The GCW Tour, Buenos Aires & Antarctica: I Wonder Which Will Expire First, Me or the Passport

Check it out. I got two Antarctica stamps in my passport:

Now this raises some interesting quesions. Antarctica is not a country and doesn't have a government. Yet the passport is, I thought, intended as an official record of your border crossings. So why did I get a stamp for Port Lockroy and what I assume was the Arctowski Science Station? Moreover, why does the Ushuaia Tourist Information Center offer to stamp your passport with an "End of the World" stamp of Ushuaia, which, officially speaking, is just a city in Argenina?

The answer, of course, is that the stamps no longer really have any meaning. They're just government sponsored sourveniers. Immigration officials are barely even looking at your passport anymore; they're looking at their compuers ("this is the computer I use to look up the people that are crossing the border"). So why bother? Wouldn't it be easier if your passport was just a card like a drivers license, rather than it's current booklet form?

Hanging on my wall is my great-grandfather's passport. It's this giant sheet of (thick) paper with his picture glued to it, a section where someone's written in a bunch of descriptors of him (e.g., height, weight, hair color, etc.), some bureaucractic gobbledygook, and on the back are all the stamps.

So passports do change with the times. It seems to me we're due for an upgrade.