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Comment by ymbeld | Hacker News Reader

I won’t call you crazy, but I will call you naive. Modern civilization was what brought us centralized states and corporations. And yet we always seem to think that that next hill, just over the horizon is where everything will flip on its head and we will be back to some mythical past where we could roam wherever we please—all enabled by technology of course.

New World 2.0 isn’t coming.

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I don’t see the early 19th century as a “mythical past”, nor did I say big changes were “just over the horizon.”

Space is quite literally limitless from a human perspective; to assume that somehow human beings will make zero progress on space travel 500 or 1,000 years from now seems naive to me.

I didn’t say something about the progress of space travel. I made an observation about how technological progress and centralization are correlated. And I don’t think societies in the age of space travel (with the technology that that entails) will be less centralized than what we have now.

But I don’t think technological process and centralization are necessarily correlated. It’s more like they go in cycles.

The progression from trains to cars is a good example. At first you had highly centralized, expensive transport. Then cars developed and became decentralized.

On a longer timeline, consider technologies like writing, or paper. Initially highly centralized, now so ubiquitous that we don’t even recognize them as technologies.

I’m basically just saying that on a long enough timeline, the chances that space transportation is controlled by a central authority seems nearly impossible.

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