When will it be time for a world government?

When will it be time for a world government?

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Published on December 16th, 2009, 9:50 am
Rift: News

Just some musings here, on the sweep of history.

A wise man once said that if the governments of the world really DID know that the Earth was being visited by aliens using technologies beyond our wildest dreams, they would all suddenly become the best of friends. The point being that groups of people can, and have in the past, set aside more petty and parochial differences in order to deal with more serious threats collectively.

The trouble is getting people to agree that a threat exists, and that banding together is worth the trouble of dealing with the threat. In the case of Nazi Germany, the threat was not agreed upon in time and the alliance that formed after that mistake became undeniable broke apart after the problem was "solved." On the other hand, the problem of British tyranny over the American colonies resulted in a more long-term union of varying states with disparate needs: the federation that resulted was able to create unity where needed and allow states to address more local needs as they saw fit.

Now the world faces some rather interesting problems. Some are time-worn, such as terrorism. Others are relatively new, such as global climate change. And our current favorite thing to discuss, the economic troubles.

Now it seems to me to be just common sense that all of these problems could far better be dealt with if humanity had a more central government. But a world government won't happen until humanity as a whole recognizes a threat so large and so general that there is a push for unification.

Now if the ice that currently covers Greenland were to slide into the ocean, turning Miami into an island... that MIGHT just drive some folks to agree that a serious change of standard procedures is needed. Or will we end up acting as we did in the case of Nazi Germany... waiting until millions are getting killed before saying "Hm... we done screwed up. Better start to fix things now!"?
:think:

When I think about the idea of this without much thought my first response is probably similar to most.... "Never going to happen..." but if I give it a few minutes of thought more, I think it's very reasonable to see a government that eventually unites much of the world... maybe not all, but much of it. It's difficult to suggest a plan for obtaining that single government without silliness, but I think John Kerry had bigger expectations then even Obama when he suggested the U.S. join the European Union. If North America and Europe could operate under a single government, I would imagine we would solve thousands of petty problems merely by joining forces. Bigger items could be dealt with in a much more efficient manner. Imagine passing a single law for Europe and North America that resulted in lower emissions. It's like that scene from 'Office Space' where they steal 1/8 of a penny, but it adds up to huge sums of money. Small changes would equal a huge effect.

The point is that uniting into a world-spanning government would be acceptable to most people under certain crisis scenarios, like alien invasion. If the general world environment experiences a meltdown... catastrophic, cascading failures that will kill humans at a rate never before seen, I expect folks in general could finally conclude that such a change might help. But in that case, it would very likely be too late.