Quotes About Technology

Prophets see the mile-long stands of photovoltaic cells in projects like Charanka as inherently destructive to communities, natural and human.

Pride of place must go to the Olmec, the first technologically complex culture in the hemisphere. Appearing in the narrow "waist" of Mexico about 1800 B.C., they lived in cities and towns centered on temple mounds.

Arguably their greatest intellectual feat was the invention of zero. In his classic account Number: The Language of Science, the mathematician Tobias Dantzig called the discovery of zero "one of the greatest single accomplishments of the human race," a "turning point" in mathematics, science, and technology.

The Olmec, Maya, and other Mesoamerican societies were world pioneers in mathematics and astronomy—but they did not use the wheel. Amazingly, they had invented the wheel but did not employ it for any purpose other than children's toys. Those looking for a tale of cultural superiority can find it in zero; those looking for failure can find it in the wheel.

Every society, big or little, misses out on "obvious" technologies. The lacunae have enormous impact on people's lives—imagine Europe with efficient plows or the Maya with iron tools—but not much effect on the scale of a civilization's endeavors, as shown by both European and Maya history.

Man minus the machine is a slave," proclaimed Henry Ford, touting his new tractor. "Man plus the machine is a free man.

Historians estimate that in 1800 all of the steam engines in Britain could generate perhaps 50,000 horsepower. By 1870 the figure had soared to more than 1.3 million horsepower, a twenty-six-fold increase. Nobody was going to wait for solar enthusiasts to fiddle with mirrors that didn't work on rainy days. Mouchot was trying to persuade society to switch from a stable stock of coal to an inconstant flow of sunlight. And society was not terribly interested.

The only thing more mysterious than failing to invent the wheel would be inventing the wheel and then failing to use it. But that is exactly what the Indians did. Presumably countless thousands of people rolled the toylike figurines back and forth. How could none of them have thought of making their wheels bigger and more useful?

Even with animals, though, the Olmec would not have had much use for wheeled vehicles. Their country is so wet and boggy that Stirling's horses sank to their chests in mud; boats were a primary means of transportation until recently. In addition one might note that Mesoamerican societies were not alone in their wheel-blindness. Although Mesopotamia had the wheel in about 4000 B.C., nearby Egypt did not use the wheel until two thousand years later, despite being in close contact

Slash-and-char is very clever," Ogawa told me. "Nobody in Europe or Asia that I know of ever understood the properties of charcoal in soil.

However anomalous to European eyes, this form of writing has deep roots in Andean culture. Knotted-string communication was but one aspect of these societies' exploration of textile technology (see Chapter 3). In these cultures, Heather Lechtman, of MIT, has argued, cloth "was the most important carrier of status, the material of choice for the communication of message, whether religious, political, or scientific.

Can it be that there is anything of more consequence in life than the great business in hand, which absorbs the vitality and genius of this age? Surely, we say, it is better to go by steam than to go afoot, because we reach our destination sooner—getting there quickly being a supreme object. It is well to force the soil to yield a hundred-fold, to congregate men in masses so that all their energies shall be taxed to bring food to themselves, to stimulate industries, drag coal and metal

The window apparently wanted only to take his thoughts back. Which was fine with him, for he had seen the metal face of the age and had been so stunned by it that when he thought into the future, all he could vision was a world from which everything he had counted important had been banished or had willingly fled.

One mantra of Silicon Valley, the technological innovation capital of the world, is "fail faster to succeed sooner.

wolf bone was the Stone Age equivalent of a supercomputer.

The internet's vast interconnectivity made it possible for everyone to hear everyone else—and to be heard by everyone else. This is perhaps the most important and radical change wrought by digital information.

Once we crack the problem of fusion, we have an assured source of energy for as long as you want to think about it. It will cease to be a reason for war or an influence on foreign affairs.

Without periodic nuclear testing, weaponeers argued, they could not be certain that the weapons in the nuclear stockpile would work. Nuclear bombs, like any other machines, decay over time.

Amazon can deal directly with writers and publish—and distribute—their work to the public, what need is there for the publishing houses? The means of production are in the hands of the masses now, not in the hands of the elites.

It would take only a few thousand terabytes of hard-drive space to archive a human's entire audiovisual experience from cradle to grave.

Scientists would then build a demonstration fusion power plant that would begin operations in 2035 or 2040. After five decades of broken promises, lies, delusions, and self-deception, it will finally be true. Fusion energy will be thirty years away.

if history is any guide, a long, long road lies ahead before physicists will be able to tame fusion reactions

But there is a dirty little secret. Fusion is not clean.

a fusion power plant would produce a larger volume of radioactive waste than a standard nuclear power plant.