>Technologies are idea-based, and culture is their memory. This coda quote belongs as intro thesis, instead. The conclusion should have been: technology found

>Technologies are idea-based, and culture is their memory. This coda quote belongs as intro thesis, instead. The conclusion should have been: technology found in common artifacts and archived catalogs was popular, explaining historical occurrence. And it happens that popular technology takes similar shapes, because it solves the same problems in similar and effective ways. Which is really a way of describing the thinking of man -- in other words, the abstracted container and transmitter of the technology -- as something which has remained remarkably similar over the surveyed occurrences of those popular technologies. The immortality metaphor clouds that, unless you go all the way. To think of another set of alien species of technology requires a different way of thinking, which we can only speculate about, like about alien species which might live on a planet otherwise identical to our own.