"It was the fate of modernity to see the natural displaced by the artificial, the organic by the inorganic, and change by the planned, then the underground provided a picture of the future -- of the kind of world modern people would build...."

"Finally, The Machine that keeps the whole human race alive beneath the earth fails, and one by one the life support systems fail."

E. M. Forster,"When the Machine Stops"

"The sewers of Paris, London and a host of other cities during the nineteenth century, were deeply implicated in the political and social discourses of their time."

"All over the world, nature was conquered and disciplined, and even the cities, which at first glance appeared to be the very epitome of the artificial and the constructed, were perceived to be feminine organisms: wastelands in some accounts. wilderness in others, and jungles in others."

Pursell, "Dirt and Disorder," p. 181.

"With Newton's mechanics came powerful machines, and eventually the steam engine, the motive force which reshaped the world by overturning agrarian society, spawning factories and stimulating commerce, unleashing the industrial revolution, and opening up entire continents with the railroad."

"Life in Newton's time was short, cruel, and brutish. People were illiterate for the most part, never owned a book or entered a classroom, and rarely ventured beyond several miles of their birthplace. During the day, they toiled at backbreaking work in the fields under a merciless sun. At night, there was usually no entertainment or relief to comfort them except the empty sounds of the night. Most people knew firsthand the gnawing pain of hunger and chronic, debilitating disease. Most people would live not much longer than age thirty, and would see many of their ten or so children die in infancy."

"The need to bring cities under control, to make them safe for the masculine pursuits of profit, politics and power, required also that male control be exerted 'down there', in the deep recesses of the sewers where corruption and infection were rampant and all that was unlawful held sway."

p. 181.

By the nineteenth century, a period of intense scientific discovery was well underway. Remarkable advances in science and medicine helped to lift people out of wretched poverty and ignorance, enrich their lives, empower them with knowledge, open their eyes to new worlds, and eventually unleash complex forces which would topple the feudal dynasties, fiefdoms, and empires of Europe.

"It is sometimes maintained that war is the greatest stimulus for technological change, and the twentieth century provides plenty of evidence that this might, indeed, be true. The computer stands as a case in point. Although analogue computers, using electro-mechanical movements, were in development during the 1930s, wartime created a great need for fast computations, especially of ballistics and cryptography"

p. 154.

"The 'automated battlefield' began in 1966 with Robert McNamara's 'wall' at the demilitarized zone in Vietnam. This was to be a line of sensors which would detect any movement back or forth between 'our' side and 'theirs.'...with Asians serving as guinea pigs in our tests of deadly new technology."

p. 156.

The Three Pillars of Science

Matter • Life • The Mind

These three elements form the pillars of modern science. Historians will most likely record that the crowning achievement of twentieth-century science was unraveling the basic components underlying these three pillars, culminating in the splitting of the nucleus of the atom, the decoding of the nucleus of the cell, and the development of the electronic computer. With our basic understanding of matter and life largely complete, we are witnessing the close of one of the great chapters in the history of science.

Kaku on our decisions.