The striking thing about this metaphysics of development is that it needs no finality. Development is not attached to an Idea, like that of the emancipation of reason and of human freedoms. It is reproduced by accelerating and extending itself according to its internal dynamic alone. [...] It has no necessity itself other than a cosmological chance.

It has thus no end, but it does have a limit, the expectation of the life of the sun. The anticipated explosion of this star is the only challenge objectively posed to development.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 7