Ever since the Wright Flyer took to the air in December 1903, distances have been shrinking. Air travel has now reduced to half a day, what used to take more than half a year not too long ago. Singapore Airlines flew until recently a non-stop flight from Singapore to Newark that made the journey in 18 hours. Look up the locations of Singapore (1N, 104E) and Newark (40N, 75W) and you will realize that they are located pretty much half-way across the world. According to the Man in Seat 61 a similar journey from the UK to Australia will take about 40 days by sea even today.
So distance is not what it used to be - but is that alone enough to claim that Geography is History? Maybe not, but put that together with another fact of life in the 21st century and we might find it hard to refute that claim.
This other life-changing fact is that work is now portable. We are all familiar with how it started. Work that was essentially done on computers, could be done on computers located anywhere as long as the little 1s and 0s could be carried over later to where the result of the work was required. In the earliest days of outsourcing, this probably meant carrying a hard disk drive over, but once computer networks spanned the globe, the work was not just portable but instantly teleportable.
Teleportation does not seem to be restricted to 1s and 0s anymore either. We now have teleportation of physical goods possible too - well in a way. According to this article, when an astronaut needed a wrench on the International Space Station, NASA emailed him one. I am sure that if I looked hard enough on the internet, some day very soon I will be able to find someone somewhere in the world who can manufacture a car and email it to me. That day is already here.
Geography is indeed history.
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