If telecommunications and geospatial solutions continue along their current trends, human society will soon be communicating with each on such a huge and fast scale, we may as well be thought of as making up still larger minds and beings. Physical location will be irrelevant. We have tribal instincts that cause us to band to together, and combine that with ever increasing communicative abilities, and the tribes just get larger and larger.

If telecommunications and geospatial solutions continue along their current trends, human society will soon be communicating with each on such a huge and fast scale, we may as well be thought of as making up still larger minds and beings. Physical location will be irrelevant. We have tribal instincts that cause us to band to together, and combine that with ever increasing communicative abilities, and the tribes just get larger and larger.

As a species, we have always wanted to gather together in order to survive and flourish. We have an instinct to follow leaders. Even those leaders have this instinct, and look to others, or at least the ideas of others, to lead them. We think like one mind when we've put our heads together. We oftentimes play one tribe off the other, so our own tribes can learn from their mistakes and we can broaden our own means of growing and interacting.

Long distance conference calls used to be, at one time, disembodied voices and pauses between speakers as the information was relayed; sometimes minutes for each line in a conversation from Montreal to Auckland. Then the pauses got shorter and disappeared. Then the voices began to have faces. People in Montreal could now feel like they were actually looking at people from Auckland.

So of course now the goal is to make such an improvement in communications that people in lots of different settings, besides offices and homes, are able to communicate like they're in the same room! No longer will it even be necessary to think about where on the physical globe a person is standing. The communication exchange would be so quick, and the spatial data so large, that even on a chairlift in Calgary you'll be able to relay whole streams to someone in the back alleys of Ottawa. You're as good as being in the same room.

Of course, this has all come to pass already. But the idea is that as data streams and communication grow, what has already come to pass will become possible on an ever-larger scale. Soon, groups that require no space on the earth as their own, will have become more important than those who do.

If this happens for a long enough time, only a few of these huge new groups will exist at all on the planet. They would be communicating with each other so fast and effectively, that the people that make them up might as well be considered to be thinking alike. They would still have their individuality of course, but now their thinking will be nuanced in such a way that their thinking is the same when viewed from the scale of the group. The groups will then take on their own distinctions and become individual thinkers themselves.

What will become of the physical space of the planet's surface after it no longer needs to be divided up by human tribes? It becomes covered with the physical means to sustain humans so they can communicate virtually. It becomes, when viewed from a large enough perspective, like a few bodies for the groups themselves.

We will have created them ourselves from the materials in the planet. The ultimate future of telecommunications and geospatial solutions is humans becoming more and more a part of something that is always getting larger.