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Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

Some of us would like to visit other continents. A world that grows ever smaller is one where war becomes ever unthinkable.

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Yeah, this is why neighboring countries never go to war.

If anything, being able to just fly over the ugly parts and arrive directly at your plastic wrapped all inclusive resort is a good way to increase the social divide and drive us closer to a war.

Neighboring countries that trade and are in each other's supply chains + economic zones don't go to war.

See: the US' painful and bizarre attempts at butchering its relationship with Canada. The integration of the two economies means that such ham fisted manoeuvres take money out of people's pockets pretty fast.

In a pre-mass travel world, I can see someone like a certain leader attempting to annex Canada. Now? It's unthinkable. Just saying it causes billions in damage.

This works as long as the leaders strongly favour economic prosperity of their countries. Russia invaded Ukraine, despite that the countries traded a lot, and their supply chains were cross-linked.

You can visit other continents already? If they aren't connected by land, we have aeroplanes - and if you don't like flying, you can go by boat.

A 6000 km long undersea tunnel with a 600 km/h avg speed train traversing it would be pretty futuristic alright :)

You'd think so, but Europe grew ever smaller, with open borders, low-cost flights, single market, until at some point it didn't any more, and that process is since 2016 reversing.

I don't know. At some point in the not so distant past the west had hundreds of flights to Moscow and St. Petersburg and bought hundreds of millions worth of goods from Russia every day.

Didn't stop them from getting into a war

That sounds like a false choice. In order to avoid war, people need to burn enormous amounts of fossil fuels so they can personally visit the country?

If shorter distances were correlated with more peace there wouldn't be a genocide in Gaza, since the distance from Gaza to Tel Aviv is only about 70 km. More travel may have other advantages, but peace doesn't seem to be one of them.

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