This is one of the random thoughts that usually pop right into my head when I least expect it.
I was on a work trip. One of those where you get to travel to exotic destinations but all you get to see is the office, the company cafeteria and the hotel. I was having dinner at the hotel and I started thinking of how come people have this strange need to aggregate in some area. How did people start living with other people, and how did they manage to eventually take this concept to such gigantic proportions as to create today's biggest cities, with millions and millions of individuals living close to each other.
The first reason I thought of was procreation and the continuation of the species: a certain gene pool needs a minimum degree of diversity in order to avoid extinction. Did humans in the upper palaeolithic or in the mesolithic really think along those lines? Probably not. So here I am, I'm not very good at running, hiding, or throwing spears. I can't hunt for food, but I'm good at growing legumes. If I find someone who's good at hunting, maybe we can trade food. Now, wouldn't it be easier if the two of us lived relatively close to each other instead of a half-day walking distance? I haven't studied anthropology, archaeology or any related branches, but that kind of makes sense to me.
Without going that far back in time, just think that a hundred years ago a grain of black pepper needed to travel for months to reach Europe, from south west India to Italy, but people could still find black papper in grocery shops, because they lived in human settlements where specialisation of roles could support a complex social infrastructure: different people can do different things and provide different needs, but they need to be in relatively close proximity in order to maximise their reciprocal advantage.
In physics, this is equivalent to a system trying to find its equilibrium by minimising its energy. An electron in an excited atom "prefers" to drop to a lower energy level if that level is not already full. This is what the electron thinks: what's the point in doing so much work just to keep running like mad in a "higher orbit", when I could just cruise casually around a "lower orbit"? So the electron "drops down" an energy level and sheds the excess energy in a flash of light. And no, I haven't studied much physics either, but that kind of makes sense to me.
Extrapolating the principle of minimising a system's energy, here's what a human might think instead: what's the point in spending half a day travelling to buy some food, load up enough food to last me a while (because it's not like I'll do this again tomorrow, or the day after), then carry all that food back home and manage its storage, when I could just move downtown and simply pop down to the corner shop whenever I need to?
The real achievement in moving downtown, in really fancy terms, is not that I have found a low-energy equilibrium. My half-day walk has become a two-minute stroll. The 20 kilometers between the shop and my house have become less than 100 metres. By moving downtown I have effectively compressed space and time.
Today, as a human living in the remote countryside, I don't actually need to move at all, but I can still compress space and time. How? With Internet, of course. I don't need to live in relatively close proximity to other humans and human structures: I need to move to wherever there is an Internet connection and a postal service, and these might well exist in the remote countryside as well as downtown. So will internet reverse the process of urbanisation, or at least will it make such reversal possible? I think so. Virtual offices, internet videoconferencing, voice-over-IP, news streaming, bla bla bla... it's all there already. The recent hype of "going green" even encourages to great extents to stay where you are, avoid travelling, avoid lighting up an entire office or unnecessarily loading the public transport system if you can work from home. The fascination for "going downtown", perhaps, will eventually be confined only to touristic attractions. I'm not saying people will have no more reasons for sticking together in organised physical conglomerates: I'm just saying, IMHO, that there will be a lot less of a motivation to do so in the future.
M.
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