IFG standard in Solar

What I’d like to do this week is talk about another popular credo, one that plays a very large role in blinding people nowadays to the shape of the future looming up ahead of us all just now. In an interesting display of synchronicity, it came up in a conversation I had while last week’s essay was still being written. A friend and I were talking about the myth of progress, the facile and popular conviction that all human history follows an ever-ascending arc from the caves to the stars; my friend noted how disappointed he’d been with a book about the future that backed away from tomorrow’s challenges into the shelter of a comforting thoughtstopper: “Technology will always be with us.”
Let’s take a moment to follow the advice I gave in last week’s post and think about what, if anything, that actually means. Taken in the most literal sense, it’s true but trivial. Toolmaking is one of our species’ core evolutionary strategies, and so it’s a safe bet that human beings will have some variety of technology or other as long as our species survives. That requirement could just as easily be satisfied, though, by a flint hand axe as by a laptop computer—and a flint hand axe is presumably not what people who use that particular thoughtstopper have in mind.
Perhaps we might rephrase the credo, then, as “modern technology will always be with us.” That’s also true in a trivial sense, and false in another, equally trivial sense. In the first sense, every generation has its own modern technology; the latest up-to-date flint hand axes were, if you’ll pardon the pun, cutting-edge technology in the time of the Neanderthals. In the second sense, much of every generation’s modern technology goes away promptly with that generation; whichever way the future goes, much of what counts as modern technology today will soon be no more modern and cutting-edge than eight-track tape players or Victorian magic-lantern projectors. That’s as true if we get a future of continued progress as it