What will this world become if telecommunications and geospatial solutions continue on their current path? What will happen to human society when communicating with one another makes concerns over physical location irrelevant? Our tribal instincts make us band together, and the ease of communicating today makes this instinct even more pronounced, until communication becomes so simple, we no longer can be separate.

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 is already happening. However, when large enough amounts of spatial data can be sent at fast enough speeds, it will be possible at a much larger scale. The more information we can communicate faster, groups of people will come together that do not require any physical space of their own to exist.

Eventually, there will only be so many of these groups left, their inner communications so fast and so efficient, the people among them may very well be thought of as thinking alike. On that scale, they all do. Of course, individuality on a personal scale will be preserved, but as long as the nuances of their thinking are similar enough, their thoughts as they pertain to the group will be the same. Now, the group is another individual, the average of all the people, and those groups will either merge together or drive away each other.

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.