So why isn't michigan conquering ohio or vice versa right now? Why aren't the canadians from the hinterland coming in to take over vancouver? Because they are "on the same side" which is ultimately a meaningless political device. It's still humans versus humans in michigan or ohio or the U.S. or anywhere else. It stands to reason that one day we could possibly be all on the same side, and we could have no fear of conquest from our fellow humans, just like those humans who are in michigan have no fear of conquest by ohioans today. In that world, having an advanced military would be about as useless as an ohio police department having ICBMs.
There are so many parallels and analogies to this idea, but there's a reoccuring pattern where some system becomes dominant and then seems to lose the characteristics which made it successful, ultimately becoming doomed.
You see this in business, where companies climb to the top through aggression and innovation, but then become laggards and protectionists (and ultimately fall away). You see it in countries. You see it in technologies. Heck, you see it in biological systems.
Perhaps that's just a normal part of the greater process, these cycles of growth, innovation, collaboration, etc., followed by stagnation and decay (and then death, or near-death, whereby the system returns to the growth effort).
The nice thing about being human is that we theoretically have the capacity to choose what our goals are (assuming our basic needs are currently met). As such, we could be choosing to work on goals such as "everyone always has food, shelter, and physical safety". This surely must be achievable, but maybe it would take virtually everyone working toward this goal. It's not really a sexy way to spend your time if you are already fortunate enough to have those things... such as if you live in a place rich in resources and with relatively few people. You would not be particularly compelled to contribute to the wellbeing of others, especially if you could not see them. But we have the privilege of awareness and knowledge, so we can see that there are still many people without even food or water. We could do something about this if we made it our focus.
And it might just turn out that having this collective focus would save our collective lives later. There's a reasonable chance that humanity will face a food crisis due to climate change and population growth. Practicing now at learning how to solve these problems might mean the difference between humans existing into 2100 or not.
