Mankind had been so preoccupied with threats that were natural or environmental in origin – an ice age, an asteroid impact, a runaway greenhouse effect – that an equally formidable danger to the human race had been overlooked. And that danger was the much-vaunted solution to any threat to man’s survival, and the problems of the world in general: technology. The ice would still creep over the earth and the asteroid would still strike and the temperature would still run away, but on a timescale so vast relative to the human experience it was all but
