“Put another way, the team calculated that it would require 1 billion standard shipping containers to contain all of life’s DNA. According to the estimate, plants seem to harbor the most DNA, weighing in at 3.6 × 1031 megabases, though they were closely followed by prokaryotes (1.6 × 1031 megabases).”

“On some level each of these figures intuited or explicitly argued that if the Allies won the war simply because of their technological superiority — and then, precisely because of that success, allowed their societies to become purely technocratic, ruled by the military-industrial complex — their victory would become largely a hollow one. Each of them sees the creative renewal of some form of Christian humanism as a necessary counterbalance to technocracy.”