With a cellular phone we can call from the desert, from the top of a mountain, from the middle of nowhere, and communicate to anywhere in the world. Now that's what I call progress. If the human spirit had undergone a comparable degree of progress to technology, the poetry and art of those who died hundreds of years ago should seem impossibly quaint to the modern eye. And yet, we recognize that our generation is hard put to come anywhere close to these artists. Technology is an apology for our feelings of inferiority when we compare ourselves to our forebears.
Cold comfort is better than none.
And the brick served them as stone, and the lime served them as mortar. Because there were no rocks in Babylon, they were forced to apply technology and invent the brick. This is a seeming non-sequitur. The Dor Hapalaga were intoxicated with technology. Bricks were the Babylonian equivalent of a Saturn V rocket.