The speed of light is our friend in this regard, but I expect it is more likely we will become very fast, so what is today tiny lag will become very problematic, rather than traveling to the stars. But that is getting ahead of myself, if we don't have competing craziness we might not get starships or mind emulations. (;_;) So how can we get some of the benefit of this today where we are all one with Harvard?

A commenter there writes:

Russia is an interesting case. You’ve got a whole school of Russian linguists, with roots back in the Soviet era, who think they can reconstruct really ancient language families. American linguists (with a few exceptions — Joseph Greenberg) think they’re crazy. (I’m not competent to decide who’s right.) There’s also a tradition of Soviet/Russian sociologists, anthropologists, and archeologists doing old-fashioned investigations of ancient “ethnogenesis” of modern nationalities while Westerners have been busy convincing themselves that all this stuff is socially constructed and part of the “invention of tradition.” Peter Turchin is somebody who benefits from having a foot in the Russian camp (his dad was a dissident and his family got kicked out in the 1970s and he keeps up his ties with Russian researchers) and not worrying too much about marching in step with Western academic historians. And David Anthony’s work on Indo-European origins benefits a lot from him keeping up with former East Bloc archeology and archeologists and ignoring the “pots not people” Anglo-American orthodoxy.

As an aside I think, the pots not people people seem to have been wrong. People probably came with pots.

This seems like an argument for forcing graduate students to take a second language, and keep up with work outside English.

Any other ideas?