The world is getting larger again.

Back when the book "Around the World in 80 Days" was set, transportation was improving and distances were getting easier to traverse. As the book tells it, this trend led to someone claiming that it was possible to travel around the world in a mere 80 days, which so astonished someone else that they expressed their disbelief by asking facetiously whether the original claimant thought the world was shrinking.

Of course the Earth itself had not been shrinking, but the time required to get from place to place had. And since then, the trend continued through improved roads, railways, ships and aircraft global travel has caused the world to become tiny. Why even as recently as my grandmother's day the word "imported" stamped on a product raised it's status and value instead of reduced it. To go to the expense of bringing something in from overseas was a costly novelty. Now it's trivial. I know there are other factors at work in this change, but my point is that distance used to be an impediment, and now it is far less of one.

The world has been shrinking for centuries, but now it is about to snap back. It might not be as large as it used to be before the continents were mapped. The virtual world will still exist just outside this window that is my computer monitor. But for real life transport of people and things across the face of the planet - it's getting further each day. Every increase in the price of oil, every millimetre lower the world oil reserves dipstick reads, the planet expands.

I fear that this expansion of the world will not be as slow or as gentle as it's shrinking was. The ethereal trails we humans make as we go about our daily lives may be broken as the world undergoes a hulk-like transformation, shaking off the fetters that we've used to keep it small. Roads are vulnerable to disuse and decay. Railways are long under-funded and may not take the sudden jump in usage. Aircraft with their ravenous appetites may once again become a rare things that children point at and shout "Look! A 'plane!"

There may be an upside to the world getting bigger. A return of locality and of community. Less footprints in distant, isolated places. Perhaps outsourced jobs will come home to roost? It's hard to say. Hard to see what's next. But the world seems far bigger to me today than it did yesterday.