Everyone always talks about how the world has gotten smaller. How planes are now able to fly nonstop around the world, trip that took months now take hours, and of course how the internet has been able to almost instantly connect us with people around the world. I'm not trying to downplay the significance of this, on the contrary, it is absolutely amazing that I can get on a video chat with a friend down the street, a friend on the other side of the country, and a friend on the other side of the globe all at the same time and have a conversation where we can hear and see eachother... and that it doesn't increae my internet bill a single cent! But I don't think the world has gotten smaller, I think our reach has gotten longer. Maybe it's just semantics, but I like to look at it my way instead. When you say the world has gotten smaller... you're saying that the Earth has done somthing, when it hasn't. The Earth 50 years ago was 85,345,714,285,714,285,714,286 times larger than a human being and today it is still 85,345,714,285,714,285,714,286 times larger than a human being. What's changed is all the amazing things we as human beings have come up with. Granted, I think it would have been better if we were able to focus inward to improve ourselves instead of improving machines so much, but I digress. I just saw that number on how much larger the Earth is than a human being, and it's pretty much impossible for our minds to really picture how much bigger the Earth is than each and every one of us. But that just made all of what we have accomplished so much more incredible. We haven't shrunken the Earth so that we could travel the country in the same time we could travel between two cities, we were able to make a way for us to travel an incredibly further distance in a shorter amount of time than one used to be able to travel a much much shorter distance.
Now if only we can figure out how to make ourselves fly on our own without need for planes, then we'd reeaallly be on to something...
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