Derek Beyer

I feel this. I used to joke that I was caught somewhere between Thoreau and Sagan — I wanted to fuck off to the woods and I also to do everything and see the Universe. So for me, it has often been more about ambition than material. Do I let the world go by or do I try to put my hand on the ball?

Also, American urban design has made this split feel more binary than is necessary. I have tried — really tried — to figure out where I could satisfy both my desire for access to nature and access to culture, and if someone has a good answer (that isn’t exclusive to the ultra wealthy at this point) I’d love to hear it. This is a result of policy decisions.

I loved this one, Elle. I really appreciate that you refuse to collapse complexity or give in to false dilemmas.

This most reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy. He attempts to write plausible political conflict around the terraforming of Mars, and mostly succeeds in conveying the political coordination issues, but it's hard to write credible conservatives when the environment you're talking about doesn't sustain any form of life. (He also wrote The Ministry of the Future more directly about climate change, but it's more of an extended thought experiment than a novel, and even as a KSR fan I can't recommend it.)

I think "we should learn to control the climate more generally" is most compelling because "stopping" climate change isn't simply a matter of applying the brakes. It will require many different approaches, and being able to reverse certain kinds of damage will mean having a lot more deftness than simply ceasing the mistakes we've made this far. We have been living in a world where humans affect the climate unintentionally, so the only place to go from here is a world where we control it intentionally.

Thank you for the thoughts and ideas. You and other commenters have addressed national defense and the time needed for participation, but I also wonder how this would effect cross-jurisdiction coordination. It seems to me that village-states would have some kind of impact on how we build public infrastructure. For better or worse, I'm not sure.

The big question seems to be: Good for whom, and in what sense? The countries involved? Their leaders? Their citizens? The world? Humanity? This framing helps clarify why the annexation question isn't straightforward.

I think there's likely a political equivalent to optimal currency area theory. Just as economic conditions determine whether a region benefits from sharing a currency, various factors might determine the ideal political unit size. There are cities, states, and empires that would be better off as something else due to their specific context and attributes, though I'm not certain that this would correlate directly with what would be best for their citizens. I can imagine an imperial Athens that provides better material conditions and a city-state Rome that makes better art. And this is almost certainly not the same as what's best for their leaders as they determine it.

Then, I suppose the question is how you determine that for any particular context. How do we know if the right move for the moment is to move toward empire or independence? That doesn't seem solvable without knowing the outcomes we desire and the values we use to constrain our answers, which again rely on knowing who we're answering for.

For what it's worth, the United States definitely has an optimal political area problem, but I don't think the solution is states-as-countries either. It's too big and diverse for one country and too connected for 50. Given a frictionless vacuum, I'd say there are about seven regions with sufficiently collective interests and shared culture to be countries. Even then, I think the ideal might be something like a looser confederation that maintains shared defense, currency, and free movement while allowing for more regional autonomy on other matters.