What would the human race look like?

On my drive into work this morning, I heard an interesting story on on WAMU (sorry, can’t find the specific story link) about a Korean-American adopted by white American parents. While initially struggling against her Korean heritage, she eventually came to appreciate and be proud of it. The commentator, himself an adopted Korean in the same situation, was very grateful for the chance to grow up in such a mixed household.

Along with these thoughts, I there’s a set of novels I recently finished: Orson Scott Card’s Shadow series. In it, he describes an Earth that starts out a lot like the one we know today (maybe a few hundred years in the future), and is eventually unified under a single ruler. The novels are very good, despite the fact that they leave quite a bit of details about how this would happen, given the nature of humanity. On the other hand, maybe it’s merely evoking the philosophy that humans are inherently good, and given the right set of circumstances, they will choose to do good for all of us. I think I could believe that, despite what we see in the world today.

But these two stories together got me thinking: what if the entire world were open to us–no borders, easy  transportation, peaceful coexistence, interdependency, leading to high intermixing, intermarriage, etc…. What would we end up looking like as a human race? I initially thought of this question in terms of physical features, but it’s interesting to think about language, culture, economics, technology–anything at all. It certainly requires a great deal of imagination and taking things for granted to see this world, but I think it’s interesting in a futuristic, sci-fi sort of way.