ABSTRACT
The wisdom o f the ancient world embraced the apparent futility o f human aspirations. It accepted that even the greatest civilisations would eventually stagnate and collapse to he born again anew in a different yetfam iliarform . Nothing, it was thought, could alter the eternal recurrence. The ruins o f past civilisations were there f o r all to see. Thy did not even consider the possibility that a technological strategy would enable human society to break out o f its endlessly repetitive pattern because, in their epoch, there was no material incentive to do so. A nd so the great wheel o f civilisation turned slowly, but not endlessly, in historical time.
