of the Nile.
Rich countries have street lighting, poor countries didn't - even the west-east German border used to be very obvious. 20 years later cheap fluorescent tubes are everywhere which has blurred this a little