Without ending up on an FBI watchlist, let's just say, for the sake of argument, that Sales and "Uncle Ted" were on the right track about technology inevitably leading toward psychic isolation and environmental devastation, that corporations are finding ways to turn each human interaction into a commodity, that we're well beyond carrying capacity for the planet and have likely screwed up the ecology for the next million years or so. Just suppose ...

What solution do we have? I'm pretty sure that even before homo sapiens came on the scene, Neanderthals and even earlier versions of humanity thought about labor-saving devices. They dreamed of not dying from little infections, of not dying in childbirth, of spears that went a little further, of furs that were warmer, of fires that would not need tending. Are we not more or less doomed by our rejection of physical misery and the power of our imagination to simply recreate it all?

More interestingly, imagine a human society which selects a place to stop and then also has to enforce it, both internally and against any other societies which might have a different idea of where to stop (boy that gunpowder sure is a nifty idea). You would need a one world government with some kind of technological edge over those ruled ...