>Regional identities are PARTICULARLY useful, as they help unite groups of people who share a common history, traditional, and cultural memory.

It hasn't been very useful to me, though you may have different experiences. I don't care about common history or traditional and cultural memory; the most important factor is that someone can learn it, instead of being forever left out because they drew a different straw in the birth lottery.

>Not to mention, them having a common identity creates peace and harmony within a geographical region and lets them work as a team

This is a way to work in a team, there are others which work regardless of your identity. The peace and harmony immediately comes crashing down when you have someone with a different identity. In fact, thinking that there is some magical peace and harmony that's created in your own group is exactly what makes the illusion crumble; if you convince people that there's peace and harmony within their own group and only when that group is based upon some shared identity, they won't act in harmony when someone else comes along.

It fosters an exclusionary atmosphere.

>Of all your identities, I would argue your geographical one would STILL be the strongest/be benefitting you the most, regardless of how much an irrelevant contrivance you consider it to be.

I don't think you can reliably make this statement to someone who finds that the identity given to them (by birth or through childhood) is in fact a hindrance. Xenophobia is a problem. Your strongest identity is the one that you're most comfortable with - it benefits you the most. It might be geographical identity, but everyone has a geographical identity anyway - it's not as special as other identities - and you can't choose it, either.

>it has just made more people desire the same boundaries (ie, shown how some places are more desirable)

Has it really? I know many people who are happy with the way online gaming, IRC, mailing lists among other things erase national boundaries. It's perhaps the thing I love most about the Internet. You can be together with people - to foster the "human connection".

>Discounting 'the specific patch of ground you were born in' is an incredibly privileged and individualistic way of seeing things.

Howso? And if it is privileged, let whomever experiences it have that privilege, and hope that others can have that same privilege.

>and discounts the fact that we are, after all, humans

We are humans; this is the most important thing. It's not discounting humanity - it's reinforcing it. Before I get called a speciesist, I would be happy to extend it to "we are, after all, life forms". Though that doesn't make us feel as special.

We get attached to the labels and indenties that make us feel the most special - I don't think there is any place for this, especially in a much more communicative world. You can feel as special as you want, but I think it is problematic when you start saying "my special thing is better than yours". And I can't imagine a situation where that doesn't crop up.

It seems as though you are providing an "excuse" for our nature; you seem to have identified that our identities are based upon a wrong view of the world - that is, the wrong view that we are special snowflakes.

I don't think it's an innate human thing to do this - and if it is, why can't we overcome it? Why not abandon this wrong view, and encourage others to do it? You don't have to go to space to do it, my human friend.