Accretion is the process by which the planets in our solar system formed. When the sun was born, all the left over bits were left spinning around it. Gradually these bits started to clump together. As the formed bodies got bigger, their gravitational mass increased, drawing in more bits and making the mass bigger still until, eventually, a planet was formed that had hoovered up most of the fragments in its orbital path around the sun.
This is why every planet has it's own orbital path.
The Asteroid Belt is an example of what all the planet forming bits look like - the process of accretion was prevented from taking its course here by the disruptive influence of Jupiter's gravity.
The theory of Accretion also works well in the description of the business world. Out of a starting mass of tiny companies, bigger companies start to form, sucking in and taking over smaller failing companies until they grow to the size of corporations. The market is then dominated by a few corporations rather than a gigantic mass of small independent companies all with equal clout.
We've seen this in western business culture that began in the 17th and 18th centuries. And we've seen it recently with the Internet boom.
The Internet was supposed to democratize everything. Ordinary people would have the ability to start up their own venture on the net. Mass ingenuity would outmanoeuvre the less nimble big corporations. The dot.com boom was the result. Yet in just one decade (rather than the centuries needed in older business) most of the startups went to the wall or were bought out, and we now have the giant Googles, Amazons, etc. We start out with a clean slate, and the process of accretion happens regardless.
Capitalism starts out with lots of lizards and ends up with a few dinosaurs taking over.
Socialism simply dispenses with the lizards and replaces them with just one dinosaur.
The process of accretion has also occurred in the history of societies.
Humanity began as hunter-gatherer Bands. Lots of them. And they travelled, and frequently fought (be under no illusion about this last point, the evidence is very clear). Tribes then formed, which were simply groups of bands uniting under one chieftain. There was nothing voluntary about this 'uniting' however. The chieftain was part of an aristocratic elite and the bands were subdued.
Tribes, often united by an elite, a language and sometimes a religion, grew bigger. Failing tribes were conquered or broken up, their fragments sucked in by the larger tribes. The remaining tribes fought amongst each other until one emerged victorious, subduing the others and becoming the ruling elite of a much larger entity that we now call Nations.
Accretion is not the result of 'Will', or the desire to co-operate. It occurs by gravitational force. Or simply force.
One day the world may be run as one complete, indivisible entity, with one world government. But it won't be because all the nation states chose to co-operate and voluntarily subordinate themselves. It will be because one state militarily, economically or culturally - or all three - conquered all the others and made them agree to become vassals.
Are we near that condition now?
No. The UN is, like the EU, mostly voluntary, and therefore doomed to disappear under its own flabby irrelevance. The US, while more powerful than any state in history, shows us that it will take a lot more to subdue the entire world. The process of accretion continues.
Unlike in space however, accretion in business and in governments is accompanied by the constant re-breaking up and re-moulding of entities at periodic intervals.
Whether it was Persia, Rome, Ottoman or Spain, the old dinosaurs were broken back into lizards, only to reconstitute bigger dinosaurs elsewhere.
Looking at history and at all of contemporary world politics, there is absolutely no evidence - not one crumb - to suggest that this will not continue.
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