Plowboy: You truly feel that all the major changes in history have been caused by science and technology? Asimov: Those that have proved permanent – … - Isaac Asimov

But it was more than a planet; it was the living pulse beat of an Empire of twenty million stellar
systems. It had only one, function, administration; one purpose, government; and one manufactured product, law.

Work of each individual contributes to a totality and so becomes undying part of a totality. That totality is human life. Past and present and to come forms a tapestry that has been in existence now for many tens and thousands of years. And has been growing more elaborate, and on the whole more beautiful.

There was no doubt about it: the City was the culmination of man's mastery over the environment. Not space travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily independent, but the City.