It’s a Big World

The Grand Canyon from the north rim

They say it’s a small world, but it still feels really big to me.

I’m no expert, but I think I have enough experience to provide a fairly educated opinion on travel. One thing that I often hear about history is that the advent of various methods of transportation made the world “smaller” and brought more people in contact with one another. This always made sense to me, but as I consider this assertion further my opinion has become more nuanced. Despite my use of advanced technology to reach faraway places, the world still feels pretty huge to me. Just because I can get to France in less than a day doesn’t make the Atlantic Ocean look like any less of an obstacle. Humans are still tiny creatures on a giant planet. Even a country as small as Luxembourg would take ages to fully explore.

But yet the world is more interconnected. The internet allows us to communicate with only milliseconds of delay. News now updates constantly through all 24 hours of each day. Globalization is real, whether you call it the salvation or the doom of our world.

French Romanesque architecture

But none of this is new. It’s not like contact between distant peoples is a recent invention. Traders sailed to England from Greece and Phoenicia, a Carthaginian is rumored to have reached the Horn of Africa, and Chinese dignitaries visited the Romans. Vikings found the Americas long before Columbus’ great-great-grandparents were born. And yet the world still hadn’t gotten any smaller… I guess since travel was still too slow back then for our modern tastes.

To find some sort of stopping point for what is becoming quite a ramble, I will say that I don’t think the world has “gotten any smaller.” What’s changed is that communications are quicker. The planet remains as massive as it’s ever been.

Starting out on a strange mood but eager to continue,

Grant