"Today, only science supports the myth of progress. If people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear of what may come if they give it up. (...) Science gives us a sense of progress that ethical and political life cannot."
John Gray: Straw Dogs, 2002
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"Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology - a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials."
Ronald Wright: A short history of progress, 2005
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"Science, which was once a rigorous field thriving on intellectual adventure, is today bogged down in a technological adventure that denatures it. (...) A techno-science without a consciousness of its impeding end is, however unwittingly, merely a sport."
Paul Virilio: The information bomb, 2000
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"A popular misconception exists that the builders of the pyramids were somehow less intelligent than we are. This simply isn't true - there is no evidence that the human brain has evolved at all in the last 50.000 years at least. Modern people are merely benefiting from thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and experimentation, not from increased intellect. (...) These ideas are part of a mistaken view of history best described as temporocentrism - the belief that our own time is the most important and represents a 'pinnacle' of achievement. The temporocentric view is a hangover from nineteenth century ideas of progress."
Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Inventions, 1994
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"La capacidad de acción de un objeto tiene dos alternativas: la tecnología (cambiar el entorno) o la movilidad (cambiar de entorno)."
Jorge Wagensberg: ¿Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, cuál era la pregunta?, 2002
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"Too many of us blithely assume that we need not deal with the base
causes of our environmental problems becaue soon-to-be-discovered
technological solutions will make those problems obsolete."
Michael Zimmerman: Science, nonscience and nonsense, 1995
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"Most people believe that if we spend enough money on researching any problem, we will find the solution. In some cases, that is true."
Herbert Inhaber: why energy conservation fails, 1997
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"The automobile was not developed in response to some grave international horse crisis or horse shortage. (...). As was the case with automobiles, the need for trucks arose after, not before, they were invented."
George Basalla: The evolution of technology, 1988
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"In fighting climate change, we must fight not only the oil companies, the airlines and the governments of the rich world: we must also fight ourselves."
George Monbiot: Heat, 2006
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