The best example of the next progression of this norm in international relations and cooperation is the EU, while not perfect, it is easy to see how in a few decades, this might replace the nation states of Europe and form a superstate. this isnt going to happen overnight but it is going to happen, the historical precident has been set. And it is only a matter of time ( albeit a long time) that this process expands to include other nations.

It might well happen that we do not end up with one government, some cultural/ religious issues might very well see there being two or three dominant governments, with a scattering of isolationist or unimportant states on the periphery.

But lesser known to those outside of the engineering fields, American politicians also use the same irrational sentiments to avoid creating any meaningful international cooperation on technological standards. For fuck's sake, this is the same country who can't even switch from standard to metric, that's how isolationist we are. That's why every SD card manufactured in a different country has is made to its own set of standards, and then every camera or cell phone becomes a bigger pain in the ass to design and more expensive to build. And the problems only multiply as you look at technology as a whole. This is what our protectionists rackets are doing for us while Americans make hypothetical assumptions about why things are so much better just the way they are now. I just wonder what an American laying in a hospital in France will say 10 years from now when the doctors can't access his medical records because of - you guessed it - an incompatible file format made to an unknown specification. Oh, everyone will say stuff like "computers suck" and move on with their lives, I guess, and keep on going with their knee-jerk reactions to associate governments with tyranny and chaos with freedom.

The centralization of power is a scary thought indeed.

From what I have seen here in the USA, lots of religious people LOVE centralization of power. They only hate it when somebody else does it.

I haven't forgotten, and I sure hope it can happen!

Thump: Don't forget to shoot me a comment on a thread when you're ready to come to Texas this summer, then I'll get you my email.

The reason I want a one-world-government is so that it can implement useful policies that span the entire world. While the UN has done this on occasion, it has always been as a small sideline to its main job, political grandstanding by its members. Same for the EU. So I don't support them.

Just as a side note, I always laugh when physicists say that social sciences are "soft" sciences, or easy. I'd like to see a physicist try to do an experiement where there were no independent variables.

That is pretty much the opposite of what "soft science" means. Soft means that it's more complicated, harder to predict, and not obviously entirely deterministic. In a sense, soft sciences are harder than the hard sciences; this is what provides the wiggle room that makes them soft. ;)