What is the role of geography and place in the future of progress?
There was the recent paper on “Why Britain? The Right Place (in the Technology Space) at the Right Time” looking at why Britain gained economic leadership during the Industrial Revolution. We have seen the agglomeration effects on innovation regions with Detroit in the 40′s and 50′s and Silicon Valley in the 1990s-2010s.
On the other hand we are seeing remote work and considerably high demand for it. Recent data on LinkedIn had 14% of jobs being listed as remote, but garnering 52% of the applications. IP commercialization is not limited to where it was developed.
He proposes 2 concepts, one is “articulated thalassography”, a measurement I’ve seen in fractal theory, comparing the length of the coast with surface of the country that can be reasonably defended... Another is “Mereuporia”, the capacity in a zone to have stable “realms” that compete strongly but can never win totally on the whole zone...
Both ideas push countries to stay stable, exchange much, innovate much, and prevent the creation of a sterile centralized empire.
The second author, cited David Cosande (and Isaac Asimov, and many others, including a post-Roman historian) : Philippe Fabry
In English there is only: “history of next century”, and “Rome from libertarianism to socialism: Ancient lessons for our time”
He has a more comprehensive theory of history (Historionomy), proposing that there have been 3 ages, with Mycenian empire, Roman Empire, and US Empire, evolving in spiraling cycles...
What he calls Civilization A was Greece, and now is Europe (before it was Cretan “palaces”), with dynamic states that from medieval period, move to a Renaissance, with each country making a national transition from medieval to monarchy then parliamentary democracy.
However, this transition is frozen during wars when the country is troubled… Britain with 100 years war, delayed French Revolution by 100 years, while it’s own process was not… it became the “thalassocracy” , having control over the commerce… WW1&WW2 (German national transition, which triggered Russian transition halted by Staline unexpected victory) propelled USA as the new Thalassocracy...
Being the Thalassocracy make you connected to many civilizations, attractive to innovators, demanding in innovation, and not afraid of innovations.
In Antiquity, Athens was the thalassocracy.
There is much more to say, but yes, geography, because of commerce and capacity to protect your land are key.
One of the reason of Russian psychology is that they were on the road of nomad warlords from Mongolia, regularly invaded… France on the opposite is a crossing but have good natural borders to hale. and England is an island. Ukraine was the door to Europe, where Polish empire installed Cossacks horsemen to block eastern invasions… guess what happened when someone attached them from the east ? (Note that the mass of fighter against nazis were Ukrainians and Belarussians)...
What is depressive with Fabry is that he predict the fate of US Empire is like Roman Empire, move from democracy to autoritarianism, then alone in his empire, with no competition, it will collapse like USSR, leading to a new middle age, allowing a new Renaissance, but with bigger-size civilization (guess à which scale)… risky colonization far from Civilization A… a new Thalassocracia...
The only things to do would be to store Alexandria Library in a very safe place, and promote a new Bysance Interesting theory...
The more transportation and communication technology advance, the more we conquer time and space, and the less they matter. However, they still matter a lot, and will for the foreseeable future. We would need something faster than supersonic airplanes, or some kind of very high-fidelity VR/telepresence, for the effect of distance to be negligible.
Emphasis on “foreseeable”—maybe something will happen that makes distance obsolete.
On the other hand, it can only do so as long as we stay on one planet. Once we go beyond Earth, the speed of light makes distances matter again. Even between here and the Moon, a ~2.5-second round trip delay makes real-time conversations awkward. Between here and Mars, the delay is measured in minutes, making even basic web browsing basically impossible. Once we become interstellar, we’re basically forking human civilization. So probably “place” will always matter.
I know this is a minor point of yours, but I think straightforward extensions of existing web technology could solve the problem of communication between Earth and Moon or Mars, at least when interactivity with another human on earth is not required. CDNs already cache a large % of media your browser downloads. The number of round-trips needed is an optimization target in modern web engineering, and e.g. HTTP/2 introduced many new improvements for that. Compute also can move closer to the user; one can imagine AWS opening a new region “mars-1” with most or all of the same services they offer on earth.
The challenge here may actually be achieving the bandwidth needed to proactively push most data on the internet to Mars. High bandwidth (like fiber between major data centers) helps achieve impressive latency on Earth; I have no idea how difficult or expensive it would be to achieve such bandwidth between Earth and Mars.
Live collaboration is of course harder and the solutions to those seem to be more on the product and process side. Long-form writing, Loom video/screen recordings, and general written-first culture is something remote-first companies rely on today.
I think the Earth–Mars communication problem is definitely solvable, and it makes sense that the solution would be built on top of existing web standards. But I think new solutions and new standards/protocols would need to be developed, and it would be less than straightforward—it will require real engineering. And no matter what the solution, the overall user experience will be different.
What is the role of geography and place in the future of progress?
There was the recent paper on “Why Britain? The Right Place (in the Technology Space) at the Right Time” looking at why Britain gained economic leadership during the Industrial Revolution. We have seen the agglomeration effects on innovation regions with Detroit in the 40′s and 50′s and Silicon Valley in the 1990s-2010s.
On the other hand we are seeing remote work and considerably high demand for it. Recent data on LinkedIn had 14% of jobs being listed as remote, but garnering 52% of the applications. IP commercialization is not limited to where it was developed.
There are some analysis about why democracy, modernity appeared in Europe, earlier in Greece, and there are two related analysis.
One is by David Cosandey, “Le secret de l’Occident. Vers une théorie générale du progrès
scientifique, ”
You can translate this related presentation to have a quick vision:
https://gerflint.fr/Base/MondeMed4/Demorgon_Secret.pdf
He proposes 2 concepts, one is “articulated thalassography”, a measurement I’ve seen in fractal theory, comparing the length of the coast with surface of the country that can be reasonably defended...
Another is “Mereuporia”, the capacity in a zone to have stable “realms” that compete strongly but can never win totally on the whole zone...
Both ideas push countries to stay stable, exchange much, innovate much, and prevent the creation of a sterile centralized empire.
The second author, cited David Cosande (and Isaac Asimov, and many others, including a post-Roman historian) : Philippe Fabry
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=digital-text&rh=p_27%3APhilippe+Fabry&s=relevancerank&text=Philippe+Fabry
In English there is only: “history of next century”, and “Rome from libertarianism to socialism: Ancient lessons for our time”
He has a more comprehensive theory of history (Historionomy), proposing that there have been 3 ages, with Mycenian empire, Roman Empire, and US Empire, evolving in spiraling cycles...
What he calls Civilization A was Greece, and now is Europe (before it was Cretan “palaces”), with dynamic states that from medieval period, move to a Renaissance, with each country making a national transition from medieval to monarchy then parliamentary democracy.
However, this transition is frozen during wars when the country is troubled… Britain with 100 years war, delayed French Revolution by 100 years, while it’s own process was not… it became the “thalassocracy” , having control over the commerce… WW1&WW2 (German national transition, which triggered Russian transition halted by Staline unexpected victory) propelled USA as the new Thalassocracy...
Being the Thalassocracy make you connected to many civilizations, attractive to innovators, demanding in innovation, and not afraid of innovations.
In Antiquity, Athens was the thalassocracy.
There is much more to say, but yes, geography, because of commerce and capacity to protect your land are key.
One of the reason of Russian psychology is that they were on the road of nomad warlords from Mongolia, regularly invaded… France on the opposite is a crossing but have good natural borders to hale. and England is an island. Ukraine was the door to Europe, where Polish empire installed Cossacks horsemen to block eastern invasions… guess what happened when someone attached them from the east ? (Note that the mass of fighter against nazis were Ukrainians and Belarussians)...
What is depressive with Fabry is that he predict the fate of US Empire is like Roman Empire, move from democracy to autoritarianism, then alone in his empire, with no competition, it will collapse like USSR, leading to a new middle age, allowing a new Renaissance, but with bigger-size civilization (guess à which scale)… risky colonization far from Civilization A… a new Thalassocracia...
The only things to do would be to store Alexandria Library in a very safe place, and promote a new Bysance
Interesting theory...
The more transportation and communication technology advance, the more we conquer time and space, and the less they matter. However, they still matter a lot, and will for the foreseeable future. We would need something faster than supersonic airplanes, or some kind of very high-fidelity VR/telepresence, for the effect of distance to be negligible.
Emphasis on “foreseeable”—maybe something will happen that makes distance obsolete.
On the other hand, it can only do so as long as we stay on one planet. Once we go beyond Earth, the speed of light makes distances matter again. Even between here and the Moon, a ~2.5-second round trip delay makes real-time conversations awkward. Between here and Mars, the delay is measured in minutes, making even basic web browsing basically impossible. Once we become interstellar, we’re basically forking human civilization. So probably “place” will always matter.
I know this is a minor point of yours, but I think straightforward extensions of existing web technology could solve the problem of communication between Earth and Moon or Mars, at least when interactivity with another human on earth is not required. CDNs already cache a large % of media your browser downloads. The number of round-trips needed is an optimization target in modern web engineering, and e.g. HTTP/2 introduced many new improvements for that. Compute also can move closer to the user; one can imagine AWS opening a new region “mars-1” with most or all of the same services they offer on earth.
The challenge here may actually be achieving the bandwidth needed to proactively push most data on the internet to Mars. High bandwidth (like fiber between major data centers) helps achieve impressive latency on Earth; I have no idea how difficult or expensive it would be to achieve such bandwidth between Earth and Mars.
Live collaboration is of course harder and the solutions to those seem to be more on the product and process side. Long-form writing, Loom video/screen recordings, and general written-first culture is something remote-first companies rely on today.
I think the Earth–Mars communication problem is definitely solvable, and it makes sense that the solution would be built on top of existing web standards. But I think new solutions and new standards/protocols would need to be developed, and it would be less than straightforward—it will require real engineering. And no matter what the solution, the overall user experience will be different.