Integrationism

Posted to the Apocaholics Anonymous group on Insight Timer, 29 March 2022.

I’m grateful for modern communication and transportation networks.  Last night I was sending messages practically instantaneously to people on different continents from here in the Galápagos islands 1000 km from the nearest mainland, and next week I’ll fly back to my country of origin literally overnight.

When Charles Darwin was here less than two centuries ago, it took several weeks or months to send letters and specimens he had collected back home to England, and his voyage around the world aboard the Beagle, which was originally supposed to last for three years, took five.  Back then, you had a significant chance of dying on a journey like that, and if you did make it home it would be in the company of a somewhat different group of people as several of your original companions probably did die along the way, and the survivors mostly had a miserable time (Darwin suffered from terrible seasickness his entire time aboard the Beagle for five years, understandably given his berthing situation… He wrote to a cousin, in a letter that probably took months to reach her, “I hate every wave of the ocean”).  And people today complain about having to sit in cramped airline seats for a few hours (as Louis C.K. said, “But it doesn’t go back a lot!”).

It’s now possible to travel literally halfway around the globe to the other side of the world in a matter of hours rather than months or years, and to send messages or even speak to someone by audio or video call anywhere on Earth virtually instantaneously in fractions of a second, effectively in real time.  In Darwin’s time, less than a couple of lifetimes ago, this would have been considered nothing short of miraculous… But it’s no miracle, but rather the fruits of science and technology, which allows us to consistently reproduce the “miracle” regularly at will (which is why most people already take it entirely for granted… Is the speed of light not fast enough for you?! 😅).