The Next Migration: Rethinking Space

The Next Migration: Rethinking Space*

I love reading books. The one that most shaped my thinking was “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari - how humans started somewhere in Africa and gradually conquered the whole Earth, moving from place to place, using every available resource and wiping out animals along the way. I read it and asked myself: okay, we conquered the whole planet, now what?

Human history can be described in many ways: as the invention of agriculture or the invention of cities. But perhaps the first human invention was something much simpler. We learned to migrate. When the rivers dried, we migrated. When winters grew too cold or the game finished, we migrated again. But unlike animals, humans had another type of migration – we were always curious what was there beyond the horizon.

But today the map looks different. Where do we go, when there is nowhere left to go?

Every continent is occupied. Every piece of land belongs to someone. When people move now across deserts, over mountains, across the Mediterranean or the Balkans, they are not migrating into empty land. Europe and North America are flooded by immigrant waves, which leads to overpopulation, cultural clashes and social tension. Climate change, scarcity, conflicts, exhausted resources. These forces will probably reshape the second half of this century. Governments talk about borders and policies.

I tried to find a solution to this problem not through politics, but through physics. I read Asimov’s New Guide to Science, then Al-Khalili’s Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed and I kept encountering the same strange idea: that space - the thing we move through - might not be as fundamental as it looks.

Physics has been suggesting something like this for more than a century. At the smallest scales of reality, the universe behaves in completely different way from the world around us.

The double-slit experiment was what really struck me. A single particle fired at a barrier with two slits doesn’t behave like a small object traveling through a precise location. Until it is measured, it behaves like a wave spreading across countless possibilities. Physicists describe this using something called Hilbert space - a mathematical structure with no directions, no distances, and no geometry. Only probabilities. The particle is not really somewhere. “Somewhere” only appears later, at our scale of reality.

Entanglement made this even stranger. Two particles created together stay connected even when separated by vast distances. Change one, the other responds instantly. At first this seemed impossible, as nothing is supposed to travel faster than light. But what if nothing actually travels? What if the particles were never truly separated in the first place?

If space emerges from something deeper, then distance might be less fundamental than we think.

This is the idea I wish to share with you.

Instead of asking where humanity can move within the space we already have on Earth or potentially Mars in the future, we might eventually ask something stranger:

What if space itself is a secondary manifestation of a deeper structure. If at a lower or more internal level there is no space, and perhaps no time. This would allow us, knowing the structure at this lower or internal level, to be able to change the geometry of space. Purely theoretically, in this situation we should have no obstacle to moving instantly to any point in the universe. Instead of trying to create ever more powerful rockets, with which we cannot reach another star within a human lifetime, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to deepen our knowledge of quantum physics? Quantum nonlocality does not itself allow us to move matter faster than light. But it hints at something deeper: that the separation we call ‘distance’ may not be as absolute as it appears at our scale of reality. If we could one day understand the underlying structure from which space itself emerges, we may find ways to alter geometry rather than simply travel through it.

Modern theoretical physics already hints at something like this. Some theories suggest that spacetime may be built from networks of quantum information, something like an immense cosmic fabric woven from entanglement. If the pattern of connections changes, the geometry of space may change with it.

If such a possibility ever becomes real, its consequences would reach far beyond physics. A civilization that is no longer confined to a single planet would no longer face the limits of land, resources, or survival. Pressure that today turns into competition, migration crises, and wars might one day dissolve simply because the horizon of knowledge has expanded.

I know this sounds impossibly far from the families walking across deserts today with everything they own in a single bag. It is far from them. My idea will not help anyone tomorrow.

But I have read something in the book “Sophie’s World” that stayed with me: that philosophy begins with the feeling that something is strange, not with the feeling that something is impossible.
Some of the greatest technologies in history often began as ideas that seemed abstract and impractical. When James Maxwell wrote equations describing electromagnetic waves, no one imagined radio or TV. Later Albert Einstein described the relationship between mass and energy, which sound purely theoretical before preparing the ground for nuclear power.

All these discoveries have broadened the horizon of human knowledge. We have climbed a mountain in physics to see that behind it rises another mountain, then a third one, and perhaps beyond that - the boundless ocean.

The same thing happens with every human migration, which, reaching the familiar horizon, discovers a new one even more distant. What will be the next human migration, will it not be in changing our perception of space and, as a result, in the possible ways of overcoming it?

References

Harari, Y. N. (2011). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper Collins.

Asimov, I. (1960). Asimov’s New Guide to Science. Basic Books.

Al-Khalili, J. (2003). Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Gaarder, J. (1991). Sophie’s World. Aschehoug.

*The essay was written for The Minds Underground Essay Competition 2026