Traveling across the country recently, I saw lots of semi-trucks, trains, and cargo ships. The semis take one container at a time, a driver and rig for each, not to mention roads. The trains can take a whole lot of containers, stacked two high and stretching a mile long all pulled by a single engine with just a few humans. But it requires a car for each and, more importantly, a track laid down, often through mountain tunnels or over bridges. A lot of infrastructure and energy consumption to overcome friction and gravity.
But the ships are another matter. Their size is almost absurd. They stack and file containers by the dozens. They don’t need roads or rails. Only at loading/unloading points do they require any kind of infrastructure. The ocean is already there. It does almost all the work. Friction is minimal, gravity is friendly, and massive shipments can cross the globe. The ships need little in the way of advanced engineering. They don’t even need good maneuverability, as tiny tugs handle the detail work in harbor. The tugs can zip from ship to ship, bumping and nudging them.
It’s kinda crazy to think that with all this stuff getting moved about, the water is doing most of the work.
Probably a labored analogy, but it makes me think of the internet. It’s this giant sea of info, atop which all kinds of data can float. The quantity of stuff you can move around is insane, because the network does most of the work, not individual programmers or machines. I’m sure there are analogies for tugs and harbors if I went far enough, but it’d break apart pretty quickly no doubt.
Still, the idea of using water to relieve friction and gravity constraints and move around massive shipments seems congruent with the internet as a medium for deploying services and information.