Pushing Cubes

It’s so fascinating to me how much of civilization turns on how efficiently we can move a box from Point A to Point B. Think about how much of your life involves getting stuff from somewhere to somewhere else – your commute, the way you buy groceries, how you visit distant friends or family, how Christmas presents get to your house. Billion-dollar companies run on no better of a proposal than: “We can move this thing slightly faster or more efficiently than the next guy.”

And so much of what we do is motivated by avoiding that very thing! Advancements in remote work and 3D printing and home exercise equipment – it’s all based on the idea that moving stuff around is so onerous that we’ll do a whole lot just to avoid some of it.

We even have entire institutions that do nothing but police which cubes can move to which points. Nations are built on it. Customs, borders, all of it – it all can exist because moving cubes around is so important that controlling it can control whole civilizations.

Some day, some scientist will crack the code on the whole “teleporter” thing, and that will be the absolute end of the society we know. I can’t even fathom what our civilization would look like if the logistical task of pushing cubes around vanished. It took so much work to put a cube on the Moon, and look how excited we were! Imagine the possibilities of just flinging them wherever we wanted.