Panta Rei. Everything flows....like a river, supposedly. And War is the father of all things. Both sentiments have been ascribed to Herakleitos, a 6th century Presocratic philosopher. Today, war seems to have become rather less of a motive historical force. Technology and the women and men driving it are seen as the true enablers of life, death, and indeed war itself.

Looking at the war in Iraq, it has become obvious that technology is as much the handmaiden of war, as it has become the very framework within which the US army as well as insurgents function. But there is a worrying side effect that seems to make technology and science part of the great, eternal and slowly-changing background of human progress; I am not talking about Global Warming; I am talking about the rather worrying absence of occasional scientific revolutions that, despite our present glut of personal, mobile, wireless and other technologies seem to be absent.

It is hard to justify the absence of scientific revolutions and this summary judgement might even be wrong. Einstein's theories took a few years to be discovered and quantum mechanics wasn't table talk until the 1950s. I am beginning to believe that owing to the proliferation of wars since 2001, we have begun to fear technological change as much as we fear war.

Although technology will have a decisive part to play in the solution of our global environmental problems, there is no doubt that technology is at the root of the problems. Calming conceptual boundaries between natural environment, urban living, and indeed, technology have lost much of their ordering function.

Much of the perceived resource crunch (water, oil, tillable soil, forests, living space, precious metals) has a lot to do with distribution problems, much of which can only be resolved by the application of massive computational power. Staying in any modern harbour or airport is quite enough to convince us of that.

Indeed, taking a look our very existence on this planet, it doesn't really matter whether 2-3 billion people live here or 9: We are fundamentally dependent on intelligent technology to provide us with water, food, livable atmosphere. This makes the argument for living a life connected to nature somehow superfluous, since we are not likely to survive as autonomous family or clan units.

We might be better off to adapt to the global changes affecting us. Howling about the global warming is not going to change much, since these are not processes we can influence in the short term. We can affect global atmospheric processes over time periods of more than 30 years and we have to try and make policies that enable us to do that. But in the short term we have to adapt, not fight or ask for political advantages.

And wars, well, we never needed them