One human being, even armed with a spear or a bow and arrow, can do nothing to a mammoth but watch from a very safe distance. A cooperating group of human beings, armed each with similar primitive weapons, can destroy a mammoth, and, indeed, such hunting groups managed, long before the birth of civilization, to drive these magnificent creatures to extinction-as well as other large, but insufficiently intelligent, species.

Of all tribal species, only Homo sapiens developed a technology, and, as it happens, there is very little in the way of technology that a single human being, starting from scratch, can develop. A group of human beings, with diverse talents, are much more likely to have the succession of ingenious ideas that bring about the growth of technology.

Not only that, but the growth of technology seems to require, inevitably, the development of larger and larger co-operating groups to maintain that technology at its level and to bring about further growth.

The development of agriculture required a large population of farmers not only to till the fields and weed and hoe and sow and reap and do all the work required to produce a year’s supply of food, but also to make the implements needed, to construct and maintain the irrigation ditches, to build walled cities and collect armaments to protect themselves from surrounding tribes who, not having sown, would be glad to collect the reapings by force.

Fortunately, the development of agriculture made it possible to support a larger population than would have been possible without it. In general, it has been true that advances in technology have both produced and used a larger and denser population than before.

To make the technology work, moreover-and this is the crucial point-there must be co-operation at least over a political unit large enough to be economically useful. Through history, as technology has advanced, the size of these economic units has necessarily increased from tribal patches, to city-states, to nations, to empires.

—Isaac Asimov, Nice Guys Finish First, collected in The Sun Shines Bright, 1981