It would be nice if we could get away from nations, but I'm not really ready to cede the game and entrust China with supremacy or even parity and hope that it all works out OK.

Do you think nations are a bad thing? What's your alternative? City states? Planet-wide government?

I left it intentionally ambiguous about my own opinions on the topic, as I am not interested in a nationalistic debate about my own views, as they aren't relevant here. (If you'd like to take an easy guess at them and discuss further, my email's in my profile.)

I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that whether something is wasteful or not is a value judgement in a lot of ways, and that there aren't usually one size fits all answers for all members of a society when it comes to value judgments, especially for a potentially multiplanetary society.

Nations are great. Not everyone agrees on all policies. My personal opinion is that I do not want to live in a censored or communist country (Such as China). Having borders and different countries allows multiple ideas to exist and folks can choose where to live.

> folks can choose where to live.

This is absolutely not true in practice, even for rich people fortunate/lucky enough to be born in a place where they receive a passport with lots of options.

For the 99% of the other humans, it's even worse.

That doesn't appear to be a defect inherent to nations since there seems to be a pretty even split between free and non-free nations[0] Rather, it seems to be a problem of bad governance, corruption, ineffective or non-existent institutions, etc. My reason for favouring a world with many nations is that failures of those varieties are generally limited by the borders of the nations in which they occur. A world with a single governing body is a world with a single point of failure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#:~:tex....