Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Peaceful relations among humans on earth, and peaceful relations between humans and the other life forms on the planet, are imperative for the survival of planet earth as a habitat for life as we know it. Making the achievement of peace an affirmative goal for all humanity is noble and essential.

Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:29 am

PART 3 OF 3

Because I could see that this precessional principle of self-employment was a reasonably realistic possibility (though to the best of my knowledge never before consciously adopted and tested by others), I resolved to adopt such a course formally, realizing that there would be no human who could authorize my doing so nor any authority able to validate my decision so to do. I saw that there would be no humans to evaluate my work as it proceeded -- nor to tell me what to do next.

I went on to reason that since economic machinery and logistics consist of bodies in motion, since precession governs the interbehaviors of all bodies in motion, and since human bodies are usually in motion, precession must govern all socioeconomic behaviors. Quite clearly humans do orbit at ninety degrees to the. direction of their interattractions -- orbiting elliptically around one another's most attractively dominant neighbors, as do also galaxies within supergalaxies and all the stars, moons, comets, asteroids, stardust particles, unattached molecules, atoms, and the electrons within the atoms. All orbit their respectively most interattractively dominant nuclei of the moment. I recognized that overall interproximities vary and that Newton's law of system interattractiveness varies inversely at a second-power rate of the mathematical distances intervening as well as in respect to the product of the masses of any two considered bodies. All of the foregoing evolutionary intertransformings I observed would occasion frequently changing interdominances.

I assumed that nature would "evaluate" my work as I went along. If I was doing what nature wanted done, and if I was doing 'it in promising ways, permitted by nature's principles, I would find my work being economically sustained -- and vice versa, in which latter negative case I must quickly cease doing what I had been doing and seek logically alternative courses until I found the new course that nature signified her approval of by providing for its physical support.

Wherefore, I concluded that I would be informed by nature if I proceeded in the following manner:

(A) committed myself, my wife, and our infant daughter directly to the design, production, and demonstration of artifact accommodation of the most evident but as-yet-unattended-to human-environment-advantaging physical evolutionary tasks, and

(B) paid no attention to "earning a living" in humanity's established economic system, yet

(C) found my family's and my own life's needs being unsolicitedly provided for by seemingly pure happenstance and always only "in the nick of time," and

(D) being provided for "only coincidentally," yet found

(E) that this only "coincidentally," unbudgetable, yet realistic support persisted, and did so

(F) only so long as I continued spontaneously to commit myself unreservedly to the task of developing relevant artifacts, and if I

(G) never tried to persuade humanity to alter its customs and viewpoints and never asked anyone to listen to me and spoke informatively to others only when they asked me so to do, and if I

(H) never undertook competitively to produce artifacts others were developing, and attended only to that which no others attended then I could tentatively conclude that my two assumptions were valid: (1) that nature might economically sustain human activity that served directly in the "mainstream" realization of essential cosmic regeneration, which had hitherto been accomplished only through seeming "right-angled" side effects of the chromosomically focused biological creatures; and (2) that the generalized physical law of precessional behaviors does govern socioeconomic behaviors as do also the generalized laws of acceleration and ephemeralization.


The 1927 precessional assumptions became ever-more-convincingly substantiated by experiences -- only the "impossible" continued to happen. 1 became ever more convinced that 1 must go on developing artifacts that would make possible humanity's successful accomplishment of survival activities so much more logically and efficiently as to render the older, less efficient ways to be spontaneously abandoned by humanity. 1 resolved never to attack or oppose undesirable socioeconomic phenomena, but instead committed myself to evolving and cultivating tools that would accomplish humanity's necessitous tasks in so much easier, more pleasant, and more efficient ways that, without thinking about it, the undesirable ways would be abandoned by society. (I liked the popular 1944 song, "Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative.")

All the foregoing was, then, the precessional course 1 deliberately adopted in 1927. 1 had only the remaining days of my life to invest. It involved swift sorting out of the complex of design, production, testing, and demonstration tasks to be performed. What was the order of inherent priorities and successively overlapping interdependencies?

Socioeconomic precession by environment-controlling artifacts was a strategic course that obviously could be steered only by maximum reliance on our intuitive sensibilities, frequent position determination and course correcting, plus constant attendance upon the thoughts evolvingly generated by our commitment and its moment-to-moment, experience-produced new insights into the relative significance of the whole family of evolving events. It involved swift recognition and correction of all errors of judgment. It required being always "comprehensively considerate."

* * *

As navigational aids and "high-seas life-preserving devices" wisely to be employed in sailing such a course in heretofore-uncharted socioeconomic seas, 1 have patented everyone of what seemed to me to be strategically important items amongst my inventions, and have done so as they occurred in all economically relevant countries around the world. This has cost threefold any and all royalties ever accruing to those patents. 1 did so for the following reasons:

Having no academically earned scientific degrees 1 could not qualify for membership in any scientific societies and could therefore not publish my discoveries officially in their journals. I found that filing of patent claims established an equally valid scientific record of my discoveries and inventions. The preamble texts of patent claims are often philosophically and historically enlightening. Of necessity they are meticulously specific in respect to the technological means of practical realizations of the inventions.

The worth of a patent, however, is not established by the merit of the invention but by the expertness with which its claims of invention are written. Almost anyone can obtain a patent from the patent office. What history has shown to be socioeconomically important is whether those claims can survive in the highest court trials of patent-infringement cases. Vast knowledge of the precedents in court-decision history and of the patent strategy of great corporations is essential in the writing of the claims.

While a U.S.A. patent can be obtained for less than $200, a patent that the great corporations' patent attorneys see no way of circumventing re- . quires expensively expert professional services. Added to this is the cost of world-around major nations' patent coverage (which foreign patents must be applied for and obtained because every country can now air-deliver their inventions into any other country within less than a week, in contradistinction to a six-month water-delivery lag in 19(0). This world-around patent coverage cost about $50,000 in 1975 (it was $30,000 in 1950) for obtaining each world-protected, probably court-sustainable, infringement-defying patent.

In every instance I sought the services of those lawyers most widely acknowledged to be the champion patent attorneys of that moment in the specific category of my type of inventions.

From time to time during the half-century since I first obtained a patent, the patent attorneys of more than 100 of the world's most powerful corporations have called upon my patent attorneys to obtain a license under one or more of my patents. In everyone of these instances, phrasing his statement in varying ways, the visiting powerful corporation attorney has said to my attorney (usually as a flattering, but truthful, "one-professional-to-another," off-the-record remark), "Of course, the first thing my client asked me to do was to find a way of circumventing your client's patent, but you have written your claims so well that I was forced to advise my client to procure a license under your patent if indeed he wished to engage in the invention's manufacture without exposing himself to almost certainly devastating infringement expense."

That statement discloses two truths. The first is that big business, which now makes its major profits out of know-how, deliberately steals know-how wealth whenever possible; the second is that if I had not taken out patents, you would probably never have heard of me nor would you have learned that an independently operating little individual, starting penniless and creditless, had indeed succeeded in inventing what I, as the half-century "Guinea Pig B" -- the test-case individual -- have been able to accomplish.

My half-century experience also discovered the natural, unacceleratable lags existing between inventions and industrial uses in various technical categories, which occur as follows: in electronics -- two years; aerodynamics -- five years; automobiles -- ten years; railroading -- fifteen years; big-city buildings -- twenty-five years; single-family dwellings -- fifty years. Clearly these lags have consistently characterized the lengths of gestation periods in the different arts with which I was concerned. In the case of most of my inventions the gestation lags have been far greater than the seventeen-year lifespan of patents in those arts. Patents in the forty-five- to fifty-year invention- gestation-rated single-family-housing arts are financially worthless. I took out many patents in these arts, however, because it was in the field of human-life protection, support, and accommodation that the worst socioeconomic problems existed.

In 1927 the American Institute of Architects journal published a plan for a single-family dwelling they felt to be an optimum single-family dwelling under the improving technical circumstances of 1927 -- it included electric refrigeration instead of the old icebox, oil-burning furnaces instead of human- shovel-stoked coal furnaces, etc. Concerned with my accelerating ephemeralization, I inventoried all the design fixtures of that optimum single- family dwelling -- its floor area, its volume, the number and placement of its windows, the number of lumens of light admitted, all of its plumbing and wired facilities, its insulation, etc. -- and then I calculated its complete weight, including all of its pipes and wires out to the city mains. It weighed 150 tons.

Then, using the most advanced aircraft-engineering techniques and the highest-performance aluminum alloys, etc., I designed a dwell-in-able environment control of the same volume and floor area that in every way provided facilities and degrees of comfort equal to those of AIA's optimum 1927 single-family dwelling. My aeronautical-engineering-counterpart single- family dwelling weighed only three tons -- a fact that I proved seventeen years later when, incorporating all logical interim technological ,-improvements, we built that aircraft-engineering prototype in Beech Aircraft's plant in Wichita, Kansas.

This three-ton to 150-ton (1/50th) weight ratio of the difference between the technical capabilities of the aircraft versus the home-building arts clearly confirmed the reasonability of my working assumption that the accelerating ephemeralization of science and technology might someday accomplish so much with so little that we could sustainingly take care of all humanity at a higher standard of living than any have ever experienced, which would prove the Malthusian "only you or me" doctrine to be completely fallacious.

Having committed myself to precessional existence, I now focused all my effort for the rest of my life on applying the highest science and technology directly to the realization of human livingry.

Most of my inventions have come into public use long after my relevant patent rights have expired. Some of them have not yet come into public use but will do so fifty years after their 1927 invention and thirty-two years after the seventeen-year patents have expired. This has not mattered to me since I did not take out the patents to make money but only to document and demonstrate what the inventive little individual can accomplish, and to prove documentably the socioeconomic existence of such unique industrialization lags.

For instance, my mass-producible one-piece bathrooms that are now in mass production in West Germany and are· fabricated as I planned, with glass-fiber-reinforced-polyester-resin, are almost exact visual-form replicas of the sheet-copper and aluminum prototypes I developed, installed, and thoroughly tested and proved at the United States Bureau of Standards, Hydraulic Division, in 1937-38, having first designed one in 1927- -- ll of which, as designed, had to wait until the glass-reinforced-polyester-resins plastic industry had been developed, there being a half-century gestation period in the home-improvements art.

Paradoxically, the truly luxurious West German one-piece bathrooms are now about to be made obsolete by the combined effectiveness of my fog-gun self-cleaning device and my dry-packaged and hermetically sealed and mechanically- carried-away-and-packaged toilet device, which altogether eliminate all wet plumbing and do away with the need of piped-in-and-away water and water-borne wastes. The amount of water needed' by the fog gun is less than a pint per day per family. All water for our advanced dwelling machine will be brought to the dwelling in quantities equal to milk and fruit juice consumption.

Now that I have proven that an individual can be world-effective while eschewing either money or political advantage-making, I do my best to discourage others from taking patents, which almost never "payoff" to the inventor. My patent taking was to effect a "bridgehead" accreditation to more effective employment of humanity's potentials.

My half-century experience in the foregoing experiment makes me feel certain that if I had developed any of the inventions to make money or to aggrandize self, I would have failed to do either, as have so many thousands failed when committed primarily to self-advantaging. I frequently hear from only-to-self-committed individuals who lament with pathetic self-conviction that others are trying to steal their inventions, wherefore they don't dare to disclose to anyone, while perversely yearning to profit by what to them is invention. Very often, unknown to them, prior disclosures of the same invention "idea" exist.

Ideas are easy to come by; reduction to practice is an arduous but inspirationally rewarding matter.

I have discovered that one of the important characteristics of most economic trends is that they are too slow in their motion to be visible to humans. We cannot see the motion of the stars, the atoms, a whirling airplane propeller, the growth of a tree, or the hour or minute hand of a clock. In the latter case we can see only the movement of the second hand. Humans do not get out of the way of that which they cannot see moving. As with the electromagnetic spectrum, most of the frequencies and motions of Universe are ultra or infra to man's sensorial tunability.

With a half-century of experience in prognosticating based on the rates of change of my ephemeralization and acceleration curves, I am firmly convinced that I can see clearly a number of coming events, and I am therefore vitally eager that people should not be hurt by the coming of these events, particularly when I can see ways in which it would be possible not only for them to avoid hurt but even to prosper by and enjoy what now seems to me to be inevitable.

Much that I see to be inevitable is unthinkingly opposed by various factions of society. Reflex-conditioned society, facing exclusively toward its past, backs up into its future, often bumping its rump painfully but uncomprehendingly against the "potential-wealth coffers" of its future years' vastly multiplying capability to favorably control its own ecological evolution and the latter's freedom-multiplying devices.

My recitation of self-disciplines may suggest that all I had to do was to conceive of the discipline and institute it, whereas the fact is that my previously conditioned reflexes frequently contradicted my intentions, while circumstances beyond my control converged so powerfully as to divert me from my intended self-disciplines. It has taken constant disciplining and re-disciplining to get myself under control to a productively effective degree.

Throughout the first half of my last fifty-two years of severe reorientation of my life pattern -- in which I determined to give up forever the idea of "earning a living" for my family and self while depending entirely on ecological precession to provide the critically needed material, tools, and monies to carry on the work -- my friends and family and my wife's family and friends would say that I was being stubbornly treacherous to my wife and daughter in not attempting to "earn a living." Thus goaded, I would from time to time accept a job that was proffered me by some friend, and for the moment all these friends and family were relieved and delighted. In each instance, however, all my grand strategy would languish and things would go wrong until, for one reason or another, I jumped off the deep end again and recommitted myself to the unfunded comprehensive program of solving problems by environment-modifying artifacts produced with the most advanced scientific and technological means. Then everything would go smoothly again.

By and large I seem to have made more mistakes than any others of whom I know, but have learned thereby to make ever swifter acknowledgment of the errors and thereafter immediately set about to deal more effectively with the truths disclosed by the acknowledgment of erroneous assumptions.

I don't want a reader of this chronicle to think that I am anything other than what I am -- an average healthy human being with all the attendant weaknesses and vulnerabilities. What is important is that the reorientation of my life and the criteria of its conduct did render such an average human being more effective than under conventional circumstances.

There is one, as-yet-unmentioned, comprehensively overriding commitment that I made before developing all my already-recounted disciplines and commitments, especially to the principle of precession, whereby I gained complete release from the concept of earning a living for my family and myself and gained, as well, the day-to-day practical physical implementation of all my artifact-inventing and reduction of the latter to physical demonstration.

I have deliberately kept this all-important commitment to the last. If it had not come first in my life pattern however, it is quite possible that I might not have had the insights that led to all the intercomplementary resolutions and self-discipline.

* * *

My definition of the word believe means to accept an explanation of physical phenomena without any experiential evidence. At the outset of my resolve not only to do my own thinking but to keep that thinking concerned only with directly experienced evidence, I resolved to abandon completely all that I ever had been taught to believe. Experience had demonstrated to me that most people had an authority-trusting sense that persuaded them to believingly accept the dogma and legends of one religious group or another and to join that group's formalized worship of God.

I asked myself whether I had any direct experiences in life that made me have to assume a greater intellect than that of humans to be operative in Universe. I immediately referred back to my good education in the sciences and my directly experienced learning of the operation of a plurality of physical laws -- such as the interattraction of celestial bodies, varying inversely as the second power of the arithmetical distances intervening -- which laws could only be expressed in the purely intellectual terms of mathematics, which plurality of laws always and only related to eternal relationships existing between and not in anyone of the interrelated phenomena when considered only separately. None of the eternal and always concurrently operative laws had ever been found to contradict one another -- ergo, they were all designedly interaccommodative like a train of gears. Many also were interaugmentative. I said that when we use the word design in contradistinction to randomness, we immediately infer an intellect that sorts out a complex of potentials and interarranges components in complementary ways -- ergo, human mind in discovering a plurality of these only mathematically expressible eternal laws, all of which are interaccommodative, is also discovering the intellectually designed scenario Universe, whose designing requires the a priori eternal existence of an intellectual integrity of eternally self-regenerative Universe. I said to myself, I am o'erwhelmed by the only experientially discovered evidence of an a priori eternal, omnicomprehensive, infinitely and exquisitely concerned, intellectual integrity that we may call God, though knowing that in whatever way we humans refer to this integrity, it will always be an inadequate expression of its cosmic omniscience and omnipotence.

At the time I resolved to do only my own experientially based thinking, in 1927, the Russian Revolution, then ten years old, was beginning to cope with its survival problems by including industrialization as well as farming. In 1928 they brought into operation their five-year plans of successively most important tasks to be accomplished. Realizing from the outset that in order to organize the complete preoccupation of all their over 100 million people with the Communist party's specific planning, it would be disastrous to their efforts to tolerate the continuing presence of any other mystically higher authority than that of the Communist party -- such, for instance, as any of the great organized religions -- probably in pure expediency, the Communist party said that science, which is utterly pragmatic, proved that there is no God -- ergo, Russia, committed to omniscientific technology, was also thenceforth committed to atheism. Many intellectuals around the world accepted this "party-line" doctrine.

In 1930 Einstein, "Mr. Science" himself, published his "Cosmic Religious Sense -- the Nonanthropomorphic Concept of God." Einstein said that the great scientists such as Kepler and Galileo, whom the Roman Catholic Church had excommunicated as "heretics," were, because of their absolute faith in the orderliness of Universe, far more committed to the nonanthropomorphic cosmic God than were the individuals heading the formal religious organizations.

Since 1927, whenever I am going to sleep, I always concentrate my thinking on what I call "Ever Rethinking the Lord's Prayer." The Lord's Prayer had obviously been evolved by a plurality of deeply earnest and thoughtful individuals whose names we will never know. My latest rethinking of it follows.

I am confident, contrary to the Russian assumption that science invalidated all possibilities of the existence of God, that, as specifically argued, my following declaration constitutes a scientifically meticulous, direct-experience- based proof of God.

EVER RETHINKING THE LORD'S PRAYER
July 12, 1979

To be satisfactory to science
all definitions
must be stated
in terms of experience.

I define Universe as
all of humanity's
in-all-known-time
consciously apprehended
and communicated (to self or others)
experiences.

In using the word, God,
I am consciously employing
four clearly differentiated
from one another
experience-engendered thoughts.

Firstly I mean:-
those experience-engendered thoughts
which are predicated upon past successions
of unexpected, human discoveries
of mathematically incisive,
physically demonstrable answers
to what theretofore had been misassumed
to be forever unanswerable
cosmic magnitude questions
wherefore I now assume it to be
scientifically manifest,
and therefore experientially reasonable that

scientifically explainable answers
may and probably will
eventually be given
to all questions
as engendered in all human thoughts
by the sum total
of all human experiences;
wherefore my first meaning for God is:-

all the experientially explained
or explainable answers
to all questions
of all time-

Secondly I mean:-
The individual's memory
of many surprising moments
of dawning comprehensions
of an interrelated significance
to be existent
amongst a number
of what had previously seemed to be
entirely uninterrelated experiences
all of which remembered experiences
engender the reasonable assumption
of the possible existence
of a total comprehension
of the integrated significance~
the meaning --
of all experiences.

Thirdly, I mean:-
the only intellectually discoverable
a priori, intellectual integrity
indisputably manifest as
the only mathematically statable
family
of generalized principles-

cosmic laws --
thus far discovered and codified
and ever physically redemonstrable
by scientists
to be not only unfailingly operative
but to be in eternal,
omni-interconsiderate,
omni-interaccommodative governance
of the complex
of everyday, naked-eye experiences
as well as of the multi-millions-fold greater range
of only instrumentally explored
infra- and ultra-tunable
micro- and macro- Universe events.

Fourthly, I mean:-
All the mystery inherent
in all human experience,
which, as a lifetime ratioed to eternity,
is individually limited
to almost negligible
twixt sleepings, glimpses
of only a few local episodes
of one of the infinite myriads
of concurrently and overlappingly operative
sum-totally never-ending
cosmic scenario serials

With these four meanings I now directly address God.
"Our God-
Since omni-experience is your identity
You have given us
overwhelming manifest:-
of Your complete knowledge
of Your complete comprehension
of Your complete concern
of Your complete coordination
of Your complete responsibility
of Your complete capability to cope
in absolute wisdom and effectiveness
with all problems and events
and of Your eternally unfailing reliability
so to do

Yours, Dear God,
is the only and complete glory.

By Glory I mean
the synergetic totality
of all physical and metaphysical radiation
and of all physical and metaphysical gravity
of finite
but non unitarily conceptual
scenario Universe
in whose synergetic totality
the a priori energy potentials
of both radiation and gravity
are initially equal
but whose respective
behavioral patterns are such
that radiation's entropic, redundant disintegratings
is always less effective
than gravity's non redundant
syntropic integrating

Radiation is plural and differentiable,
radiation is focusable, beamable, and self-sinusing,
is interceptible, separatist, and biasable --
ergo, has shadowed voids and vulnerabilities;

Gravity is unit and undifferentiable
Gravity is comprehensive
inclusively embracing and permeative
is non-focusable and shadowless,
and is omni-integrative;
all of which characteristics of gravity
are also the characteristics of love.
Love is metaphysical gravity.

You, Dear God,
are the totally loving intellect
ever designing
and ever daring to test
and thereby irrefutably proving
to the uncompromising satisfaction
of Your own comprehensive and incisive
knowledge of the absolute truth
that Your generalized principles
adequately accommodate any and all
special case developments,
involvements, and side effects;
wherefore Your absolutely courageous
omnirigorous and ruthless self-testing
alone can and does absolutely guarantee
total conservation
of the integrity
of eternally regenerative Universe

Your eternally regenerative scenario Universe
is the minimum complex
of totally intercomplementary
totally intertransforming
nonsimultaneous, differently frequenced
and differently enduring
feedback closures
of a finite
but nonunitarily
nonsimultaneously conceptual system
in which naught is created
and naught is lost
and all occurs
in optimum efficiency.

Total accountability and total feedback
constitute the minimum and only
perpetual motion system.
Universe is the one and only
eternally regenerative system.

To accomplish Your regenerative integrity
You give Yourself the responsibility
of eternal, absolutely continuous,
tirelessly vigilant wisdom.

Wherefore we have absolute faith and trust in You,
and we worship You
awe-inspiredly,
all-thankfully,
rejoicingly,
lovingly,
Amen.


* * *

In considering theology and science I think it is important to note their differences regarding familiar and not-so-familiar cosmic concepts.

It is the very essence of my thinking that, for a principle to qualify as generalizable in science, there must be no known exceptions to its reliability. Exceptionless means eternal. Principles can be only eternal.

Mathematics are eternal. Principles are mathematically demonstrable -- as manifest, for instance, in synergy. Principles are truly independent of any additional special case, time-size aspects of their manifestation. There are principles governing covarying rates of relative size-time interrelationships. That principle is manifest in E = mc2, c2 being the utterly unimpeded rate of growth of an omnidirectionally expanding light wave's surface as demonstrated in vacuo.

This also involves the mathematical principle that a system's linear dimension grows at a first-power rate, while its surface grows at a second-power rate and its volume at a third-power rate. A steel needle with an initial length of six feet and a diameter of two inches, having a "slenderness" (L/R) ratio of 36/1, is reduced to a needle three inches long with a diameter of .08333 of an inch. The six-foot needle sinks in the water. The three-inch needle floats on the water: its volume -- ergo, its weight -- has become so negligible that its surface relates only to the surface tension of the water, its weight being much less than can be supported by the atomic interattractions producing the molecular membrane of the water surface.

To demonstrate frequency in pure principle I observe painfully that I cannot put my finger through the plane of revolution of a swiftly rotating airplane propellor and withdraw it before it gets hit. Yet machine guns can be timed to fire bullets between successively revolving propellor blades. My muscle and brain cannot reflex and act that fast. I might get my finger through once but can't get it back in time. Operationally speaking, "solid" means very high frequency present in pure principle. I can see through my glasses because light moving through only one way at 186,000 m.p.s. has ample time to avoid the frequency of interference events occurring locally in pure principle.

There are no solids. There are no things. There are only interfering and noninterfering patterns operative in pure principle, and principles are eternal. Principles never contradict principles. Principles can interaccommodate one another only in noninterfering frequency ways. Principles can interaugment one another if frequency is synchronizable.

Acknowledging the mathematically elegant intellectual integrity of eternally regenerative Universe is one way of identifying God.

Everything the brain deals with relates to high-frequency thingness. Mind, and mind alone, deals with understanding the interrelationships existing only between and not in anyone principle, considered only by itself. Principles themselves are often subsets of interrelationships existing only between specific principles.

God may also be identified as the synergy of the interbehavioral relationships of all the principles unpredicted by the behaviors or characteristics of any of the principles considered only separately.

The synergetic integral of the totality of all principles is God, whose sum-total behavior in pure principle is beyond our comprehension and is utterly mysterious to us, because as humans -- in pure principle- -- e do not and never will know all the principles.

Apparently the integrity of the synergy of all synergies of all principles is continually testing its own comprehensive adequacy to accommodate all challenges in pure principle to the maintenance in pure principle of the principle of nonsimultaneous, only-overlappingly-affected, complex unity's eternal regeneration.

Realization that the foregoing may be true tends to inform humans that the introduction into Universe of humans, in pure principle, with minds operating in pure principle, capable of apprehending and objectively employing in pure principle some of the eternal principles, was courageously undertaken by God to discover whether the principle of the eternally regenerative integrity of Universe can endure inviolate despite the dichotomy of knowledge brought about by introduction into the cosmic system of humans and their minds with access to and employment of some -- but not all -- of the eternal principles. This was an experiment in pure principle to test the adequacy of the synergy of synergies of principle to cope with the sometimes perverse, egotistical, selfish, and deceitful initiatives inherent in the concept of humans in pure principle without access to the wisdom accruing synergetically only to knowledge of all the principles -- ergo, possibly capable of impairing the integrity of eternal regeneration. That may be what the integrity of God needs to know and needs to know by experimental evidence.

That is what I am thinking about in "Ever Rethinking the Lord's Prayer." It is also what I am thinking about in volume 2 of Synergetics. I think it is probably an intuitive awareness of the possible verity -- of parts or of all -- of the foregoing that makes the theologist disregard the scientist's brain-induced requirement of a cosmic beginning and ending.

All scientists have brains. Brains always and only coordinate the special case information progressively apprehended in pure principle by the separate senses operating in pure mathematical-frequency principle. Brain then sorts out the information to describe and identify special whole-system characteristics, storing them in the memory bank as system concepts for single or multiple recall for principle-seeking consideration and reconsideration as system integrities by searching and ever-reassessing mind.

Only minds have the capability to discover principles. Once in a very great while scientists' minds discover principles and put them to rigorous physical test before accepting them as principle. More often theologists or others discover principles but do not subject them to the rigorous physical-special- case testing before accepting and employing them as working-assumption principles.

Principles are eternal. Special case interactions of principles are temporal and brain-apprehensible because in pure principle we have time, which is simply the principle of potentially different relative frequencies and not of beginnings and endings.

_______________

Notes:

i. Someone suggested to me that etherealization may be a better word. However, it is disqualified for my meaning because it is founded on the no longer physically accepted concept of ether.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:35 am

PART 1 OF 2

CHAPTER 5: The Geoscope

ONE OF THE WORLD-AROUND'S most immediately critical problems is that of how to facilitate the swift development of all human individuals' discovery of all we know about human life on board Spaceship Earth at this moment in Universe -- and how so to learn in the shortest possible time.

We have already referred many times to the world's pro tern power-structure- wrought obstacles blocking the critical path to human understanding of the nature of reality.

In the Victorian era, into which I was born, reality was everything we could see, smell, hear, taste, and touch. That is what reality had always been.

When I was three years of age, the electron was discovered. Science said the electron was a nonconceptual phenomenon. Because it was invisible, it could not be photographed ... and it didn't "make the news." The electron was very real, however, because it could give you a shock -- could even electrocute you. The new reality being invisible, approximately 99.9 percent of twentieth-century science was leading industrial technology's everyday, working reality into the ultra- and infravisible -- the macroastrophysical and the microatomic, electronic, metallurgically alloying, chemically reacting, microbiologically, astrophysically exploring ranges of the electromagnetic wave spectrum of Universe. And 99.9 percent of these very real activities are nondirectly apprehensible by the bare human senses and are practically discovered and coped with only through powerful macro-micro operative instruments.

At the dawning of the twentieth century, without warning to humanity, the physical technology of Earthians' affairs was shifted over from a brain- sensed reality into a reality apprehended only by instruments, comprehended only by scientifically trained brains, understood and coped with only by experience-educated mind, and employed usefully only through mind's discovery and objectification of special case realizations of the only mathematically expressible laws governing each of the omni-intercomplementary family of scientific generalizations.

We have also noted how the power !;tructures successively dominant over human affairs had for aeons successfully imposed a "specialization" upon the intellectually bright and physically talented members of society as a reliable means of keeping them academically and professionally divided -- ergo, "conquered," powerless. The separate individuals' special, expert glimpses of the separate, invisible reality increments became so infinitesimally fractionated and narrow that they gave no hint of the significant part their work played in the omni-integrating evolutionary front of total knowledge and its power-structure exploitability in contradistinction to its omni-humanity- advantaging potentials. Thus the few became uselessly overadvantaged instead of the many becoming regeneratively ever more universally advantaged.

Hyperspecialization also prevented popular comprehension of what the ongoing world power .structure was doing -- ergo, hyperspecialization kept society preoccupied in ways nondetrimental to the power structure's interests and practically dependent upon the power structure's media for information.

In addition to (A) the difficulties of popular comprehension imposed by the invisibility of the frontiers of everyday reality, and (B) specialization as an obstacle to popular apprehension and comprehension of "what life is about" -- which obstacles A and B must be effectively vanquished within the 1980s if humanity is to continue on our planet-we now discover another formidable obstacle that must also be vanquished by 1990. That obstacle (C) is humanity's inability to see more than a very limited number of rates of motion. Humans cannot see humans growing either bodily or as local human tissue. Humans cannot see the motion of the hour and minute hands of the clock or of the physical growth of trees. Humans can realize only retrospectively that they have grown because their clothes no longer fit. Humans find that trees have grown because yesteryear's view has been cut off -- 99.9 percent of what humans can "see" comprehendingly is the belated aftereffects of what happened.

Most of the important trend patternings are invisible -- ergo, their eventuations are unanticipated by society. Because of obstacles A. B. and C most of the significant evolutionary trendings of human affairs cannot be detected and tuned in by people's sense-coordinating brains. Few of their vital challenges are apprehended in time by human brains. When humans cannot see something approaching to destroy them, they do not get out of the way.

Question: Is there not an instrument that can inform humanity about its invisibly trending evolutionary challenges -- and do so in time to allow them to satisfactorily anticipate and cope with inexorable events? Yes! There is the Geoscope, which can be swiftly realized both physically and metaphysically.

• • •

Only for six one-thousandths of its three and one-half million known years of presence on Earth has humanity sensed the shape, size, rotation, and Sun-orbiting rate of our planet in the solar system as well as our Earth's relationship to other micro-macro-Universe events. Only human mind's capability to discover the only-mathematically-definable-and-employable physical laws -- of the everywhere and everywhen nonsimultaneously intertransforming, differently enduring, differently energized, independently episodic and overlapping, eternally regenerative, scenario Universe's laws such as those of leverage, electromagnetics, and optics -- has made possible humanity's additional discovery and participatory use of macro-micro-Universe information.

"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us." To facilitate humanity's comprehension of its present status in Universe, what is needed is a sensorially tune-in-able physical means of "seeing oursels as others see us." Poet Robert Bums's wish was partially fulfilled when, for the first time, Earthian humans standing on the Moon took colored moving pictures of our planet Earth exactly as seen from the Moon and electromagnetically dispatched the pictures back to us on Earth to be seen over anybody's and everybody's properly tuned-in television sets.

Most people will say that if you want to get the best map of the whole world, use a globe, the bigger the better. The trouble with a globe is that you cannot possibly see all the world displayed on it at anyone time. The experimentally disclosed fact is that, without revolving the library Earth-globe, you cannot read the names identifying the geographical data of more than one-quarter of its surface at anyone viewing.

You may say "the larger the globe, the more you can see of the world in anyone viewing." If that were true, you could use the real Earth as your optimum globe. The fact is that the bigger the globe, the less of its surface data you can see and read at anyone time. With a twelve- or sixteen-inch globe you can get the most information possible in anyone viewing. This is approximately one-quarter of the Earth's surface.

Because humans want to see their whole Earth at once, cartographic projections of the Earth's surface were developed -- Mercator, polyconic, polar azimuthal, etc. The Mercator became the most familiarly used. It is as yet found in 1980 to be the map most frequently used in schools around the world. On it Greenland will often be seen to be larger than South America, and North America larger than Africa; it has no Antarctic continent; and the land on the left end of the map is seemingly 24,000 miles away from the land area on the right end while in reality those areas are actually adjacent. With only one exception -- the Fuller Dymaxion Projection -- all of the well-known methods of cartographic projection either chop the world data into a number of separately viewed parts or produce badly distorted images and continental fractionations.

It was to provide a satisfactory means for humanity to see correctly the entire surface of the globe all at the same time that the Dymaxion Sky-Ocean Projection was designed. With it, for the first time in history, humans can see their whole planet Earth's geography displayed on one flat surface without any visible distortion in shape or relative size of any of its data and without any breaks in its continental contour -- that is, the whole world surface is viewable simultaneously as one-world island of unbroken contour in one-world ocean.

The Dymaxion transformational projection system that produces the Sky-Ocean World Map divides the sphere into its maximum omnisymmetrical, twelve-vertexed, thirty-arc-edged subdivisions of twenty equi-central-angled arcs of 63° 26' and sixty surface angles of 72° each, spherical triangles. The thirty great circle arcs of 63° 26' act as constant peripheral integrity controls, preventing the breaking open and spilling out of the discrete data and distorting of the constant angular symmetry, both central and surface, during the transformation from spherical to planar display of the twenty triangles of the spherical and planar bound icosahedron.

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FIGURE 25. Bird's-eye view of person looking at a sixteen-inch world globe.

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FIGURE 26.

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FIGURE 27.

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FIGURE 28.

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FIGURE 29.

The more conventional projection systems that are widely used include the Mercator projection (Fig. 27), the conic projection (Fig. 28), and the polar azimuthal projection (Fig. 29). All three of these systems give rise to considerable visual distortion, which the Dymaxion projection avoids (see Fig. 30).

* * *

In 1964 the United States Information Agency asked me to consider the design of a building and an exhibition that might be adopted as the United States entry in the Montreal World's Fair of 1967, later known as "Expo '67."

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FIGURE 30.

I made a proposal, and the exhibition part of it was rejected. I was asked to continue, however, as the architect of the U.S.A. building to house an exhibition designed by others. Insofar as I know, I was the only one considered as architect of the building. I think this was because of the success the United States had experienced with my 1954 world-around, air-delivered, geodesic-dome trade fair pavilions and the U.S.A. Moscow Exhibit dome of 1959, which was purchased by the Russians as a permanent building after the United States exhibition was concluded.

Fortunately my U.S.A. geodesic dome for Expo '67 proved a success. Also, but more gradually, it is being realized by many that my rejected idea for the American exhibit is looming into ever greater prominence as a highly desirable social facility. I will therefore review the concept and development of my original idea.

I told the United States Information Agency in 1964 that by 1967 the regard of the rest of the world for the United States would be at its lowest ebb in many decades -- if not in the total two centuries of the U.S.A.'s existence. Since each country's World's Fair exhibit would be well published all around Earth, I felt that it would be very important that the United States do something that would tend to regain the spontaneous admiration and confidence of the whole world. This could be done by inaugurating at Expo '67 a computerized exploration for the most universally creative and economically sound internal and external U.S.A. policy formulation.

What I proposed was based on my observation that world people had become extraordinarily confident in the fundamental reliability of the computer and its electronically controlled processes. I know that a great many people will contradict me, but I had predicated my conviction of society's subconsciously established confidence in the computer's reliability upon vital, therefore undeniable, behavior facts.

On the working assumption that humanity had established implicit confidence in the computers and automated instrumentation, I proposed in 1964 that the United States Expo '67 exhibition should have a 400-foot-diameter 5/8 sphere building similar in shape to the 250-foot-diameter building actually built for Expo '67. In the basement of this building would be housed an extraordinary computer facility. On entering the building by thirty- six external ramps and escalators leading in at every ten degrees of circumferential direction, the visitors would arrive upon a great balcony reaching completely around the building's interior quarter-mile perimeter. The visitors would see an excitingly detailed 100-foot-diameter world globe suspended high within the 400-foot-diameter 5/8 sphere main building. Cities such as New York, London, Tokyo, and Los Angeles would appear as flattened-out, basketball-sized blotches with the tallest buildings and radio towers only about one-sixteenth of an inch high.

Periodically the great spherical Earth would be seen to be transforming slowly into an icosahedron -- a polyhedron with twenty (equilateral) triangular facets. The visitors would witness that in the processes of these transformations there are no visible changes in the relative size and shape of any of the land and water masses of the 100-foot-diameter miniature Earth. Slowly the 100-foot-diameter icosahedronal Earth's surface would be seen to be parting along some of its triangular edges, as the whole surface slowly opens mechanically as an orange's skin or an animal's skin might be peeled carefully in one piece. With slits introduced into its perimeter at various places it would be relaxed to subside into a flattened-out pattern as is a bearskin rug. The icosahedronal Earth's shell thus would be seen to gradually flatten out and be lowered to the floor of the. building. The visitors would realize that they were now looking at the whole of the Earth's surface simultaneously without any visible distortion of the relative size and shape of the land and sea masses having occurred during the transformation from sphere to the flattened-out condition we call a map. My cartographic projection of the "Sky-Ocean World" functions in just such a manner as I have just now described.

This stretched-out, football-field-sized world map would disclose the continents arrayed as one world-island in one world-ocean with no breaks in the continental contours. Its scale would be 1/500,000th of reality. Three millimeters or one eighth of an inch would represent a mile. A big 1000- foot-long oil tanker would appear to be less than one millimeter or only one fiftieth of an inch in length. A major airport's runways would each be about three millimeters or one eighth of an inch long. A major football stadium would measure less than one millimeter or one fiftieth of an inch long at this scale.

The great map would be wired throughout so that minibulbs closely installed all over its surface could be lighted by the computer at appropriate points to show various, accurately positioned, proportional data regarding world conditions, events, and resources. World events would occur and transform on this live world map's ever-evoluting face. If we had 100,000 light bulbs for instance, each mini-light-bulb could represent 40,000 people -- a medium-sized town. Mexico City, New York City, or Tokyo would be a cluster of 250 bulbs. The bulbs could be computer-distributed to represent the exact geographical distribution positioning of the people. Military movements of a million troops would be dramatically visible. The position of every airplane in the sky and every ship on the world ocean could be computer- control displayed. Weekend and holiday exoduses from cities into the country or travel to other cities would be vividly displayed by computer-controlled tallying instruments.

I proposed that on this stretched-out, reliably accurate, world map of our Spaceship Earth a great world logistics game be played by introducing into the computers all the known inventory and whereabouts of the various metaphysical and physical resources of the Earth. (This inventory, which took forty years to develop to high perfection, is now housed at my headquarters.)

We would then enter into the computer all the inventory of human trends, known needs, and fundamental behavior characteristics.

I proposed that individuals and teams would undertake to play the World Game with those resources, behaviors, trends, vital needs, developmental desirables, and regenerative inspirations. The players as individuals or teams would each develop their own theory of how to make the total world work successfully for all of humanity. Each individual or team would playa theory through to the end of a predeclared program. It could be played with or without competitors.

The objective of the game would be to explore ways to make it possible for anybody and everybody in the human family to enjoy the total Earth without any human interfering with any other human and without any human gaining advantage at the expense of another.

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FIGURE 31. Dymaxion Sky-Ocean World Map

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FIGURE 32. Cornell Geoscope

To accomplish the game's objective the resources, pathways, and dwelling points around the surface of our 8000-mile-diameter, spherical Spaceship Earth must be fully employed by the players in such a way that the world's individual humans would each be able to exercise complete actional discretion and would have such freedom of decision regarding the investment of their time in their waking hours that they would be able to travel independently, or in groups, either to and fro locally or continuing intermittently on around the world, dwelling from time to time here or there, finding everywhere facilities to accommodate their needs in an uncompromising manner. The game would seek to use the world's resources, interprocesses, and evolutionary developments in such a way that all the foregoing would be possible.

* * *

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FIGURE 33. Nottingham Geoscope

It was to satisfy the same need of humanity-to comprehend the total planetary, all-evolutionary historical significance of each day's developments -- that the 200-foot, or sixty-meter, -diameter Geoscope was developed. The Geoscope is a gossamer, open trusswork spherical structure wherewith humanity can see and read all the spherical data of the Earth's geography as seen from either its inside or its outside and in its proper interorientation within the theater of local Universe events.

When completely installed and ready for use, all Geoscopes are oriented so that their polar axes are always parallel to the real Earth's north-south polar axis, with the latitude and longitude of the installed Geoscope's zenith point always corresponding exactly with the latitude and longitude of the critically located point on our real planet Earth at which the Geoscope is installed. As a consequence of the polar axis and zenith correspondences of the Geoscope mini-Earths and the real Earth, it will be found that the miniature Earth Geoscope's real omnidirectional celestial-theater orientation always corresponds exactly with the real omnidirectional celestial-theater orientation of the real planet Earth.

Since the two spheres (mini-Earth and real Earth) are rigidly coupled together tangentially at the same latitude-longitude point on the real Earth as the latitude-longitude zenith point on the Geoscope sphere, the geographical- geometrical orientation attitudes brought about by their respective axial rotations and orbital travel around the Sun will be identical. The Geoscope has the same relationship to the Earth as has one of the relatively small lifeboats mounted fore and aft on the davits of an ocean cruise ship to the big ship herself. If the big ship changes its course from north to east, the lifeboat does likewise. If the bow rises and falls in a head-on sea, so too does the bow of the davits-mounted lifeboat.

The 4000-mile -- 1/46th light-second -- distance existing between the center of the Earth sphere and that of the Geoscope sphere mounted on the Earth's surface is astronomically negligible when compared to any of the celestial distances. The distance from Earth to its nearest star -- the Sun -- is 92 million miles, or eight light-minutes, away. The next nearest star is 25 trillion miles away. Such celestially negligible distances as 4000 miles are canceled out as visibly unappreciable. Such negligible distances are called "parallax" by the astronomer or navigator.

Standing at night with your eyes at the center of such a Geoscope-miniature Earth -- and viewing the stars outwardly through its fly-screen surface, on which are thinly outlined all the contours of all the world's continents, you will see the exact relationship of all the stars to the Earth's surface. Any star in zenith over anyone geographical point on the Earth can be verified to be in zenith at that moment over that point on Earth by telephoning someone at that point. What you will see from the center of mini-Earth at anyone time is exactly what you would see if you were safely stationed at the center of real planet Earth and had X-ray eyes and could look outwardly through 4000 miles of matter to see the stars viewable in zenith outwardly of anyone given geographical point of our axially spinning, Sun-orbiting, sphere Earth at anyone given moment. As viewed from its center, Geoscope becomes a true planetarium -- no imitation stars and no imitation sky. In the Geoscope we have the real stars in their real sky in exact zenith position as seen through the Geoscope's spherical triangle windows outwardly and around our Earth sphere in all directions as of any given moment -- as our Earth revolves and zooms along its Sun orbit within that vast starry environment.

Because the real planet Earth is revolving around its north-south polar axis, so, too, is mini-Earth. They are both thus revolving without effecting any change of the observed position of Polaris -- the North Star -- in respect to mini-Earth's north pole. Therefore, the observer at the center of the Geoscope feels spontaneously the celestial fixity not only of Polaris but also of all the other stars as seen outwardly through the Geoscope's triangular windows. Because outwardly of Geoscope's equator what we can see of the starry scene is changing most rapidly and ever less rapidly until, looking out along the polar axis, we observe no change, we get the same feeling as we do looking out the window of a railway car, automobile, or airplane. We see and feel the scene changing as a consequence of our vehicle's motion and not of the scenery's motion. For the first time in human experience Geoscope's mini-Earth spherical structure is clearly seen and felt to be revolving within the theater of Universe, and those holding steady their bodies, heads and their eyes and standing at the Geoscope's center, feel-see their Earth revolving within the vast theater of the starry sky.

With Geoscopes locally available around the world, all children experiencing its true celestial-event orientations will feel themselves being rotated around from west to east by the Earth to be shaded from the Sun's light by the rolling-around Earth's western horizon ... which deep shadowing they will call night.

They will feel their western horizon to be rotating around with them and to be obscuring (or eclipsing) the Sun. They will spontaneously say "Sunclipse" instead of "Sunset." In the same way they will say spontaneously "Sunsight" in the morning as the Earth revolves the Sun into seeability, thus spontaneously acquiring two poetical, two-syllable, truly meaningful words to replace the two-syllable, misinformative, but poetical words of their ancestry -- "Sunset" and "Sunrise."

The new educational technology of world man will of eventual, emergency- emerged, critical necessity come to produce and use the Geoscopes as basic educational tools for acquiring both cosmic and local Universe orientation. It will be universally used as the visual reference for all hourly news broadcasts everywhere around the Earth. Geoscope will spontaneously induce total-Earth, total-humanity viewing significance in regard to all our individual daily experiences. It will spontaneously eliminate nationalistic cerebrating.

The most usefully informative model of the Geoscope now under consideration is a 200-foot-diameter, structurally gossamer, look-into-able and look-out-able, geodesic sphere to be suspended with its bottom 100 feet above ground by approximately invisible cables strung tautly from the tops of three remotely erected 200-foot-high masts.

The vast number of computer-selected, colored, miniature electric light bulbs displayed on the spherical frame's surface of the 200-foot-diameter Geoscope, with their intensity and diminutive size as well as their minimum distance of 100 feet from viewing eyes (as seen from either the center of the sphere or from the ground outside and 100 feet below), will altogether produce a visually continuous-surface picture equal in detailed resolution to that of a fine-screen halftone print or that of an excellent, omnidirectionally-viewable, spherical television tube's picturing. It may well be that by the time the first 200-foot Geoscope is undertaken, we may be able to develop a spherical TV tube of that size or a complex of spherically coordinated TV tubes. This giant, 200-foot-diameter sphere will be a miniature Earth -- the most accurate global representation of our planet ever to be realized.

I have produced several fully working, lesser-diameter models of such Geoscope (or mini-Earth) facilities. Most notable were the twenty-foot-diameter one at Cornell University in 1952; the semicompleted, 200-foot-diameter one at the University of Minnesota in 1954-56; the ten-foot-diameter one at Princeton University in 1955; and, in semidemonstrability, the 250- foot-diameter, 3/4 sphere, spherical structure used as the U.S.A. pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal, Canada, in 1967; and the fifty-foot-diameter Geoscope permanently installed exactly astride the ninetieth meridian of our planet Earth as the Religious Center of Southern Illinois University's campus at Edwardsville, Illinois, in 1970.

To our 1953-55 University of Minnesota and Princeton University Geoscope development classes I suggested that our first 200-footer should serve as an everyday facility of the United Nations. I proposed that it be triangularly suspended from the top of five 300-foot-high tower masts to be erected from a group of rock ledges in New York City's East River -- known on the government charts as Blackwell's ledges. These ledges are situated in the middle of the East River a quarter of a mile south of what was once called Blackwell's Island, then for thirty years Welfare Island, and in the 1970s was renamed Roosevelt Island. All the East River water traffic running between New York's Lower Harbor and Long Island Sound or the Harlem River passes to the west of Blackwell's ledges -- that is, between the ledges and the United Nations buildings. The tallest UN building is 400 feet high. I proposed that the 200-foot Geoscope sphere be hung above the ledges with its bottom 200 feet above the water, which would locate its top at the same 400-foot height as that of the UN building and 100 feet higher than the tops of the supporting masts. I proposed that the intercabling of the mast tops and their tangentially triangling support of and tiedown of the sphere be done with high-tensile and small-diameter, high-carbon rod steel, so delicate that the dull-black-plated support system would be invisible -- the geodesic-tensegrity sphere being of such low weight as to make this invisibility highly feasible.

This would result in the 200-foot sphere seeming to be floating in midair as though it were a small celestial body that had come in very close to Earth at just the right location to make it highly visible to occupants of the UN building as well as to all those in New York City in the vicinity of Fiftieth Street.

In designing the optimum public Geoscope in 1950 I chose the 200-foot-diameter, approximately transparent, gossamer-structured sphere because at that time the United States Air Force was, wherever possible, engaged in making radio-triangulated, geographically accurate photographic maps of the whole Earth's surface. The airplane's exact geographical position at the moment of photographing was determined by electromagnetics -- geographical position fix by cross-triangulation from two known station points on Earth. This electromagnetic-beam-crossing triangulation, triggered by the camera, accurately identified the position of the airplane at the moment of its photographing of anyone picture and as located on the latitude-longitude coordinate grid of our Earth's planetary sphere. The Air Force's geographical photography work was known as the aerial (photographic) mosaicking of the world.

With the U.S.A. entering into a third, but coldly conducted, ententingly competing, small-nation puppetry-manipulated world war with the U.S.S.R. and its allies, we can understand why it was that the U.S.A. was so intently flying those world-around, radio-triangulated photomosaic missions.

The mosaic grid was flown over all those countries of the world that permitted the U.S.A. to do so. Different series of the photographic mosaicking were flown at different altitudes. The lowest-flown altitude gave the greatest details. It was the communist countries' prohibition against the U.S.A.'s photographic mapping that caused the U.S.A. to develop the Russian-shot-down, ultra-high-flying U-2, hoping to accomplish the triangulation task.

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FIGURE 34. Drawing for proposed United Nations 200-foot Geoscope

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FIGURE 34a. Drawing of support masts for proposed UN Geoscope

Three masts could do it and would be preferable, but all would have to support the sphere from well below its equator.


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FIGURE 34b. Bird's-eye view of UN Geoscope

The optimum Geoscope is designed to make practical an omnidirectional moving picture displayed on the surface of a large sphere for presenting all manner of information relevant to all human affairs as they occur around the whole of our planet, so that the whole world's population can learn for itself how to comprehend the significance of the world-around information as compounded with other powerfully relevant, long-known, and broadcast news and other Geoscope-mounted information.

The lowest level at which the Air Force radio-triangulation-fixing photo-mosaicking was flown obviously produced the greatest detail. The Air Force did all their photographing on the moving picture industry's thirty-five-millimeter film. In photo-industry lingo "contact" prints of the thirty-five-mm. frames means actual -- unenlarged -- film-frame size, black-and-white or colored prints, about 2-1/4 X 2-1/4-square-inch prints. Contacts of those 35-mm. frames as photographed by the Air Force's lowest-level mosaicking, when assembled like a picture puzzle and pasted onto a balloon of the right size, altogether produce one united, spherical surface picture of the whole world. The diameter of such a spherical picture "globe" made up of contact prints of the lowest-level mosaicing is about 200 feet. The higher the level of mosaic flying, the smaller the sphere produced.

Since I knew in 1950 that I could produce a 200-foot-diameter, adequately strong, but lightly trussed geodesic sphere, I determined to design a 200- foot Geoscope.

During World War II the largest clear-span, steel-trussed, quadrangularly based airplane hangars' narrowest horizontal dimension's truss spannings built were approximately 250 feet wide. To make them a foot wider would have doubled the weight of the steel trusses.

No clear-span, spherical structure of that size had ever been built anywhere in 1950. The structural engineering profession. did not at that time assume that such a large, clear-span, spherical structure could be economically produced. As yet standing in prime condition, St. Peter's 150-foot-diameter marble dome built in Rome over 400 years ago and the Pantheon's equally excellent-condition 150-foot-diameter marble dome built in Rome about 1700 years ago 'were, in 1950, history's largest clear-span domes. In 1950 the largest-ever steel-framed, radial-arch dome of 150-foot diameter was built. Geodesic structures opened up the ability of humans to build unlimited- diameter clear-span spherical structures. (By 1958 I had built a clear-span geodesic hemispherical dome of 384-foot diameter. Since then they have gone to 700 feet in diameter, and they will keep on growing in clear-span size at an ever faster rate until we enclose whole cities.)

The thirty-five-millimeter pictures taken by the U.S. Air Force at their lowest level of mosaicking (which would produce a 200-foot-diameter sphere) were of such detail that you could, with your naked eye, identify your own home grounds and even your house, which would be a 1/100th-of- an-inch speck -- the smallest speck seeable by human eye. You would not be able to see your car in front of the house, nor could you see humans or cows. But you could see clearly your 400-acre-or-greater farm.

This 200-foot-size Geoscope would make it possible for humans to identify the true scale of themselves and their activities on our planet. Humans could thus comprehend much more readily that their personal survival problems related intimately to all humanity's survival.

The 200-foot Geoscope's surface geography would be at a scale of one to
200,000. At this scale, on a 200-foot-diameter miniature "Earth," we set the
following approximate equivalencies:

1 foot = 200,000 feet
1 foot = 38 miles
1 inch = 3 miles = 15,000 feet
1/16 inch = 1040 feet
1/16 inch = 3 football stadia
1/16 inch = length of Queen Elizabeth 2
1/16 inch = length of average oil tanker
1/64 inch = edge of one acre


Since the size of the smallest line that can be seen separately from another line is 1/120th of an inch, the width of two lines of 1/120th of an inch would be l/60th of an inch. A 1/120th-inch line enclosing a square 1/64th of an inch would not have a visible interior area, so for this reason an acre as shown on the 2oo-foot-diameter Geoscope would appear only as a square dot l/64th of an inch along its outer edge. An average home-house would make a square speck of about 1/100th of an inch to the edge.

Speaking "approximately," the city of greater Los Angeles would make a circle one and one-half feet in diameter on the 200-foot-diameter Geoscope. A small town of 5000 people would make a circle one inch in diameter. Looking at the 200-foot-diameter Geoscope frour 1000 feet away, you could say realistically to yourself, "I can't see it from here, but my house is a seeable speck on that world," and putting powerful binoculars to your eyes, you could see that speck.

The Geoscope's electronic computers will store all relevant inventories of world data arranged chronologically, in the order and spacing of discovery, as they have occurred throughout all known history.

Historical patterns too slow for the human eye and mind to comprehend, such as the multimillions-of-years-to-transpire changes in the geology of our planet -- for instance, the picturing on the Geoscope Earth in two minutes of the drifting apart of the continental plates.

Or in another four-minute sequence picturing, the last four one-million-years- each ice ages, spaced 250,000 years apart, their transforming of the world's ocean waters into ice cappings, which water shift reveals peninsulas interconnecting what we now know of only as islands -- for instance, the Malay Peninsula including all of Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Bali, Sulawesi, and the Philippines, as it did in the last ice age.

The geographically varying population growths of our Earth can be run off on the Geoscope at a rate of one second per century. This would show humanity first appearing on the coral atolls in the waters of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, then coming up on the lands of China and India and East Africa, and spreading westward into Europe and thence westward to the Americas, with a small second-magnitude migration, rafting on the Japan Current and flowing the other way.

Another change to be illustrated is resource transpositioning, such as the shift in geographical location of the world's iron metal from mines of yesterday, much of which is now converted into world-around city buildings, railway tracks, and bridges, all of which latter are scrapped when the buildings or railways become obsolete. Yesterday's buildings and equipment have now become our "highest grade" iron mines. The data covering such epoch shifts may be comprehensively introduced into the computer's memory bank and acceleratingly displayed around the interior or exterior surface of the Geoscope "Earth," to be comprehended by any human of sound brain and mind.

The 200-foot Geoscope could present the cloud cover and weather history for all the known weather histories as recorded by ship captains around the world and in the recent century by world-around weather stations.

At Boulder, Colorado, the United States Meteorological Service has a large computer-equipped headquarters. They have two large world maps on the walls of the main lobby of their building; the first world map has displayed on it all the weather data just received seconds ago from stations all around the world. Throughout all the last thirty cold-warring years there has been no breakdown in the integrity of the hourly interweather reporting amongst all the nations around the Earth.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:35 am

PART 2 OF 2

On the other identically sized and colored world map is shown the predicted world weather map emanating from the huge computer into which has been fed all the known weather data from each of the world-around weather stations for each year and day of the year for all the known years of weather record-keeping. Out of that ever-increasing data the computers figure the most probable weather conditions for each locality for each minute of the day for each day of the year. The computer map is becoming ever more identical to the actual world weather map.

This meteorological headquarters of the U.S.A. at Boulder, Colorado, sits high on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, with Denver and the Great Plains stretched out far below. Walter Orr Roberts took moving picture footage of the vast area stretched out below Boulder. He had his moving picture camera take one picture per minute. There were all kinds of clouds in the sky down below Boulder. Much of the time you could see clearly between the clouds, at which time you could see the whole city of Denver with vast open land around it. He took such one-minute-apart pictures for many hours. He then projected the moving picture at the conventional twenty-four-frames-per-second rate and was astonished to see the cloud formation acting exactly like ocean waves rolling across the scene, with cresting-breaking waves having deep intervening troughs through which you could see the wave bottoms (on which Denver sat). It is very probable that the world history of weather for 200 years shown at high-speed acceleration on the Geoscope might display very great regularities of seasonal changing, with possible regularities of multiyear periods between dry and wet weather, etc.

The world history of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions could be shown on the 200-foot Geoscope and, if the world-around picturing is accelerated to contract time in important degree, it might readily disclose rhythms that would visually predict the corning quakes and eruptions.

Since the military intelligence of each of the world's military powers keeps careful track of their respective enemies' disposition of their armaments, troops, and navies, such strategic matters are not secret to the military of both sides and are only unknown to the world people. The 200-foot Geoscope installed outside the UN might display all that is known of those military dispositions around the Earth. All humanity would be able to see where all the world's submarines are located. This might greatly alter the dependency of people upon their political leaders and tend to induce an active democratic participation in world affairs. The UN delegates would obviously be greatly aided and stimulated by the 200-foot Geoscope disclosures to be viewed through all their east-facing windows.

Around-the-world evolutionary changes in transportation means, quantity, average miles per year, etc. -- the number of people engaged in world travel and their average distancing, their convergencies in cities and deployments to remote places -- would all be dramatically displayed on an accelerated rate of disclosure around the world. The present "real time" disposition of all aircraft operating around the world would be displayed, as well as their departure points and destinations. The accelerated pattern of world movement of population from farms and cities would be dramatic.

Juxtaposition and overlaying of seemingly unrelated information may produce unexpected and otherwise unimaginable pictures quickly and synergetically.

One of the most fantastic capabilities of the human brain is that of complex pattern recognition. If world-encompassing actions were accelerated, or a facsimile of the action presented within the velocity range of human comprehension, not only would the motion become clearly visible, but also some fundamental principles or heretofore unfamiliar forms of behavior probably would be exposed. The brain quickly correlates such new information with previously acquired data and insight gained from other experiences and adds understanding to the new phenomena being examined. Many of today's seemingly completely new and complex occurrences are in fact relatively simple and are clearly related to other phenomena with which we have learned to deal successfully.

With the Geoscope humanity would be able to recognize formerly invisible patterns and thereby to forecast and plan in vastly greater magnitude than heretofore.

The consequences of various world plans could be computed and projected, using the accumulated history-long inventory of economic, demographic, and sociologic data. All the world data would be dynamically viewable and picturable and relayable by radio to all the world, so that common consideration in a most educated manner of all world problems by all world people would become a practical everyday, -hour and-minute event.

From our usual local, only tangentially viewed, horizon-to-horizon observations -- within which we see such a small fraction of the Earth that it seems to be horizontal -- we conclude that in order to be a sphere, the Earth must indeed be very, very large. Other lands and other people seem very remote and strange. The interrelationship between their activities and ours is difficult to comprehend. When one realizes, on the other hand, that we all are in fact on the surface of a very tiny spherical spaceship on a long and seemingly inexplicably purposed journey, our proximity to each other becomes clear, and the absurdity of many of our conflicts becomes evident.

For the first time in all human history humanity's function as local Universe information-gatherer and local Universe problem-solver will be a practical reality, using the whole of Earth's comprehensive resources and data, and incisive, computer-augmented problem-solving capabilities with all humanity's spontaneous democratic participation, allowing humankind to use its intellect to the fullest in attempting to make our existence successful.

The proposed UN East River Blackwell's ledge installation of the 200- foot Geoscope was brought to the attention of U Thant when he was the Secretary General of the United Nations. It appealed to him so much that he gave a luncheon at New York City's Hotel Pierre for me and all the ambassadors to the UN from around the Earth. It was well attended, with more than half of the world's permanent ambassadors to the UN present. He had me give a thorough presentation speech describing the 200-footer. It met with great favor. Thereafter, on a number of prominent occasions, U Thant represented the concept. The estimated cost at that time was $10 million. Inflation would make it about $50 million today. There was no visible source of funding. The UN itself did not have any funds for such a purpose. The development of the popularity of World Game and the increasing need for the 200-foot Geoscope might suggest that its realization may not be far off.

The Geoscope will make possible communication of evolutionary phenomena not hitherto comprehendingly communicable via humans' conceptual faculties regarding their Spaceship Earth's orientation and course of travel amongst the other planets around the Sun, as well as of the comprehensive evolutionary developments occurring around the surface of our Spaceship Earth as already described. Many events about to take place will be dramatically evidenced, as will the avoidability of many events which, if unanticipated by humans, would tend to destroy us all -- and on the other hand, if reliably anticipated, will make possible safe and happy continuance.

* * *

It is logical to consider at this point the continuingly important part played by the historically significant, omni-world-around, electromagnetically triangulated, aerial-photo-mapped, latitude-longitude-coordinated, geographical data -- the triangular gridding of whose great sphere serves as the spherical scoreboard upon which to display the Geoscope's World Game "software."

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FIGURE 35. Spherical cubing

In 1900 -- three years before the airplane, nine years before the discovery of the North Pole, eleven years before the discovery of the South Pole, and thirty-five years before radar -- world-around geographical information had multiplied to such an extent that the major governments of the Earth agreed to have their geographers hold an omniworld meeting to adopt universal standards of cartography and geography. The world's cartographers agreed to adopt a one-million-to-one scale of producing their master world maps. At that same meeting of world geographers and cartographers it was noted by many of those professionals that the rectilinear, latitude-longitude, geographical coordinate system's angular-direction-and-linearly-measured-distances method of surveying of the world (at that time in universal use) had permitted much large-scale error to creep in. It was proving less and less satisfactory to go on trying to "square" the spherical surface of the Earth. Spherical trigonometry, for instance, showed that a spherical cubing of the Earth produced eight 120-degree comers of that cube, and not 90 degrees as it was popularly misconceived to be doing.

Most of the positioning of the geographical data had been done by explorers, often without the use of sextants and only from their estimates, as recorded in journals -- for instance, "leaving the confluence of rivers X and Y, I traveled northwest for eight hours when I came upon a lake about a mile long." The explorer then made a drawing of these relationships from his pocket compass observations, pocket watch, and observations from high points of the direction of other high points and viewable features.

As a consequence the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Hydrographic Survey, and the U.S Geological Survey services determined to inaugurate a triangular surveying of the Earth's surface, starting at a point in North America whose position was obtained and frequently reverified by celestial observation and spherical trigonometry.

At that time'the U.S. Navy had an astronomically fixed, triangularly surveyed and measured-off, meticulously buoy-marked, and multi-land-points-observed "official nautical mile," just eastward of Owl's Head lighthouse in the protected deep waters of Penobscot Bay in the state of Maine. Over this official mile all the ships built for the Navy had to be repeatedly run in reverse directions -- with and against the tide, with and against the wind, etc. -- to prove that they could maintain the top speed called for in their builders' contracts with the U.S. government. In that same Penobscot Bay there was one most conveniently sightable, uninhabited small island near the Navy's "measured mile." On this island -- named "Compass Island" -- the U.S.A. surveyors built a high wooden pyramid whose apex position they carefully calculated by many-times-repeated sextant observations of the Sun and major stars. Other wooden "monumented" geographical points on other islands in Penobscot Bay were sharply located by their intertriangular relationships with Compass Island. This complex of intertriangulated islands became the base grid from which the whole U.S. continental intertriangulation grew. By the time of World War II's commencement most of the United States latitude-longitude mapping had been triangularly corrected and its geographical features accurately repositioned on government maps.

Churchill's grand strategy of coping with the Nazi-Germans' and Italians' occupancy of all Europe except the British Isles was to open the, offensive against them from North Africa. This was called the "soft-underbelly" attack.

World War II introduced also the radio-triangulation control of bombing flights' navigational courses and bomb-drop points, which thus could be accomplished from above cloud cover. Such radio control was strictly dependent on whatever ground-mapping accuracy existed on the prior-to-radio-triangulated plotted maps.

Franklin Roosevelt's grand strategy agreement with Churchill called for the U.S.A.'s swift extension of its radio triangulation surveying from the already radio-triangulated U.S.A. southward into Mexico and thence through Central America into South America, thence from Brazil's easternmost capes to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, and by triangulation of the latter with South America's other Atlantic islands to North Africa, and thence to North African positions opposite Italy on the south shores of the Mediterranean.

From their scientifically "known" North African geographical points the first U.S.A. bombing flight was carried out on Sicily -- that flight's course being only "hopefully" coordinated with the first U.S.A. landing of its troops on Sicily. Because the geographical location of Sicily had never been radio-triangulated and coordinated with the latitude-longitude grid, the U.S.A. bombing had to rely on the non-triangulatedly-verified old latitude-longitude charts. The whereabouts of Sicily was so far off the triangularly radio-coordinated grid that the U.S. Air Force bombs let go above the clouds inadvertently landed in the midst of much of its own U.S.A. troops. With Sicily finally occupied, the world radio-triangulated grid was extended reliably all the way from the U.S.A. into successively radio-corrected mapping areas of Italy, as the U.S.A. forces worked slowly northward. Positioning errors in the old world mapping as great as fifteen or twenty miles were often discovered and corrected.

After the U.S.A.'s successful military penetration northward in Italy and the Normandy landing in France, the intercontinental radio triangulation became established all the way from the U.S.A. through Central America, South America, across the Atlantic into North Africa and thence into Italy -- and was extended throughout all France as the military penetration of the Allies prevailed. Finally the world triangulation entered Germany and came to Berlin. The U.S.A. reached Berlin after Russia had already taken the portion of Germany in which Berlin was located.

By agreement of their general staffs the Russians and U.S.A. allies entered Berlin almost simultaneously. The U.S.A intelligence operatives rushed to seize as much as possible of the Germans' aerial-photo-coordinated radio-triangulated flight maps over Russia, hoping that this triangulation might have been carried deeply into Russia by the Germans. Apparently the Germans had not carried their radio-triangulated, photo-positional corrections deeply into Russia, or the Russians had found and removed the data before the U.S.A. got there -- for none was found by the U.S.A. or its allies.

Though at the time the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. were ostensibly allied, their behind-the-scenes transnational socialist and transnational free-enterprising interests were powerfully at work -- each making one-sided, strategically anticipatory moves.

As a result of all the foregoing the Russians had all the long-ago-published, omnitriangularly corrected geographical data of America, while the U.S.A. had no such data of Russian geographical corrections -- which, with errors as great as twenty miles in the latitude-longitude positioning of Russia's cities and other strategic points, meant that with the post-World War II inception of intercontinental atomic bomb warfare the Russians knew and as yet know exactly where all the U.S.A. targets are, but the U.S.A. did not know where Russian targets were-not within any strategically effective limits. To confuse the U.S.A. even more the U.S.S.R. built mock towns and cities at the incorrectly mapped points and put radio broadcasting stations where their cities were supposed to be -- but weren't -- as mispublished only by the pretriangulated gridding of the U.S.S.R.

Since the communist and capitalist worlds were organizing themselves for Armageddon and were committed to intercontinental atomic bombing, the exact location of targets was of highest importance. What the world public did not know and what both the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. military leaders did know was that the U.S.A. had no radio-corrected triangulation map of the U.S.S.R. and that the U.S.S.R. did have radio-corrected triangulation maps of the U.S.A. and as well triangulation of all the U.S.A.'s allies-Russia knew exactly where the U.S.A. is, and the U.S.A. may not as yet know where much of the U.S.S.R. is.

It was this fact that caused the U.S.S.R. to resist any inspection-of-atomic-bomb-manufacturing agreements (or any other ground-level "inspection" by the U.S.A.) as regularly demanded by the U.S.A. and its allies whenever strategic inter-U.S.S.R.-and-U.S.A.-negotiated agreements were attempted. It probably was the U.S.A.-attempted cross-triangulation operation conducted from the Iran-Afghanistan border whose operation was curtailed with termination of Shahist Iran. It was the U.S.A.'s CIA's transfer of its electronic surveillance into other Afghanistan territory that gave the U.S.S.R. a valid cause for militarily entering Afghanistan, which the Russians have long wanted to do in order eventually to reach through to the Indian Ocean. Anticipating the ultimate development of a valid cause for moving into Afghanistan, the Russians had already made the Afghans "a present" of a modem high-tonnage-carrying highway system from Russia into Kabul.

The military policy of the U.S.A. deceiving its own public first became manifest during World War II, when the U.S.A. repeatedly denied in the press and radio that a U.S. Navy ship had been sunk by the enemy -- though it had been so proclaimed by the enemy's broadcasting. Long after the facts the U.S.A. would publish the losses in a low-key manner. The adoption of the policy of self-deception was never announced by the U.S.A., but it was assumed tacitly to have been instituted to bolster U.S.A. morale. That the U.S.A. fighting forces and their supporting public were assumed by the U.S.A. leaders to be so stupid as not to realize what was happening when time after time it was learned only days later that the ships were indeed sunk was the beginning of the end of U.S.A. populace credit for the operational integrity of its representative government.

* * *

For several years I was a member of the "Dartmouth Conference." This was an arrangement made by Norman Cousins and two other Americans with the Russian Academy of Sciences to produce teams of U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. leaders in various fields -- teams of approximately twenty-five on each side -- to meet in such years as seemed expedient, first in the U.S.A. at Dartmouth College and next at Moscow-and-Leningrad, next at the Westchester Country Club in New York, etc. I was a member of the Moscow- Leningrad and Westchester, New York, conferences.

The conferees discussed every known point of contention existing between the two countries. The U.S.A. team on which I served consisted of John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard economist; Paul Dudley White, Eisenhower's cardiologist; Norton Simon, financier; Leslie Patfrath, the director of the Johnson Foundation; two Harvard U.S.S.R.-specializing professors; a U.S. Navy admiral and a U.S. Army general. The latter four had been on many U.S.S.R./U.S.A. arms-problem negotiating teams. The balance of the U.S.A. team consisted of Norman Cousins (team leader); Dr. Franklin Murphy, the chancellor of UCLA, now chairman of the board of the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Corporation; David Rockefeller; and myself.

The Russian team included the president of their Academy of Sciences, their leading astronomer (who was in charge of their space-vehicle guidance), their leading climatologist, others of their leading scientists, their most eminent writers, philosophers, economists, an admiral, a general -- thirty in all. Present also were a dozen "simultaneous interpreters" loaned by the UN.

We all lived at the same hotel. The dining room had only four-place tables. As you entered, you chose quickly with which of the Russians you wished to sit. They were the first to reach the dining room. You tried to sit successively with each of the U.S.S.R. team members. The moment you sat down with a Russian, an interpreter moved in with you. To our U.S.A. surprise it turned out at the end of the conference that all the Russians could speak English, while amongst the U.S.A. representatives only the two Harvard professors could speak Russian.

Our meetings consisted of: (A) those lasting all day, every day, at which all the officially-to-be-considered points were discussed; and (B) the very small individual dining room and other casual meetings at dinner parties and receptions. At the latter it seemed as though all points of contention could be coped with in a manner satisfactory to both sides. At the formal all-day meetings, however, everyone seemed so intractable that nothing could be resolved.

For the last day of the first week-long conferences, some in Moscow, some in Leningrad, it was decided by the leaders of the two teams that instead of having summaries prepared of what had occurred, each side would select one of its members to give a speculative half-day-long prognostication regarding all prominent features of human life on planet Earth for the next half-century. Each prognosticator would have half a day in which to make his or her presentation. It was assumed that the prognosticators would indicate how much each side was accommodating the other side's conference issues. These presentations were expected to provide a clue as to what extent the respective sides would be yielding in the future to the opposing arguments presented during the previous formal sessions.

The Russians chose their leading meteorologist to give the U.S.S.R prognostication. He would have all of Saturday morning to present it.

I was chosen to present the U.S.A. prognostication. I had all Saturday afternoon to do so. In preparation I made a tensegrity sphere to demonstrate new human-use potentials of nature's fundamental structuring principles of discontinuous-compression-and-continuous-tension as employed in all geodesics and synergetics. I also calculated the weight of a great cathedral we passed each day on the walk to the grand palace in which we held our conferences. Employing tensegrity principles, I was able to show a 99- percent weight reduction for enclosing an equal amount of clear-span to that of the cathedral, including adequately engineered snow-loading, wind-loading, and earthquake-proofing.

I based my presentation on the twentieth century's unprecedented invisible revolution in chemistry, electronics, and metallurgy, by means of which we could now do so much more with so much less weight, volume, energy, and time per each accomplished function as to suggest that we humans would soon prove invalid Malthus's seemingly infallible scientific conclusion that economically on our planet Earth it had to be "only you or me -- not enough for both." I then outlined the changes in patterning of life on Earth if there were ample high standard of living, life support for all. My discourse, its predictions, and the raisons d'etres for those predictions were approximately the same as those of this book -- Critical Path.

What I said pleased both the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. delegates. On the walk home to our hotel each individual delegate from both sides hustled up beside me and told me how excitedly pleased he or she was over my statements. The Russians were unanimously enthusiastic about what I said. Fortunately, all the U.S.A. delegates seemed equally pleased. At the farewell banquet that night the president of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences said in his closing speech, "From now on Buckminster Fuller will be ranked in the U.S.S.R. side-by-side with Franklin and Edison." I assumed that the Russians had so classified me because I was not only an inventor but dwelt in the lands of capitalism -- despite the fact that I am apolitical and an ardent advocate of an omnihumanity-advantaging freedom of individual initiative, and not of private enterprise's only selfishly benefited freedoms.

In our second meeting, two years later at the Westchester Country Club, many of the American participants lived nearby and so went home each night. Together with the Johnson Foundation director I lived at the club with the Russians. I found that the young editor of Pravda was the only Russian amongst them who seemed free to explore and discuss spontaneously the world's future prospects. Though obviously a faithful communist, his speculative thoughts seemed not to be bound within popularly established party-line dogma.

What I learned from the Russians -- regarding which I am certain they were seriously convinced -- was that "the U.S.S.R. would never be willing to negotiate with the U.S.A. regarding any world-around, supreme-power matters when the U.S.S.R. was in a weaker military position than the U.S.A."

They said to me, "Every time we struggle to attain parity with the U.S.A. so that we can negotiate, the U.S.A. institutes an arms advancement before the meeting, wherefore we are deprived of tolerable negotiating conditions.

"Worse than that," they said, "this continually defeats turning our massive high-technology productivity toward realizing a life-style for our socialist economy equal to or better than that already enjoyed by capitalism -- whose world-publicized high standard of living is a thorn in our side as we remain unable to do so -- not because of technical or social inability but because of the preoccupation of technological resources with the cold warring."

Assuming that an atomic war would mean that both sides would lose [i] -- ergo, it would not occur -- the U.S.S.R. determined to outnumber and thus overpower the U.S.A. in the design and the production of conventional air and sea armaments and in the training and maintenance of a vastly greater standing army, whereafter they felt they could negotiate constructively for the establishment and maintenance of peaceful world-around conditions.

It must be remembered that, in their 1920s-formulated, successive-multistaged five-year industrial planning, the Russians had assumed a World War II to occur in the early 194Os, at which time it would be evident to the private-enterprise world that socialism could be successful -- which private enterprise had always said would be impossible -- ergo, the private-enterprise- dominated countries would start a war to destroy socialism but would do it in a highly deceptive manner by having a Nazi propaganda offensive launched against the German industrial cartels, which would suddenly be turned against the U.S.S.R. This is exactly what happened. The Germans first made the U.S.S.R. their ally. When well into Poland and at the Russian border, the Nazis turned treacherously against the U.S.S.R. The anti-U.S.S.R. strategy of the "Cliveden set" miscarried when, soon thereafter, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. became allies.

No one in the U.S.A. can understand the bitterness as yet existent in the U.S.S.R; over the millions of U.S.S.R. troops and civilians killed by the Nazis. The U.S.S.R. could not understand the U.S.A. rearming of the Germans, with whom the U.S.S.R. was much more concerned as a World War IV enemy than with the U.S.A. as such an enemy.

The Russians had assumed in their five-year planning that when World War II terminated, they would be able to divert all their high industrial productivity toward advantaging all their people to prove that socialism could produce an economically desirable life-style equal to or better than that provided by capitalism. Again the Russian planning became thwarted when Western capitalism, which had been socialized by FDR's New Deal, realized at the cessation of World War II that it could not carry on without the vast government procurement program which is occasioned only by war. To cope with this situation the capitalists invented World War III (which they called the cold war).

The Russians queried of the U.S., their supposed ally, "Who are you going to fight?" and the U.S.A. answered, "You."

This meant that the U.S.S.R. would have to focus all its high-science-and-technology productivity on producing armaments for decades of around-the- world cold warring, in the conduct of which both the Russians and the U.S.A. would have to avoid direct, all-out interconfrontation. With the joining of supreme-powers war by direct military confrontation, neither side could withdraw without all-out surrender. However, all-out intercontinental atomic war would mean the end of human life on Earth. Therefore, the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., in testing their respective strengths, would have to operate indirectly against one another through their respective puppet nations, hopefully intent on drawing forth the "secret weapons" in the other's arsenals. Thus we have the North versus the South Koreans, the "Vietnamese" versus the Vietcong, the Israelis versus the Arabs, etc.

The Russians decided early on that atomic warheads would not be used because the rocket delivery times traveling at 14,000 miles per hour were such that with radar traveling at 700,000,000 miles per hour, both sides would know ten minutes before being struck that the enemy had fired their atomic warheads -- ergo, both sides would have plenty of time to send off all their atomic warheads, and both sides would lose. So while deceptively continuing the atomic-warhead race with the U.S.A., the U.S.S.R. committed itself realistically to producing the strongest navy in history.

The U.S.A. politicians kept the U.S.A. populace feeling militarily secure because they could point out that the U.S.A. was developing far more atomic warheads than was the U.S.S.R. The U.S.A. was doing so because big oil money, which successfully lobbied Washington's Capitol Hill energy policies -- knowing that petroleum would ultimately be exhausted -- fostered atomic-warhead production in order to build up the atomic technology industry (in the development of which the U.S. people's government had spent over $200 billion) and its nuclear scientist personnel whom they, the worldpower- structure organizations, would need to employ in operating the atomic- energy plants and the electrical-distribution network as world petroleum supplies dwindled; They would need the energy meters in order to continue exploiting the capitalist world's energy needs.

When Jane's Annual World Inventory of Ships showed that the U.S.S.R. Navy had reached parity with the U.S.A., the U.S. politicians laughed it off by saying the Russians did not even have aircraft carriers. This was true because the U.S.S.R. had seen that aircraft carriers are "highly vulnerable," so they built huge airplane-carrying submarines from which a plane would take off by "Vertol" -- vertical flight to height, followed by horizontal flight -- ergo, needing no runways. This Vertol-from-submarine launching was strongly advocated by some of the U.S. Navy's most astute officers, whose word was not heeded because the aircraft carriers were much more profitable business for private enterprise. The weapons industry's Washington lobbyists were more persuasive than the U.S. Navy's experts.

With its naval fleet supremacy established but lacking en route support bases, the U.S.S.R. then set about to develop disarmament talks with the U.S.A. from a superior conventional-warpower position -- that of controlling the high-seas lines of supply.

Realizing that the U.S.A. senators had jurisdiction over all peace negotiating and that the U.S.A. Senate's Republican membership was intent to deprive the Democratic President of peace-making success, and that apparently the U.S.A. was not going to go along with ratification of the SALT treaty, the Russians decided to put the heat on the U.S.A. so that a global naval-line-of-supply confrontation incident such as the occupation of Afghanistan would demonstrate -- as it has in Iran -- that the U.S.A. can no longer control the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea and therefore cannot take yesteryears' sure-to-win military steps against Iran.

The U.S.A.'s half-century dominance of world affairs is now terminating, just as did Great Britain's century and a third of dominance come to an end with the 1929 economic crash.

* * *

Sir Halford Mackinder was Britain's chief geographical advisor from the latter Victorian period to 1930. Mackinder pointed out that the British Empire was built on its mastery of the world's sea routes from the Orient to Europe. He also pointed out to the British, circa 1900, that what the world's seacoasts might really be was not what one saw when looking at the world maps. He showed the British that the railways were the large-tonnage-capacity, previously seagoing, cargo carriers going up onto the land. He further showed them that the Trans-Siberian Railway was being built by the Russians to short-circuit the Orient-to-Europe high-tonnage cargo routes. Mackinder pointed out that the Trans-Siberian Railway was strategically too far to the north. Its snow impediment was too great to be economical. The British kept the Russians bottled up by refusing them an Atlantic port -- Russia had to go to Archangel in the Arctic Sea and, on the Pacific coast, to Vladivostok.

The Orient Express ran only from Paris to Constantinople in Asia Minor. The czar-backing Russian-power-structure interests, hoping to compete with the British, represented the inheritors of the before-the-water-route, overland-caravaning powers of the Old World. Mackinder showed the British that the only economically successful trans-Europe and Asia railroad route would have to be from France to Constantinople and thence via Turkey and Iran to Kabul, Afghanistan, and thence through the Khyber Pass, through Sinkiang and Inner Mongolia to Shanghai, China, cutting shipping times down very much as compared with the sea routes around Africa to the Orient. Mackinder's counsel was heeded by the British.

Mackinder showed the British that Russia could, by taking Afghanistan and Pakistan, reach the Persian Gulf and then come through the Indian Ocean to intercept British cargo ships en route to the Orient. Mackinder identified on the map what he called "the Heartland." The heart of Mackinder's Heartland was Afghanistan, with its Khyber Pass leading to the east and its ability to break through to the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. Mackinder said, "Whoever controls the Heartland, rules the world." Afghanistan was (and as yet is) the heart of the world's heartland.

After World War I the British were so "tired" that they did not listen to Mackinder as they had before. In the 1920s he tried to make the British realize that the airplane altogether eliminated the world's shorelines as the limit of travel. The British did not see the airplane as a cargo carrier and believed that their world trading exclusively by ships of the sea would not be threatened by air traffic. No one had ever flown across an ocean, let alone set up air-cargo fleets capable of competing with their seagoing fleets. One of the factors that they failed to envision was that of the technology becoming ever lighter per unit of functional performance until it became feasibly and economically air-deliverable.

Mackinder developed a doctorate-level school in London in the 1920s. One of his students was a talented German named Haushofer, who listened to Mackinder pointing out that the armored tanks were, in effect, the navy destroyers coming out of the sea and running up on the land. Mackinder said to his students, "The French Maginot Line and all great fortresses around the world are obsolete." He continued, "The airplane raiders above and the armored tanks on the land could circumvent, overrun, and overtly the fortresses and overwhelm any troops or other defense." Haushofer graduated from Mackinder's school, returned to Germany, and went to work for Goering, Hitler's air minister. Haushofer described Mackinder's science in German as Geopolitik From his description of Mackinder's concept, which the British were not heeding, Goering developed his blitzkrieg -- lightning war -- with the Luftwaffe commanding the sky and tasks and other armored vehicles commanding the land. Goering flew over and rolled over the Maginot Line and took all Europe.

Until the end of World War II the British had kept the Afghanistan heartland well under control. Then, after World War II, they let its militarily guaranteed isolation greatly deteriorate. Meanwhile the Russians were busy giving Afghanistan such "presents" as a first-class highway from Russia to Kabul. The U.S.A. gave them naught.

In 1954 the British Foreign Office advised the U.S. State Department that they had just learned from their ambassador in Kabul, Afghanistan, that Russia, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and China had all installed impressive exhibition buildings in Kabul to take part in Afghanistan's most sacredly important holiday -- the Geshin Fair. Neither the United Kingdom nor the U.S.A. nor any of their allies had an exhibit in Kabul.

I received an emergency call from Jack Masey of the U.S. State Department's U.S. information Agency. He asked me how long it would take me to produce a 10,000-square-foot-floor-area geodesic dome so light and compactly shippable that it could be sent by one DC-4 airplane to Kabul. My Raleigh, North Carolina, shop had it produced in twenty-five days, complete with a high-tension, all-weather skin outwardly tensed to its geodesic, tubular aluminum frame. All the struts and hubs of the dome were color-coded. The 114-feet-in-diameter dome was test-assembled at the Raleigh airport and accepted by the U.S.A.

It was flown to Kabul with my one engineering representative to supervise its erection by the Afghans. It was assembled in one day just in time for the Geshin Fair opening. The U.S.A. show inside consisted of the Borden's "laughing cow," bouncing ball bearings, and Lionel trains. No one showed interest in the show inside, but all the Afghans, the Russians and East Germans, the Chinese and Czechs, were fascinated with the geodesic dome itself. The Russians asked permission to bring in their moving picture equipment to make a documentary of the dome construction. The then king of Afghanistan fell in love with the dome -- it was a great modern-materials Afghan yurt -- the Afghans' own architecture. The king asked the U.S.A. to give him the dome, but the U.S.A. refused and sent the dome off as an around-the-world traveling show.

The Russians, finding the Afghans making themselves working automobiles out of the most battered second-hand cars shipped into Kabul and then driving them around on very rough dirt roads, made the Afghans a present of macadam-surfaced, first-class roads, which delighted the Afghans because they provided some real distance driving -- the Russians extended the highways all the way into the U.S.S.R. These roads recently (1979) provided the means for the U.S.S.R. to roll their armed forces into Afghanistan.

Having been a long-time student of Sir Halford Mackinder's work, I was fascinated through my dome experience to discover that the U.S. diplomacy apparently knew nothing of Mackinder's "Heartland" concept -- or considered it to be no longer relevant.

When early in 1979 the U.S.S.R. took over Kabul, Afghanistan, it was because the balance of world power had shifted from U.S.A. to U.S.S.R. mastery.

As we have related, Mackinder had identified "The Heartland" on the maps. The heart of his Heartland was Kabul, Afghanistan. Also, the Russians with their now-great navy had access to the Atlantic Ocean only at Archangel and the Baltic ports and Vladivostok in the North Pacific. With Afghanistan under their control the Russians were able to control all the northern and eastern borders of Iran and the western borders of Pakistan.

Russia always uses the power structure's number-one strategy -- "divide to conquer!" -- and does so with psychological expertise. She often finds religious divisibility the most propitious. It was feasible in Iran, which could be divided religiously against the incumbent political power -- ergo, the Muslims versus the Shahdom of Iran -- with knowledge that after driving out the U.S.A.-supported Shahdom, it (the U.S.S.R.) could divide the Muslims into their subsects and militarily overwhelm Iran. The U.S.A.'s secretly supported Kurdish opposition to Russia in Afghanistan and to the Muslims in Iran would become the final obstacles to the Russians' century-held objective of gaining direct access to the Indian Ocean and therewith complete control of U.S.A. access to Arabian oil. The Russians' move into Afghanistan was not just a power-structure play. They were exercising their evolutionary ascendancy into the world's top power position. The Heartland -- Afghanistan and its ultimate access to the Indian Ocean -- is the historic prizes of the world's top power position.

Fortunately for the cross-breeding world citizens of North America and for the rest of the world, the U.S.S.R. is most probably intent on getting the world power structure under irreversible control as quickly as possible so that it can institute controlled demilitarization and thereby turn its immense productivity toward improving the standard of living for the socialist world and thus prove socialism's life-style to be equal to or better than the best of the life-styles produced by capitalism. I am confident that Russia does truly intend world disarmament. She will keep a powerful upper hand at each stage of disarmament but will seek to have the world's militarily scrapped metals reinvested in peacefully productive livingry advantage for all the world's peoples.

I have only one objection to the concept of comprehensive socialism: So far it has made no provision for effective development of the individual initiative of humans. Too long has such freedom of initiative been usurped either by the Communist party, representing only 1 percent of the U.S.S.R. population, or by the Western world's private enterprise's utterly selfish exploitation for money-making rather than for common sense-making. I have discussed this point with the Russians. They admit that a party dictatorship is not "democracy" and, at the same time, also admit that it is for true democracy to which the Russians, the Chinese, and most people of the world aspire. Possibly the electronically operative democracy and its ability to cope with complex problem-solving will also make safe the realization of individual initiative to be exercised on behalf of all humanity by any humans anywhere.

_______________

Notes:

i. See p. 117, "Legally Piggily" chapter, and page 192 of this chapter.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

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PART 1 OF 2

CHAPTER 6: World Game

I THINK YOU MAY FIND the physical design science revolution and its "software" outlined in my World Game thesis to be the most thorough, effective, and realistically feasible strategy for accomplishing sustainable physical and metaphysical success for all humanity, all to be realized within the shortest possible time.

In my book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (E. P. Dutton, 1963) you will find my identification of the phenomenon wealth. Wealth consists of physical energy (as matter or radiation) combined with metaphysical know-what and know-how. The scientists make it clear that no physical energy of Universe gets lost -- ergo, the physical constituent of wealth is cosmically irreducible. Experience teaches us that every time we employ our metaphysical know-what and know-how wealth, we always learn more. Experience can only increase -- ergo, the metaphysical component of wealth can only increase, and totally integrated wealth itself can only increase.

From the comprehensively informed World Game viewpoint, those who have learned how to make money with money -- which money can never be anything but a medium of wealth exchanging -- have now completely severed money from its constant functional identity with real wealth. With their game of making money with money the money-makers and their economists continue to exploit the general political and religious world's assumptions that a fundamental inadequacy of human life support exists around our planet.

These money interests are wrong. Because of (A) the constant increase in strength per pound of new metallic alloys, (B) the constant increase in horsepower per each pound and cubic inch of aircraft engines, and (C) the ever-increasing performance per pounds and cubic inches of new chemistries and electronics, in general we have the capability, which can be fully realized within ten years, of producing and sustaining a higher standard of living for all humanity than that ever heretofore experienced or dreamt of by any.

This is not an opinion or a hope -- it is an engineeringly demonstrable fact. This can be done using only the already proven technology and with the already mined, refined, and in-recirculating physical resources.

This will be an inherently sustainable physical success for all humanity and all its generations to come. It can be accomplished not only within ten years but with the phasing out forever of all use of fossil fuels and atomic energy. Our technological strategy makes it incontrovertible that we can live luxuriously entirely on our daily Sun-radiation-and-gravity-produced income energy. The quantity of physical, cosmic energy wealth as radiation arriving aboard planet Earth each minute is greater than all the energy used annually by all humanity. World Game makes it eminently clear that we have four billion billionaires aboard our planet, as accounted by real wealth, which fact is obscured from public knowledge by the exclusively conceived and operated money game and its monopolized credit system accounting.

Wealth is, then, the already organized human capability and know-how to employ the fixed, inanimate, planetary assets and omnicosmically operative and only celestially emanating natural energy income in such a manner as to predictably cope with so many forward days of so many human lives by providing for their (1) protection, (2) comfort, and (3) nurturing, and for (4) the accommodation of the ongoing development by humans of their as-yet-untapped store of intellectual and aesthetic faculties, while (5) continually eliminating restraints and (6) increasing the range and depth of their information-accumulating experience.

The success of all humanity can be accomplished only by a terrestrially comprehensive, technologically competent, design revolution. This revolution must develop artifacts whose energy-use efficiency not only occasions the artifacts' spontaneous adoption by humanity, but therewith also occasions the inadvertent, unregretted abandonment and permanent obsolescence of socially and economically undesirable viewpoints, customs, and practices.

This design revolution must employ world-around, satellite-interlinked, data-banks-and-computer-accomplished conversion of present-day, exclusively geocentric, Spaceship Earth wealth accounting by synchronizing our planetary economic affairs with the cosmic, interstellar, intergalactic, complex family of physical, time-energy behavior laws, demonstrated by astrophysics to be synergetically in economic governance not only throughout our Milky Way's 100 billion stars, but also throughout the two billion additional such galaxies now discovered and observed by astrophysics within our phototelescopic range. Little planet Earth of our small star the Sun is not exempt from the inexorable, synergetic integration of the complex of time-energy, electromagnetic, chemical structuring and destructuring's inventory of the intertransformative laws that govern the generalized, regenerative economic-investment system of the physical and metaphysical assets of what physics now finds to be an eternally regenerative, 100-percent-efficient scenario Universe.

Simultaneous "shooting the works" of the biggest atomic explosions mutually deliverable by the most powerful long-range weapons systems of the most powerful political systems on planet Earth -- designed to reinforce their exclusively politico-economic accounting concepts- -- an produce less than a visible twinkle in the galactic theater. Obviously Universe is not saying, "We cannot afford another galaxy -- let alone another star -- let alone another terrestrial crew of cosmically invisible human information-harvesting and -processing functionaries, whose problem-solving capabilities are being strangled by ignorant fears and selfishness aboard tiny planet Earth."

Scientifically faithful, synergetically integrated, time-energy, electrochemical process accounting shows that it costs energetic Universe more than a million dollars to produce each gallon of petroleum when the amount of energy as heat and pressure used for the length of time necessary to produce that gallon of petroleum is charged for at the New York Con Edison Company's retail kilowatt-hour rates for that much electricity.

About 90 percent of all U.S.A. employment is engaged in tasks producing no life-support wealth. These non-life-support-producing employees are spending three, four, and more gallons of gasoline daily to go to their non-wealth- producing jobs -- ergo, we are completely wasting $3 trillion of cosmic wealth per day in the U.S.A.

In real, energy-time. know-how accounting of wealth the planet Earth's four billion billionaires have not yet been notified of their good fortune. Their heritage probating is being postponed by the lawyers for the now inherently obsolete power structures of all kinds -- religious, political, financial, professional, and academic -- all of which exploitative systems are organized only to take biased advantage of all scarcities, physical and metaphysical.

Evolution has now accelerated into revolution, which, if it goes bloody, will render all humanity extinct, but if it goes via the design revolution, all humanity will win. This is a new kind of revolution; it is one that, instead of revengefully pulling down the top fortunate few, will elevate all the heretofore unfortunates and the fortunates alike to new and sustainable heights of realized life far superior to those previously tenuously attained by the most privileged few.

World Game comprehensively details that which individual humans must do to realize total success for all and do so within the critical time limit, before humanity passes the point of no return en route to self-extinction.

• • •

Quickly reviewing the earliest large-scale wealth trading by humans, payments were made in "kind" -- that is, with livestock that could be driven from here to there. Most valuable were cattle. When "money," or heads of cattle (known as capital, capita meaning "head" in Latin), was loaned to enterprisers, the latter's cattle were held by the lender as collateral until the enterprise venture was completed. The interim birth and growth of calves into cattle became the "interest" on the loan to be paid by the borrower to the lender of the venture's working capital. Much later, metal money replaced the cattle. The concept of interest due to the loaner persisted, but since metal does not breed more metal, the interest paid reduces the real-wealth value of the collateral when returned to the borrower.

As the scale of long-distance trading exceeded the distances to which the cattle could be driven, the trading shifted primarily into water-borne ships. Ships carry far greater loads than can humans or beasts of burden. In the earliest days of international trading by ships cattle were used as "money." This became increasingly impractical, and the Phoenicians invented iron money in the form of miniature bull horns. With metal as money there swiftly developed a world-around preference for gold, due to its scarcity and easily recognized weight per volume as well as its nontarnishability. World-trading ships carrying gold soon became prey to hijacking pirates. As mentioned in our "Legally Piggily" chapter, when the British Empire came into world-around and century-enduring supremacy in 1805, its administrators made trade treaties with countries from every region of the world. Thereafter both sides kept their trading on books of import-export accounts that were balanced annually, and the debtor nation paid the other by shifting their gold deposited in a London bank to the other's London bank, thus keeping the gold off the ships -- ergo, out of reach of small-time pirates.

This is how what is known as the international "balance of trade" originated with the powerful industrializing countries of Europe; although rich in technical experience and inventive "know-how," they lacked an adequate supply of fundamental metallic and other resources with which to realize the industrial potentials for their inventions. They were motivated to establish military supremacy over nonindustrialized countries in Africa, South America, and the Far East, within which countries the European scientists found the metal ores essential to their industries.

Present-day Ghana provides a good example of the foregoing. Ghana is rich in bauxite-the ore from which aluminum is extracted by electrolytic refinement. Ghana also has the Volta River and its basin. The Ghanaians, however, did not know of the convertibility of bauxite into aluminum. Americans with vast capital came into Ghana, arranged to have all the inhabitants of the Volta River basin banished from that basin, then built one of the world's largest hydroelectric dams there. They used the electricity thus generated to convert the Ghanaian bauxite (which was just so much dirt to the Ghanaians) into aluminum ingots. These ingots were, and as yet are, shipped to America and Europe, where the aluminum is transformed into airplanes, cooking utensils, etc., and sold back to the Ghanaians and others around the world at such a markup in price that the Ghanaians' balance of import-export trading finds them ever deeper in debt to those countries that "developed" their natural resources. The societies in the manipulating countries call these source people "the underdeveloped countries" or "the Third World."

There can be no planetary equity until all the sovereign nations are abolished and we have but one accounting system -- that of the one family of humans aboard Spaceship Earth.

Ample food and growing capacity exist on our planet to feed well every world human. But the sovereign nations and their international-trade-balancing system, and the individual hoarders of foods and other goods within the separate nations, prevent the distribution of the foods.

World Gaming discloses that humanity will perish on this planet if the sovereignty of nations is not abandoned and if the World Game's world-around computerized time-energy accounting is not forthwith inaugurated. The first step in bringing about the desovereignization will be the closing of the gaps in the world electric power grid. The world-unifying electric power accounting will be the beginning of the omnienergy accounting for world economic management.

World Game is a continuing scientific research and physical-prototyping development. It is devoted to progressive discovery of how most efficiently and expeditiously to employ (1) the total world-around resources, (2) total accumulated knowledge, and (3) the total already-produced technological tooling of Spaceship Earth, all three to the ever-advancing equal advantage of all its present and future passengers.

World Game is the antithesis of World War Gaming as played by the joint chiefs of staff of the world's most powerful sovereign nations' respective military, air, and naval establishments. Predicated upon the British Empire's post-Magellan, historically first, spherical, world-around empire and its first "inventory of vital statistics of the world," as assembled in 1805 by the East India Company College's professor of political economics, Thomas Malthus, and his findings therefrom which we have already described.

World War Gaming, in contradistinction to World Gaming, assumes Thomas Malthus's theory that there exists a lethal inadequacy of life support on our planet. World War Gaming also assumes Darwin's "survival only of the fittest" to be ruling evolution. As already mentioned in Chapter 3, this is why the United States and the U.S.S.R. have jointly spent over $200 billion annually for the last thirty years ($6 trillion total) to buy science's most effective means of destroying their respective "enemies." World War Gaming is the consequence. World War Gaming employs the ever-evolutingly- advancing, most comprehensive and incisive, scientifically and technologically feasible capabilities to develop and mass-produce weaponry systems that will ever more swiftly devastate all enemy life-support artifacts and kill ever more enemy people at ever greater ranges in ever shorter periods of time.

In contradistinction to the inherently vast wastage of World War Gaming's objectives, World Gaming takes advantage of ephemeralization -- technology's ever-higher-strength-per-weight metallic alloys and chemistries and ever-more-comprehensively-incisive-and-inclusive electronic circuitry performances per volumes and weights of apparatus used -- and employs ever-progressively- less weight and volume of materials, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per each technical function accomplished and employs those ever improving functions to produce ever more advanced livingry artifacts instead of the killingry weapons of World War gaming.

World Game assumes evolutionary stages of advancement of its successive systems of production, distribution, maintenance, design improvement, world-around integrating, precision tool-automating, and mass-producing of its ever-advancing livingry service. All these successive prototype stages of development are based on my fifty-two-year-maintained omnihistory inventory of world resources (both physical and metaphysical) and my inventory of technical trendings and progressively evoluting human needs -- both group and individual.

World Game's now clearly demonstrated capability to produce the higher- than-ever-before-experienced living standard means an ever-healthier, ever-less-environmentally-restrained, ever-better-informed and -comprehensively- educated, ever-more-thoughtfully, -spontaneously, and -cooperatively- productive total humanity operating as an ever-more-mutually-intertrusting and -interconsiderate world family, living in an ever-more-generous and less wasteful way, at an ever-more-foresighted and -comprehensively-anticipatory level; engaged in ever-more-constructive initiative-taking and cooperative intersupport of one another's initiatives and explorations; an ever-more-truly omniloving, classless, raceless, human family of Earth's planetarians -- all engaged competently in local Universe information-harvesting and in local Universe problem-solving, in successful support of the 100-percent integrity of eternally regenerative Universe, that being the function in Universe that World Game assumes occasioned the inclusion of humans and their generalized-principles-discovering-minds in the design of Universe.

Technical artifacts, invented and produced by humans, employing generalized scientific principles of Universe -- such as the principles of leverage, optics, magnetics, mass attraction, etc.-to cope successfully with life challenges varying among lethal, difficult, tolerable, or benign environmental conditions, constitute any and all differences existing between the life activities of originally naked humans in a few mid-ocean tropical "Gardens of Eden" on planet Earth three million years ago and the life-styles of humans today in skyscraper cities or in space suits exiting from their Moon-landed, space-rocketed capsule to bring back to Earth sample rocks from the Moon environment, all the while being intimately satellite-relay-televised in color to one billion people on a planet 320,000 miles away from the Moon-landed astronauts, the one billion viewers being situated in their environment-control homes around planet Earth, as those viewing Earthian billions and the Moon-landing astronauts alike are being vitally sustained by foods grown elsewhere than where they live, which foods are preserved and shipped in environment-controlling cans and packages or in artifact-produced frozen or dehydrated conditions.

World Game's design science employs all the known generalized principles and technical inventions and invents others where artifacts adequate for solving the newly emerging and foreseeably arising problems do not as yet exist. World Gaming, incorporating ever-more performance per function and higher energy efficiencies with ever-less pounds and volumes of resources, continually redesigns the artifacts and technical systems employing those ever-improving materials.

World Gaming recognizes that there are no unnatural materials. If nature permits their chemical-element associabilities, the materials and their functionings are natural. If nature does not permit or bring about their associability, they cannot exist. The substances permitted by nature may be unfamiliar to humans, but they are never unnatural -- i.e., "synthetic." World Gaming notes that humans' fear of the unfamiliar often prevents realization of humanity's imminent acquisition of improved living conditions for everyone.

World Gaming takes advantage of the ever-changing world-resource patterns, such as that of steel and other metals scrapped from obsolete buildings and machinery as the latter's designs are made obsolete by the latest military-and-naval-produced hardware. Scrap of the discontinued hardware constitutes new high-grade ore mines existing entirely above ground. As an example: there are no tin mines in the United States. All tin came originally either from England, Malaysia, Bolivia, or Tanganyika. Tin was first used for making bronze, then pewter utensils, then for tinning bathtubs and cans, next for babbitting of machinery bearings, soldering. Outperformed by newer, more effective technologies all of these early tin uses became obsolete, and that tin was recovered. Since 1940 U.S. aeronautical production tooling has involved so much tin in its soft tooling phases that the inventory of ever-remelted tin of the U.S. aircraft industry and its swift-design-change-accommodating "soft-kirksite" toolings is now (1980) greater than that remaining in the world mines -- ergo, the U.S. requires no further purchases of foreign tin. Having originally no tin mines, the U.S. has an aboveground source of tin that is now the world's largest tin "mine." World resource maps showing only the tin-in-the-ground mines are completely misinforming. World war gaming and those economic advisors of leading governments use only the in-the-ground-mine data.

As noted earlier, there are 100 dots on the Dymaxion Sky-Ocean Map, which is always used as the "playing field" in playing World Game. Each dot represents forty-four million people, that being 1 percent of the 4.4 billion humans now (1980) aboard Spaceship Earth.

Each dot is located at the geometrical center for the forty-four million people it represents. As the dots show, approximately 90 percent of humanity live north of the equator. The 10 percent who live south of the Equator live very close to it. Humanity is a "northern hemisphere" creature and is now about to integrate over the North Pole into a one-town world. We have entered a north-south, air-and-space-vehicle, world traffic pattern and are swiftly abandoning yesterday's east-west ship and railway pattern. As the doing-more-work-with-less-pounds-of-material invisible revolution keeps advancing, we have ever-more-powerful and greater-weight-and-capacity air vehicles to carry the ever-more-efficient and -lighter machinery and structures, which classes of goods were once so heavy as formerly to be shippable only by sea or rail.

As mentioned earlier, all the great rivers of the Earth are clearly shown on the world map. The source of these rivers' water supply to 54 percent of humanity comes from a vast frozen reservoir atop the Himalayas -- only a small fraction of this potential waterpower has as yet been dammed for hydroelectric generation and irrigation system development. With such hydro development the 54 percent of humanity in China, Southeast Asia, and India will all become physically prosperous in high degree. Likewise, the great, as-yet-undeveloped hydroelectric and irrigation systems of the other continents are clearly demonstrable as holding high standards of living to be realized for all humanity.

It is engineeringly demonstrable that there is no known way to deliver energy safely from one part of the world to another in larger quantities and in swifter manner than by high-voltage-conducted "electricity." For the first half of the twentieth century the limit-distance of technically practical deliverability of electricity was 350 miles. As a consequence of the post-World War "II space program's employment and advancement of the invisible metallurgical, chemical, and electronics more-with-lessing technology, twenty-five years ago it became technically feasible and expedient to employ ultra': high-voltage and superconductivity, which can deliver electrical ener-within a radial range of 1500 miles from the system's dynamo generators.

To the World Game seminar of 1969 I presented my integrated, world-around, high-voltage electrical energy network concept. Employing the new 1500-mile transmission reach, this network made it technically feasible to span the Bering Straits to integrate the Alaskan U.S.A. and Canadian networks with Russia's grid, which had recently been extended eastward into northern Siberia and Kamchatka to harness with hydroelectric dams the several powerful northwardly flowing rivers of northeasternmost U.S.S.R. This proposed network would interlink the daylight half of the world with the nighttime half.

Electrical-energy integration of the night and day regions of the Earth will bring all the capacity into use at all times, thus overnight doubling the generating capacity of humanity because it will integrate all the most extreme night and day peaks and valleys. From the Bering Straits, Europe and Africa will be integrated westwardly through the U.S.S.R., and China, Southeast Asia; India will become network-integrated southwardly through the U.S.S.R. Central and South America will be integrated southwardly through Canada, the U.S.A., and Mexico.

Graphs of each of the world's 150 nations showing their twentieth-century histories of inanimate energy production per capita of their respective populations together with graphs of those countries' birthrates show without exception that the birthrates decrease at exactly the same rate that the per capita consumption of inanimate electrical energy increases. The world's population will stop increasing when and if the integrated world electrical energy grid is realized. This grid is the World Game's highest priority objective. (See Fig. 36.)

Image

[i]FIGURE 36. Birthrate and Energy Production


There is no single power source around Earth so great as that of the wind. But winds do not blow in synchronization with the time patterning of human needs. Generating electricity when the wind blows and feeding it into batteries and withdrawing the charge when needed involves a 75-percent in-and- out loss of the electrical energy. Since 1975, when it was an efficient but new practice, all fifty U.S.A. states have been required by federal regulation to allow individual windmill owners to feed their windpower-generated electric current directly into the local utility power lines. The individuals get credited for their input on their monthly electricity bills. This practice was developed by Wind works of Wisconsin, which in turn was founded by a mid-1960s World Game prototyping operation. It has been found that within a 100-mile radius a wind is always blowing. Windmills installed around the world converting their direct current into alternating current and feeding the electric energy into the world network can harvest the planet Earth's prime daily energy income source -- the wind -- and adequately supply all the world's energy needs.

With the world's prime resources and its people and its potential integratabilities evidenced by World Game's world map, obvious design science inventions are called for, such as a "backbone" irrigation canal from the Himalayas leading south along the central highlands of the Indian continent, wherewith all the frequently devastating droughts would be eliminated for India's one-eighth of all humanity.

With such comprehensive viewability as is provided by World Game and its Sky-Ocean World Map, it is quickly realized that (with a few rare exceptions) humanity need do very little further mining. The metals already scrapped from obsolete machinery and structures, which recirculate on a sum-total-of-all-metals-average every twenty-two years, are now able to do so much more work with ever less weight per each given function with each recirculation as to make the present scrap resources of almost all metals adequate to take care of all humanity's forward needs.

While World Game discovers and identifies the world income energy sources, [ii] it is also concerned with using the energy income in the most efficient technologies. In producing liquid-fuel-energy-powered engines, World Game's design science must pay attention to the fact that reciprocating engines such as are installed in all our automobiles are only 15-percent efficient, turbines are 30-percent efficient, jet propulsion engines are 65- percent efficient, and fuel cells are 80-percent efficient. Due to inefficiently designed technical equipment and building technology, the overall mechanical efficiency of the United States economy is in 1980 only 5 percent. This means that for every one hundred units of energy consumed, ninety-five units go unused -- "down the drain."

Using only proven and now-available technology, it is feasible to increase the overall efficiency to 15 percent. This alone would reduce our overall energy consumption by two-thirds.

There are two kinds of objective engineering designing: objects that consist of a plurality of intercomplementarily moving parts (machinery) and those that do not (structures). Mechanical efficiency denotes the percent of work effectiveness accomplished by the machine per units of energy consumed. Structural efficiency relates to the functions, strength, and durability accomplished per each unit of weight of material involved.

Humanly occupied environment-controlling structures have many energy- wasting features, all of which are highly correctable. In designing the environment- controlling structural enclosures, World Game's design science heeds the following facts:

(A) Spherical structures enclose the greatest volume with least surface.

(B) Geodesic spherical structures, which are inherently omnitriangularly framed entirely of great-circle chords, give the strongest structure per weight of materials employed.

(C) Amongst the geodesic great-circle spherical structures, those based on the discontinuous compression, continuous tension -- "tensegrity" -- icosahedra give the most environmental enclosure per pound and volume of material employed.

(D) Every time the linear dimension of a symmetrical structure is doubled (i.e. 1 →2) the surface area of the enclosure increases at a two to the second-power rate (i.e., 22), while the environment-controlling structure's volume increases at a two to the third-power rate (i.e., 23). Wherefore, every time a geodesic dome's. diameter is doubled, it has eight times as many contained molecules of atmosphere but only four times as much enclosing shell -- ergo, each progressive doubling of dome diameters halves the amount of enclosing surface through which each molecule of interior atmosphere may either gain or lose energy as heat. (See "Old Man River's City" project, pp. 315-23.) Whole cities are most efficiently enclosed under one large dome.

(E) Every time we enclose a geodesic dome within a greater-diametered geodesic dome Whose radially concentric interspacing is greater than the depth of the frost penetration of that area, while at the same time avoiding use of any metal interconnections between the inner and outer domes' structuring, the heat losses and gains of the innermost domes are halved in respect to those of non-domed-over domes of the same dimensions.

(F) If in producing the geodesic domes-within-domes we make them transparent or translucent on their sunny side and opaque and inwardly reflecting on the nonsunny side, they will entrap progressively greater amounts of Sun energy as heat for longer and greater periods of time as the diameters are increased.

(G) If growing vegetation -- i.e., trees, vegetables, com, sugar, ground cover, etc. -- is planted within the dome, the photosynthetic conversion of Sun radiation into hydrocarbon molecules will chemically and simultaneously

(1) convert the monoxide gases given off by human occupants into human-supporting (air) atmosphere, thus eliminating all necessity for windows or air conditioning apparatus, and

(2) harvest hydrocarbon molecule-trapped energy as food or as fuel-alcohol energy.


(H) If the wind drag of buildings is employed to turbine-convert wind-power into tank-stored compressed air, the latter may be stored within the space between the inner and outer domes' skins as low-pressure atmosphere in quantities adequate to pneumatically and evenly distribute any concentrated outer cover loadings throughout all the tensional components of the geodesic-tensegrity structures.

Image

FIGURE 37. The dome housed the exhibit of the University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, at Ghana's first international trade fair.

Image

FIGURE 38. Illustration depicts use of the Bernoulli effect as applied to a geodesic dome. Upward draft is caused by solar heating of outside surface which then heats nearby surrounding air. The warm air rises creating a thermal column. Air is sucked out of the large openings at the ground level causing reduced pressure inside the dome. Reduced pressure causes air near top vent to rush in through small opening. Increased flow of air through small opening cools the incoming air.

(I) As the Sun's radiation is outwardly and diffusingly reflected by the dome structure's convex outer surface, vertical thermal-column movements of the Sun-heated outside atmosphere develop, which spirally rising columns of heated atmosphere will draw air out from under the dome's large lower-edge summertime openings, which voluminous outward drafting in turn pulls air into the dome through the small cross-sectioned ventilators at the dome's apex. This pressure differential between the small air entry and large exhaust openings produces the Bernoulli chilling effect, which in hot weather will swiftly cool the dome's interior atmosphere. World Game has proven this in geodesic domes at the African equator.

(J) It is clearly demonstrable that the conversion of windpower by dome-within-dome, drag-operated air turbines will power the compressing and tank storage of air and will thus produce ample power to operate a pneumatic-tool system for all mechanical operating needs within the dome. Pneumatic tools avoid the human-electrocution perils of electrically operated domestic technology.

(K) Sum-totally it is now demonstrable that properly designed domes within domes become energy-harvesting machines that provide more energy than is needed for the high-standard life support of their human occupants, wherefore such dwelling machines may become exporters of energy in variously stored and controlled forms, such as alcohol.

(L) It has been satisfactorily demonstrated that the reflective, concave inner surface of the geodesic, dome-within-dome, environment-controlling shells will act as parabolic, Sun-radiation concentrators, focusing the Sun radiation income into heating of a circularly arced, liquid-containing pipe, whereby the Sun's heat may be stored liquidly in vacuum-enclosed subterranean tanks for subsequent use in a variety of ways. The by-product heat from the air compressing is used to heat water stored in the same reservoir.

(M) World Game's design science treats the tensegrity-structured, dome- . within-dome geodesic environment controls as comprehensive energy-harvesting, -storing, and -exchanging devices. Typically, the vegetation most efficiently employed includes the growth of com and the "winged bean" in the sunlight area and mushrooms in the hot, dark areas.

(N) Radiotelephones and income-energy generators render the dwelling machine semiautonomous.

(O) Two sanitary devices as described earlier render the environment controls independent of water-supply lines and sewage-carry-away systems:

(1) the fog gun for cleaning the human skin and all other surfaces with a high-pressure air gun into whose airstream small amounts of atomized water are fed;

(2) the carton packaging and mechanized, convey-away system of human wastes to be delivered to elsewhere-located fertilizer or gas-generating works or to anaerobic methane gas and dry fertilizer-generating equipment of the dwelling machines themselves.


These two devices eliminate all wet plumbing, which has been responsible for breeding most of all the infectious bacteria heretofore entering human abodes, while also eliminating the infectious splashback feature of water-filled bowls and their water-flushed toilets.

World Game finds that wealth measures the degree to which humans have used their minds to discover scientific principles and have used those principles to invent artifacts and environment-controlling and -implementing, complex-artifact systems which, as powered only by daily energy income, can be demonstrably shown to be able to take care of given numbers of people for given numbers of forward days. "Taking care" of humans means to provide them with "pleasingly," healthily, satisfactorily stabilized environmental conditions under all of nature's known potential variables while adequately feeding them, giving them medical care, increasing their degrees of freedom, and increasing their technological options (see Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth).

As already mentioned, World Game finds that the world's wealth and its medium of interchanges -- i.e., the world's monetary accounting systems -- have been divorced from one another. Those bankers and insurance-company managements that have learned how they may legally employ to their own exclusive advantage the vast magnitudes of savings of real wealth deposited with them by those who have produced the wealth and who are quite unaware that those deposits are taken out of the bank and loaned out at swiftly increasing interest rates to others in such quantities as to underwrite the magnitude of purchasing, production, and sale of products that can be produced only by the involvements of such vast magnitudes of real-wealth tokens, and may therefore overpower all wealth capabilities of any of the individual depositors of the savings-account deposits of the real-wealth products.

World Gaming requires progressive inventorying of condensed recalls of already introduced major concepts and their integration with one another, plus additional new concepts to produce newer and greater synergetic realization.

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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:39 am

PART 2 OF 2

In the reality of physical-resource and knowledge potential we have four billion billionaires on our planet, the probating and delivery of whose legacy, as amassed by the more-with-lessing contributions and loving sacrifices of all humans in all history, has been postponed by the game of making money with money by those who as yet misinformedly operate on the 1810 Malthusian assumption that "humanity is multiplying its population at a geometric rate while increasing its life-support foods, etc., only at an arithmetic rate" -- ergo, the money-makers assume that there is nowhere nearly enough life support for all. Malthus said the majority of humans are designed to suffer and die far short of their potential life-span. Darwin's "survival only of the fittest" dictum has combined with that of Malthus to persuade the "haves" to be intelligently selfish and to legally fortify their "haveness" position against the "have-nots."

With legal planning of their lawyer-advised banking leaders, the "haves" have now succeeded in cornering all the world's monetary gold as well as the preponderance of the world's petroleum sources -- along with their refineries and world-around petro-delivery systems together also with acquisitions of all the atomic power-generating plants, originally paid for by the U.S. taxpayers -- and thereafter in severing the monetary system from the wealth system while marking up the negotiable equity value of gold and petroleum tenfold. They also have contrived their own game of international monetary banking of international balances of trade and credit accounting, greatly aided by the priorly established existence of 150 "sovereign" nations around planet Earth.

The division of world political power into 150 sovereign nations is a consequence of thousands of years of successive and individually independent contriving of history's most powerful leaders. The number-one strategy of the successful leaders of history's successively established supreme socioeconomic control systems has always been to induce the spontaneous self-divisioning of those designed to be conquered and to keep them spontaneously self-dividing and their divisions lethally interarrayed against one another in order to keep them conquered. The longer the self-divisionings can be self-perpetuating, the more spontaneously are the divisions accepted institutionally by the successive generations as being "natural" divisions, seemingly as inherently and individually existent as are different hills, valleys, rivers, and biological species. The prime vulnerabilities of humanity, which make it subject to spontaneous self-dividing, are those of different speech patterns, skin color, religions, social customs, class or caste systems, political preferences, and all varieties of individually unique "troubles," suffering, and discontent.

The historical consequence of this aeons-ago-commenced employment of this grand strategy of "divide to conquer and keep divided to keep conquered" accounts for the "natural" acceptance today by world peoples of the seemingly "God-given" existence of 150 sovereign nations of the world and their respective geographical division of all the world's dry land (as well as for all the specialized categories of human activities). This prime strategy of supreme-power wielders accounts for all the many local political divisions within the sovereign nations as well as for all the religions and for the officially encouraged maintenance of the many languages and proud maintenance of local dialects. Above all that number-one strategy accounts for the emotionally enflamed maintenance of the concepts of different races and classes of human beings and their division into highly specialized categories as "culturally" maintained by the various systems and power structures over all the highly educated individuals and those intellectuals who, if not focused professionally on highly specialized subjects, might otherwise -- as comprehensivists -- seem potentially dangerous to the rulers.

It is highly relevant to the foregoing that in 1959 science had incontrovertibly demonstrated that all the known anthropological "and biological case histories comprehensively and scientifically explored show that the extinctions of all human tribes and of all biological species have always been brought about by overspecializations resultant upon either willful or environment- induced inbreeding. If, for instance, we inbreed -- by mating two fast-running horses -- there is the mathematical probability of concentrating the fast-running genes but also of breeding in this special capability only by inadvertently breeding out the general adaptability to cope with the infrequent high-energy-concentrating events. For example, exquisitely designed birds' wings are a hindrance in walking, and the long bills of wading birds, which are perfect for marshland foraging, are relatively useless in other less specialized feeding. Generalized adaptability is needed to cope with large changes in the environment. Here lies the present chief peril of the human passengers on Spaceship Earth.

World Game makes it clear that the world electrical systems' energy-network integration and its comprehensive powering of automated, special case machinery would most effectively counter the peril of overspecialization of the humans and would introduce the omni-Universe-operative, time-energy, kilowatt-hours-per-year, commonwealth accounting system. This cosmic accounting will computer-establish the up-to-the-moment-realized cosmic-energy- income-harnessing thus far accomplished; and the technical-efficiency leve1s attained in the various energy-employing technologies operative around the world; and the resultant per capita individually employable world commonwealth facilities; and the per capita "consumable," "employable," and "enjoyable" "credits" in respect to any specific consumables, commodities, services, conveniences, or tools as manifest on the satellite-relay- integrated world computers and as individually called for and read out on each individual's electronic computer "credit card." The individually available· information will govern the individual's design science choices of the highest relative-efficiency systems to be employed. It will also tell people whether, they can do this or that, and if so, how they can go most swiftly -- for instance, from New York to Australia -- and will "book" a travel reservation and will prepay the bill for the travel accommodation. All such information is continually computer-integrated to produce the commonwealth evaluations and their read-out-ability on world-individual's pocket-computer "credit card." These will always register the world individual's share of the ever-increasingly-employable technological savings reserves and their respective technologically operative capabilities. With humanity employing such a world-around, satellite-relayed, and world-integrated computer accounting system, the world can, overnight, physically realize the "Omnibillionaire Commonwealth" of its humans.

Because (1) the interalloying of metals produces the invisible revolution of ever-higher-strength and -durability performance per pound of material employed, and because (2) the ever-higher performances produce new conditions of technological challenge, new alloys and new atomic circuits are progressively discovered and developed to provide ever-more-satisfactorily-advanced performances, and because (3) the structures and energy-operated machines using the ever-improving metal-alloy capabilities progressively make obsolete the older machines and structures, the latter become progressively scrapped and melted. It is World Game's concern to see that the progressively recovered metals are alloyed anew in ever-higher-performance atomic arrangements and are ever more promptly re-employed in new machinery and structures of ever-higher performance with ever-less weights and volumetric bulks. This progression is known in World Gaming as "Ever-Progressively-Accelerating Ephemeralization."

Wherefore: with every accelerated scrapping, recovery, and recirculation the same basic metals and the alloys of those metals progressively serve the needs of ever more people at ever-higher standards of performance. Thus we discover that the world's already-mined and -used, ever-recirculating metals become the technologically regenerative, universal "bloodstream" for realizing the ever-improving know-how of human advancement of its ever-increasing ability to cope with vital challenges. The metals, and chemistries in general, have thus become the recirculatable medium upon which is loaded the new, advanced design science inventions resultant upon progressively advancing experiences and knowledge of humanity regarding how to cope more effectively with life's evolutionarily successive challenges.

Within the twentieth century this invisible revolution of "continually learning how to do more with the same" or "more with less" resources (metallurgically, electronically, chemically, mechanically, structurally, aerodynamically, and hydrodynamically) has in only three quarters of the twentieth century brought 60 percent of humanity into enjoying a vastly more effective, healthier, and more realistically informative means of coping with life's challenges than was experienced by the most powerful monarch or financial or political potentate of 1900; furthermore, during this eighty years of time the world population has doubled, wherefore the gain has been 120- fold. During this same twentieth century's first eight decades life expectancy has been doubled for the 60 percent thus advantaged, and the range of their everyday travelability has twenty-folded. During those same eighty years that 60 percent of humanity has gone from 90-percent illiterate to 95-percent literate. They are no longer locally rooted peoples. They are on their way to becoming omni-world-around living humans preoccupied with local Universe's evolutionary affairs. In 1948 the average U.S. family moved "out of town" every five years. In 1978 they moved every three years.

In 1970 the percent of those unprecedentedly advantaged passed the 50- percent mark. Since 1970, and for the first time in history, the majority of humanity has become widely traveling "haves," in contrast to the previous multimillions of years of 99 percent of all humans being locally rooted "have-nots." The number of U.S.A. millionaires quintupled in eight years -- from 110,000 in 1971 to 550,000 in 1979.

The plotted curve of the rate of gain for increasing proportions of all humanity being thus swiftly. advantaged by the doing more for more people with less and less matter and energy per function -- all accomplished with computers, satellites, alloys, etc. -- indicates that 100 percent of all humanity will be thus advantaged before 2000 A.D. In less than twenty years (less than one generation) all humanity is scheduled by evolution (not by any world planning body) to become physically more successful and metaphysically more interestingly occupied than have any humans ever been in all known history-provided that humanity does not commit ignorance-, fear-, and-panic- induced total-species suicide.

Why might they panic? All the present bureaucracies of political governments, great religious organizations, and all big businesses find that physical success for all humanity would be devastating to the perpetuation of their ongoing activities. This is because all of them are founded on the premise of ameliorating individual cases while generally exploiting on behalf of their respective political, religious, or business organizations the condition of nowhere- nearly-enough-life-support-for-all and its resultant great human suffering and discontent.

Reason number two for fear-wrought panic is because all of the 150 nations of our planet are about to be desovereignized by evolution; that is; they are about to become operatively obsolete -- about to be given up altogether. There are millions in the U.S.A., for instance, who on discovery that their government was about to become bankrupt and defunct would become activist "patriots," and might get out their guns and start a Nazi movement, seeking dictatorially to reinstate the "good old days." If people in many of the 150 nations succeeded in re-establishing their sovereignties and all the customs-barrier, balance-of-trade shacklings, it would soon be discovered that the 150 nations represent 150 "blood clots" imperiling the free interflowing of the evolution-producing metals and products recirculation as well as of the popular technical know-how disseminating.

We have today, in fact, 150 supreme admirals and only one ship -- Spaceship Earth. We have the 150 admirals in their 150 staterooms each trying to run their respective stateroom as if it were a separate ship. We have the starboard side admirals' league trying to sink the port side admirals' league. If either is successful in careening the ship to drown the "enemy" side, the whole ship will be lost.

Long ago the world's great religions learned how to become transnational or more effectively supranational. Next the world's great ideologies learned how to become supranational. Most recently the world's largest financial-enterprise corporations have become completely supranational in their operation. Big religion, ideologies, and businesses alike found it intolerable to operate only within 150 walled-in pens. Freeing themselves by graduating into supranational status, they have left all the people in the 150 pens to struggle with all the disadvantages of 150 mutually opposed economic policies. The European Economic Community is a local attempt to cope with this world problem.

The United States of America is not a nation. Nations are large tribes of humans that have been geographically isolated for millennia and have progressively inbred the physical types surviving under those unique geographical ,conditions. As mentioned, the U.S.S.R. had 146 naturally evolved "nations" to integrate, the physiognomies of each U.S.S.R. nation looking quite different from the others'. The United States of America is a crossbreeding integration of humans from all the nations of the planet Earth; though often speaking of itself as the United States of America, it is not America. Its population is only one-half that of North and South America. The North Americans. consisting of Canadians, the U.S. citizens, and Mexicans, are evolutionarily cross-breeding into a single hybrid family of world humans.

As a sequel to the foregoing scientific data (see Chapter 1, pp. 9-11), which proves the invalidity of humanity's assumption of a plurality of different races and classes of humans to exist on our planet, the computer will be able to help in discovering the swiftest course for humanity to pursue in order to free itself of such self-deception. The computer can also disclose the economic savings of humanity to be accomplished by elimination of race, class, and creed differentials. The computers can and will show the increases in commonwealth to be realized by such elimination of false premises in social judgments.

World Gaming produces truthful, ergo corresponding, insights that are popularly communicable by world-around, satellite-relayed television, the practical workings of which, and their demonstrably favorable results for all, may readily induce agreeing vision and courage on the part of all individuals of spontaneously and progressively intercooperative humanity.

It is the invisibility of the alloys and chemistries and of the electronic circuitry of the design science revolution which finds that revolution to be as yet uncomprehended and ignorantly opposed by humanity's reliance only on yesterday's politically visible means of problem-solving. It is both the invisibility and misinformedness that occasions the lack of spontaneous popular support of the invisible design science revolution by the most powerful political and money-making systems. Big government can see no way to collect taxes to run its bureaucracy if people are served directly and individually by daily cosmic-energy-wealth income. Money-makers cannot find a way of putting meters between people and the wind, Sun, waves, etc. Neither big government nor big business pays any serious attention to the fact that we can live on our energy income, rather than on nature's energy savings account (fossil fuels), or by burning our Spaceship Earth's physical hull, which consists entirely of atomic energy in the form of matter.

In 1969 I initiated, and students developed, what have since become annual World Game seminars, attended by university faculties, students, scientists, engineers, and· government officials -- for its first three years at Southern Illinois University, next at the University of Southern California, and thereafter for four years at the University of Pennsylvania, and for one year at the University of Massachusetts. In 1979 the seminar was conducted partially at New York University and partially at the University of Pennsylvania; in 1980, at the University of Pennsylvania.

Seven years ago the World Game's annual research activity culminated in a book written by Medard Gabel, Energy, Earth, and Everyone (Doubleday, rev. ed., 1980), which demonstrated beyond any argument that humanity can carryon handsomely and adequately when advantaged only by its daily energy income from the Sun-gravity system. World Game also published a second book by Medard Gabel, Ho-Ping: Food for Everyone (Doubleday, 1979) -- this time on world food resources, which shows that we can take ample care of all human food needs. The 1979 World Game was participated in by many experts on world food matters.

World Game will become increasingly effective in its prognoses and programming when the world-around, satellite-interrelayed computer system and its omni-Universe-operative (time-energy) accounting system are established. This system will identify the kilowatt-hour-expressed world inventory of foods, raw and recirculating resources, and all the world's unique mechanical and structural capabilities and their operating capacities as well as the respective kilowatt-hours of available energy-income-derived operating power with which to put their facilities to work. All the foregoing information will become available in respect to all the world-around technology's environment-controlling, life-sustaining, travel- and communication- accommodating structures and machines.

All the sulphur coming annually out of all the chimneys around the world exactly equals the amount of new sulphur being mined and distributed annually to keep world industry going. The people who let the sulphur go into the air are not in the sulphur business.

World government will require all industries to install the already-successfully- proven technology and therewith precipitate and recover all their profitwise-unwanted chemical by-products. Underwriting all those costs of installation and operation, world government will give tax credits to all those industries complying with the order, so that those industries can compete with those in the industry who do not have such pollution problems". World government will then stockpile all the chemical substances recovered from all previous liquid, gaseous, or solid dumpings, fumings, or runnings-off -- known ignorantly as "pollution." The value of the recovered resources will more than offset the tax rebates given by the government in order to enforce precipitation. All the chemical substances in all their states are essential to the maintenance of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. Nature has no "pollution." This is a word coined in human ignorance regarding the presence of the right chemicals being released in the wrong places by those who profit only through selfish preoccupation and nonconsideration of others. The hour-to-hour changes in the inventory of world-government stockpiling of all recirculatable substances will be constantly fed into the world-integrated computer together with locations and summaries of the total inventories available for new tasks. World government will replace altogether all the scrapmongers who, to increase prices, hold their products off the market until they become scarce.

World Game records make it clear that the big money-makers of early U.S.A. history, those who funded the Harvard Business School, the Wharton School of Finance, etc., may have made their money in ways that were legal but ruthlessly scheming. The students at today's business schools are not given courses on how to cheat your mother-in-law or how to sell your friends short. Because the business schools make it plausible that fortunes may be won in a legal manner, we have present-day business executives trying to find legal ways of getting the public's money.

World Gaming makes it eminently clear that the simplest way for top executives of the supercorporations to make profits and keep their own salaries rising is to make their corporation the first in its field to raise prices despite any government, public, or labor opposition. The second way is to cut down on personnel at the retailing level and to force customers to wait in lines. No single human waiting line seems too formidable by itself, but if we consider all those standing in all the lines at all the different airlines at all the world's airports -- as the computer does -- and all the people wanting to secure an airline ticket waiting for half an hour on the telephone after hearing the ticket clerk's "Please hold," and all the people waiting for twenty minutes to place their orders in all the restaurants around the world, we discover the billions of human hours sacrificed daily by people whose time is of high value. Those in lines are being legally robbed of billions of their life-hour dollars, which go to the corporate profit account as savings in labor costs.

All the banks and airlines are now placing in their foyers chrome metal standards suspending velvet ropes within which the queue of customers may be neatly snaked. Airplanes have been squeezing paying passengers closer and closer together in wider planes until as many as eleven people sit abreast today.

The World Game-maintained inventory of socially abundant resources breaks down into eight main categories:

1. Reliably operative and subconsciously sustaining, effectively available twenty-four hours a day, anywhere in the Universe: gravity, love.

2. Available only within ten miles of the surface of the Earth in sufficient quantity to conduct sound: Le., the complex of atmospheric gases whose Sun-induced expansion on the sunny side and shadow-side-of-the-world-induced contraction together produce the world's winds, which in turn produce all the world's waves.

3. Available in sufficient quantity to sustain human life only within two miles above planet Earth's spherical surface: oxygen.

4. Available aboard our planet only during the day: sunlight.

5. Not everywhere or everywhen available: water, food, clothing, shelter, vision, initiative, friendliness.

6. Only partially available for individual human consumption, being also required for industrial production: e.g., water.

7. Not publicly available because used entirely by industry: e.g., helium.

8. Not available to industry because used entirely by scientific laboratories: e.g., moon rocks.


World Game's integrated world computer system will have the task of differentiating out the abundant resources and facilities from the scarce, and differentiating the scarce into degrees of scarcity as well as into the day-today fluctuations of the borderline cases. The computer will keep constant track of where the resources are geographically located or where they are traveling. That which is in constant abundance is 100-percent socializable. That which is scarce must be reserved for tasks that serve all society in general. The element oxygen in the atmosphere is in abundance at sea level and need not be distributed by artifacts. Oxygen at 11,000 feet and more above sea level is critically scarce and must be compressed into tanks and distributed for breathing through masks and tubes.

The gas helium is very scarce on planet Earth. It has very important, unique characteristics. Number one, it is not flammable, as is hydrogen, though it weighs almost as little as hydrogen. Helium, though the socially theoretical property of everyone, becomes useless to anyone if compressed into four billion separate bottles, each of which is distributed to each of our at-present four billion Earthians. There are a number of technical tasks that helium can perform to the advantage of all humanity, all of which can be programmed into the computer.

The relative abundance of the ninety-two regenerative chemical elements in the thus-far-known Universe is about the same as the inventory of their relative abundance on Earth. The relative abundance of the chemical elements is also approximately the same as that of their occurrence in the organisms of the human bodies. All this data and all the tasks that can be performed by each element to the greatest advantage of all humanity will be programmed into the world-integrated computers to make it evident to all humanity which eco-technological strategy at any given time will produce the highest advantage for all, against which information it can be determined what alternative advantages might attend implementing and supplying the essentials for realization of newly proposed invention initiatives of various humans.

It was World Game that asked, as described before, one of the world's greatest oil geologists, Francois de Chadenedes, if he could write an accurate scenario of nature producing petroleum 'on planet Earth through the photosynthetic transformation-into-hydrocarbon of Sun radiation by the vegetation and algae arid the succession of events following their transformation as the vegetation is consumed by other biologicals, or is transformed into various residues, all of which are blown by winds or washed by streams and gradually accumulate in various geographical locations and become progressively buried within the planet's outer crust. Thereafter there were various heats and pressures (caused by ice ages, etc.), earthquakes, or deep burial below water or soil until those chemical heats and pressure conditions occurred which are essential to the production of petroleum. De Chadenedes said he could, and after a year he presented us with the scenario with all of its time increments and pressure conditions spelled out. We. then asked him to figure how much it would cost nature per each gallon of petroleum for that much pressure and heat for that much time, were it calculated at the retail rate for that much energy for that length of time as charged us by the public utilities. The cost came to well over a million dollars per gallon.

Since World Game's accounting system is that of the Universe's own time-energy intertransforming requirements, we must accept as cosmically unquestionable this costing of petroleum, coal, and gas resources, which nature has been syntropically importing and accumulating on planet Earth in order, ten billion years hence, to turn the Earth into an energy-exporting (entropic) star.

For this reason World Game considers all fossil fuels to be nature's own savings account, deposited in our "Earth bank" and not to be stolen by exploiters. Everyone knows that we should live on our (energy) income and not our savings account. Nor should we burn our capital-account production equipment in order to produce meter-marketable energy, for there will soon be no further production capability. Atomic energy by fission or fusion constitutes burning our terrestrial production equipment.

As mentioned, World Game finds that 60 percent of all the jobs in the U.S.A. are not producing any real wealth -- i.e., real life support. They are in fear-underwriting industries or are checking-on-other-checkers, etc. The majority of the jobs occasion the individuals using three to four gallons per day in their automobiles to go to and from work -- at true cosmic costing this means four-million dollars per worker per day. Obviously the computer finds that it would save the planet Earth's energy account $500 trillion a day to give all the non-wealth-producing workers their full pay to stay at home.

In the same way the World Game's world-around-integrated computers will show that it will save-pay handsomely to pay all professors and teachers in full to stay at home or in their laboratories and relinquish all teaching to video cassettes, whose selectable programs are to be called out by the individual students of all ages around the world to be shown on their home television sets. The old educational facilities and a small fraction of individual teachers who love most to teach will use the old educational facilities within which to produce the cassette programs.

The computer will prove to society that it will pay to introduce automation wherever feasible and to allow the machines to work twenty-four-hour days while paying yesterday's workers in full to stay home. Only those who love each particular technology will keep the world-around video education in operation. Those who pass the exams to qualify for such working will not be paid for it. They will act as does any amateur athlete -- doing what they do for the love of it. This competing to qualify for all the production and service jobs will govern all work. The work will not be paid for. Everything the individual needs is already paid for. Rudyard Kipling's "L'Envois" tells the story.

When Earth's last picture is painted.
And the tubes are all twisted and dried,
The oldest of colors have faded
And the youngest of critics have died,
We shall rest
And well shall we need to
Lie down for an eon or two
'Til the master of all good workmen
Shall put us to work anew.

Then only the master shall praise us,
And only the master shall blame,
No one will work for money,
And no one will work for fame.
But all for the love of the working
And each in his separate star
Shall draw the thing as he sees it
For the God of things as they are.


World Game shows that we can discontinue newspapers and save the trees for fuel-alcohol production. World Game finds that all news can be disseminated by television and that computers can keep track of all the information that fills the advertising and want-advertisement pages, and any individual looking for any kind of opportunity can get the matching information from the computer in seconds. Individuals can go shopping by cable television.

Local Universe is the term used by World Game to identify the macrocosmic limits of human observation. These macro-limits are identified as the radius of the present maximum phototelescopic-and-radar-reached information (in 1980 the spherical sweepout of an approximately eleven-and-one-half- billion-light-year radius) around planet Earth in all directions.

World Game takes the inventory of relative abundance of all the chemical elements present within that radius as spectroscopically analyzed by the light received in all directions around us from all the stars of all the galaxies within that eleven-and-one-half-billion-light-year radial distance.

World Game takes the relative abundance of all the chemical elements thus far found on planet Earth. The local Universe inventories and the Earthian inventory of the relative abundance are somewhat similar, as is the relative abundance of the chemical elements present or acceptably present in human beings' bodies. The Earthian inventory includes all the isotopes of all the chemical elements and the relative abundance of the latter. In respect to the Earthian abundance, some of the elements are so relatively plenitudinous as to make them available for various universal technological uses; they are therefore socializable, but only when employed with other elements in instruments, machinery, structures, medicines, and nutriment.

World Game notes that gold is the most electrically conductive of all elements. It is also the most highly reflective of all metals, and therefore has many functional uses. New computer circuiting and such functions as the new laser energy beaming with rubies will occupy the majority of the rare metals and jewels.

Rubies function in producing laser beams, etc. Diamonds, being the hardest of all elements, have many cutting and other technical functions. All the rare stones and metals will have industry's unique industrial tasks to perform. The question then arises as to who will determine which technological initiatives should have prior access to the inherently scarce, high-advantage functionings of the scarce and rare inventories of chemical elements.

World Game finds that the computers fed with all the relevant energy-efficiency facts will be able to demonstrate which uses will produce the greatest long-term benefit for all humanity.

World Game foresees that the greatest problems for humanity to solve in the future will be how to accommodate the initiatives of millions of humans who, freed from muscle- and nerve-reflexing jobs, find their inventory of past experiences and their minds integrating synergetically to envision evergreater advantages to be realized for humanity. We will realize this age of regenerative inventing which is rendering humans very effective in their cosmic functioning as local Universe information-gatherers and local Universe problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.

* * *

I consider it essential to pay all my bills in the swiftest possible manner. In whatever system I find myself I commit myself to "play the game," for I am not a political revolutionary; I am a design science revolutionary.

Responding to criticism by individuals who said that the reason Buckminster Fuller was not trying to "earn his living" was because he was incapable of doing so, I told one of my audiences in 1947 about Obnoxico, a theoretical enterprise I had invented through which I could make vast amounts of dollars in one year on an entirely legal basis -- but one as typically undesirable to me as is all money-making.

I said, "You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive."

I do not consider it to be money-making when I insist upon being refunded for the development and overhead cost of the services I perform annually for others, which performance I undertake only in response to the requests of others.

The private-enterprise corporation called Obnoxico was schematically designed only to serve as an object lesson. Obnoxico was designed to exploit the most sentimental weaknesses of humanity. In my theoretical Obnoxico's catalog the number-one item suggested that on the last day that your baby wears diapers you very carefully remove them, repin them empty, and stuff them full of tissue paper in just the shape in which they were when last occupied by your baby. You pack this assembly carefully into a strong corrugated- paperboard container and send it to Obnoxico, which will base-metallize the diapers, then gold- or silverplate them and send them back to you to be filled with ferns and hung in the back window of your car. The easily forecastable profits from this one item ran into millions of dollars per year.

Eagerly my friends of 1947 on being told of Obnoxico joined in the fun and began inventing items for its catalog. Next they began sending me Obnoxico items then beginning to come on the market in 1950 for the first time and as advertised in magazines: plastic pebbles for your garden walk and the now-prevalent, but then-new, plastic flowers.

I then showed how the contributors of the original items sent to me in fun -- to keep the joke going -- could be persuaded to accept shares in Obnoxico in exchange for their contributions. Then the Faustian aspect of the enterprise revealed itself, for it was clearly foreseeable that the stockholders would swiftly become so rich that they would tend to take the whole matter seriously. Overnight they would lose their sense of humor as their greed was stimulated and they became ruthlessly deliberate exploiters of humanity.

Somehow or other the theoretical Obnoxico concept has now twenty-five years later become a burgeoning reality. Private enterprise is now building airports with ever-longer walkways and hotels with ever-increasing numbers of levels of ground-floor and basement arcades to accommodate the evermore- swiftly multiplying Obnoxico stores.

Human beings traveling away from home with cash in their pockets, thinking fondly of those left behind or soon-to-be-joined loved ones, are hooked by the realistic statuettes of four-year-old girls and boys with upturned faces saying in a cartoon "balloon," "What did you bring me, Daddy?"

As the banking system pleads for more savings-account deposits (so that they can loan your money out to others at interest plus costs) the Obnoxico industry bleeds off an ever-greater percentage of all the potential savings as they are sentimentally or jokingly spent for acrylic toilet seats with dollar bills cast in the transparent plastic material, two teddy bears hugging an alligator, etc.

World Game is Anti-Obnoxico and commits itself to making Obnoxico and allied activities obsolete rather than attacking it directly.

_______________

Notes:

i. See the World Game Laboratory publication, Ho-Ping: Food for Everyone, by Medard Gabel, Doubleday, 1979.

ii. See World Game Laboratory's Energy, Earth and Everyone by Medard Gabel, Doubleday, rev. ed., 1980.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:40 am

PART 1 OF 2

PART III

CHAPTER 7: Critical Path: Part One


IN SCIENTIFIC PROGNOSTICATION we have a condition analogous to a fact of archery -- the farther back you are able to draw your longbow, the farther ahead you can shoot. For this reason we opened this book with our "Speculative Prehistory," taking us back five million years through four ice ages, and at least three and one-half million years of scientifically proven presence of humans on Earth. We are confident of the validity of our speculative prehistory because it is predicated on naked humans' physical limits of existence and on environmentally permitted and induced human behavior and on human artifact-altered environments and their progressive circumstance- delimiting and capability-increasing effects. It is also synergetically comprehensive.

In reviewing the full range of humans' presence on Earth we discover two main evolutionary trendings.

Class-two evolutionary trendings are all those events that seem to be resultant upon human initiative-taking-or political reforms that adjust to the changes wrought by the progressive introduction of environment-altering artifacts. All the class-two evolutionary events tend to flatter human ego and persuade humanity to deceive itself by taking credit for favorable changes in circumstances while blaming other humans or "acts of God" for unfavorable changes. It therefore assumes that humanity is running the Universe wherefore, if its power-structure leaders decide that it is valid to cash in all of nature's available riches to further enrich the present rich or to protect them militarily from attacks by their assumed enemies -- all at the cost of terminating human presence on planet Earth -- that is the power-structure leaders' divine privilege.

All the class-one evolutionary trending is utterly transcendental to any human vision, planning, manipulation, and corruption. Class-one evolution accounts for humans' presence on Earth. It accounts for their having always been born naked, helpless for months, and inexperienced -- ergo, ignorant, hungry, thirsty, curious, and therefore fated to learn how to survive only through trial-and-error-won, progressive accumulation of experience. Class-one evolution accounted for humanity's all-unexpected invention of verbal (aural, sound) communication, and thereby the integration of the experience- won information of the many, whereby the integrated information of the many increased the capability of humanity at large to cope with the exigencies of life. It is class-one evolution that led, after the progressive integration of the total experience-won information, to the unpredicted invention of writing or visual communication, by means of which the dead could speak to the living and within which total written information history human mind from time to time discovered repetitive patterns, which in turn sometimes led to the discovery of generalized scientific principles.

Class-one evolution had human fathers and mothers for multimillions of years serving as the memory-bank authority that showed children what they could safely eat and how to communicate. The parents told the children what they could or could not do to get along with the "system" into which they were born. The parents told the children what they should or should not believe. To history's children the parents were "the authority." The myriad esoteric, illiterate ways in which the parents communicated to their children were parroted by the children. Thus were esoteric dialects proliferated until their many progressive deviations multiplied the many initially different world languages.

It was class-one evolution that in the mid-1920s disclosed to the world's children and their parents that the voice coming over the radio had more up-to-the-minute information regarding many more subjects than had the parents. The parents did not tell the children that the radio people had more authoritative information -- it was self-evident to the children, who witnessed their parents running next door to the neighbors to tell them what the radio people had just told them.

The people who were selected as broadcasters by the radio stations were selected for the commonality of their diction in contradistinction to the millions of esoteric jargons with which the parents had communicated. The radio people were also picked for the size and richness of their vocabularies and the facility with which they drew upon such conventionalized vocabularies.

Because it was self-evident to the children that the radio people were greater authorities than their parents, the children now emulated the diction and vocabularies of the radio people. Not to be belittled in their children's estimation, the parents learned the commonly accepted radio people's pronunciation of an ever-enlarging conventional vocabulary. Within half a century (two human generations) this completely altered and improved the world's languages.

The speed of sound is approximately 700 miles per hour. The speed of electromagnetic radiation is 700 million miles per hour. Sound can travel only in conducting mediums -- for instance, in the Earth's atmosphere. Electromagnetic radiation can travel on indefinitely through Universe. The amount of information humans can acquire visually is a millionfold greater in range, speed, and meaning than is the information they acquire aurally.

* * *

The university and college students who became the first to make the world news as dissidents in 1965 and 1966 were born in the years TV came into the American home. The Class of '66ers were the first human beings to be reared by the "third parent," whose TV voice and TV presence were often heard and felt by the children much more than those of the two blood parents. TV daily briefed them visually -- ergo, vividly -- on the world-around news, regarding the world's continual aches, pains, disasters, Olympic triumphs, etc.

The young were saying, "I know that Dad and Mom love me to pieces, and I love them to pieces, but they don't know what it's all about. They come home from the office or golf links or hairdressers and sit down to beer and small talk or 'sitcoms.' They have nothing to do with our going into Vietnam. They have nothing to do with our going to the Moon. They have nothing to do with anything except earning a living -- and spending it on TV-advertised goods. The whole world is in great trouble. My compassion is for all the people anywhere who are in trouble. Since the older people don't seem to know what is going on and are too preoccupied with irrelevancies, I and my contemporaries must do our own thinking and find out what needs to be done to make the world work."

As we wrote in the opening lines of our "Self-Disciplines," Chapter 4, up to the time of the radio the older people were always saying to the young, "Never mind what you think. Listen. We are trying to teach you." With the TV making it clear to the young that the parents did not know much about anything and were not "the authority," the young, responding to intuition, said to themselves, "I am going to have to do my own thinking and take my own actions." Nonetheless, they were utterly unskilled in world affairs, highly idealistic, and easily exploitable.

The abrupt, spontaneous historical events on the Berkeley campus of the University of California and elsewhere occasioned youth's discarding forever the authority of their elders. The Class of 1966 shocked the world by saying that it felt no special loyalty to its families, its university, its state, or its nation. The youth of the Class of 1966 were thought by the oldsters to be shockingly immoral and lacking in idealism. Not so! They were as idealistic and full of compassion as any child has ever been, but their loyalty was to all humanity. They were no longer the victims of local class or race bias. Their idealism was at first skillfully exploited by the psycho-guerrilla warfaring of the communist-capitalist secret operations. Soon the young realized that they were using their heads for punching bags and cudgel targets instead of for thinking. Many of their numbers began to listen to my lectures about solving problems by appropriate technology instead of by physical struggling or politisal revolution. Informed by me, they began to say mankind can do anything it wants. "Why don't our officials and families stop talking about their local biases and wasting wealth on warring -- all because they assume that 'war is necessary' simply because there does not seem to be enough to take care of even one-half of humanity's needs."

The young ones asked, "Why not up the performances per units of invested resources and thus make enough to go around?" Their elders repeated, "Never mind what you think," so the young ones stopped asking.

Occurring after millions of years of the absolute unquestioned caring for the young by the authority of the elders, this metaphysical cutoff -- like its physical counterpart, the cutting of the umbilical cord after the child is born and has access to its own oxygen -- occurred when humanity had acquired enough relevantly critical information to be able to proceed on its own initiatives divested of the many misinterpretations by the elders as to the total significance of the total information. This cut-off experience is typical of all class-one evolution, which is always transcendental to all class-two evolution- to human planning, contriving, manipulation, or corruption.

Also typical of class-one evolution are the two trends we have mentioned so many times in the previous chapters -- the invisible chemical, metallurgical, and electronic production of ever-more-efficient and satisfyingly effective performance with the investment of ever-less weight and volume of materials per unit function formed or performed -- i.e., ephemeralization -- accomplished within ever-less increments of time -- i.e., acceleration.

These coordinate class-one evolutionary trendings, which have been manifest for three quarters of a century, are as yet unrecognized by any world economists, heads of state, or business leaders. Though there is a popular intuition that acceleration may be in evidence, it is not officially heeded. Individuals amongst political and business leaders are often aware of changing conditions, such as that which makes suddenly available a pocket calculator or a quartz watch. They do not comprehend that these individual "goodies" are parts of overall ephemeralization and acceleration trending that, within only three quarters of a century, has converted those enjoying an adequate and pleasing standard of living from less than 1 percent of all humanity in 1900 to 60 percent of all humanity in 1980, the latter enjoying an even higher standard of living than had been enjoyed before 1900 by any of the world's kings or financial potentates of all history. Class-one evolution alone accounts for the doubling within this century of the life "expectancy" of that 60 percent of all humanity which, by 1980, has had its standard of living so spectacularly advanced.

* * *

All technical evolution has a fundamental behavior pattern. First there is scientific discovery of a generalized principle, which occurs as a subjective realization by an experimentally probing individual. Next comes objective employment of that principle in a special case invention. Next the invention is reduced to practice. This gives humanity an increased technical advantage over the physical environment. If successful as a tool of society, the invention is used in bigger, swifter, and everyday ways. For instance, it goes progressively from Ii little steel steamship to ever-bigger fleets of constantly swifter, higher-powered ocean giants.

There comes a time, however, when we discover other ways of doing the same task more economically -- as, for instance, when we discover that a 200-ton transoceanic jet airplane -- considered on an annual round-trip-frequency basis -- can outperform the passenger-carrying capability of the 85,000-ton Queen Mary.

All the technical curves rise in tonnage and volumetric size to reach a "giant" peak, after which progressive miniaturization sets in. After that, a new and more economical art takes over and then goes through the same cycle of doing progressively more with less, first by getting bigger and taking advantage, for instance, of the fact that doubling the length of a ship increases its wetted surface fourfold but increases its payload volume eightfold. Inasmuch as the cost of driving progressively bigger ships through the water at a given speed increases in direct proportion to the increase in friction of the wetted surface, the eightfolding of payload volume gained with each fourfolding of wetted surface means twice as much profit for the same effort each time the ship's length is doubled.

This principle of advantage gain through geometric size increase holds true for ships of both air and water. Eventually doubling of length of seagoing ships finally runs into trouble. For instance, an ocean liner made more than 1000 feet long would have to span between two giant waves and would have to be doubled in size to do so. If doubled in size once more, however, she could no longer be accommodated by the sizes of the great world canals, dry docks, or harbor depths.

At this point the miniaturization of doing more with less first ensues through substitution of an entirely new art -- David's slingshot over Goliath's club operated from beyond reach of the giant.

This overall and inexorable trending to do more with less is known sum-totally as "progressive ephemeralization." Ephemeralization trends toward an ultimate doing of everything with nothing at all, which is a trend of the omniweighable physical to be mastered by the omniweightless metaphysics of intellect.

All the missile-hurling arts of man and men's warring or fighting to the death have followed this same fundamental evolutionary pattern of bigger, then smaller.

Assuming that there were not and never will be enough vital support resources to go around, we conclude that there must be repeating eventualities in wars to see which side could pursue its most favored theory of survival under fundamental inadequacies. Humanity has continually done more killing with less human effort at greater and greater distances and at ever-higher speeds and with ever-increasing accuracy.

The killing went from a thrown stone to a spear to a sling to a bow-and-arrow to a pistol, a musket, a cannon, and so on until man used the great weapons-carrying battleships. Suddenly a little two-ton, torpedo--carrying airplane sank a 45,000-ton battleship, and then the 2,000-miles-per-hour airplane was outperformed by the 16,000-miles-per hour, atom-bomb-carrying rocket of minuscule weight in comparison to the bomb-carrying plane. If world warring persists as a consequence of the concept of "survival only of the fittest minority," there will come the approximately weightless death rays operating at 700 million miles per hour.

At the present point of history the uranium bomb has been displaced by the hydrogen bomb, and then it was discovered that if either side used that new greatest weapon, both sides and the rest of humanity would perish, so the biggest weapon could not be used. Nor could the equally large and mutually destructive biological or chemical gas warfaring. Both sides then discovered that killing of the enemy's people was not their objective.

Killing the enemy's ideology is the objective. Killing the enemy's people brings sympathy and support for the enemy from the rest of the world, and "gaining the good opinion and support of the rest of the world" is one of the new world-warring's objectives.

At this point both sides have started to explore the waging of more war with lesser-more limited-killing but more politically and economically devastating techniques. Just as ephemeralization employed ever-more-minuscule instruments and thus took technology out of the limited ranges of the human senses into the vast and invisible ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum reality, so too has major warfaring almost disappeared from the visible contacts of human soldiery and entered into the realm of invisible psychology.

In the new invisible miniaturization phase of major world-warring both sides carryon an attention-focusing guerilla warfare (as was conducted in Vietnam) while making their most powerful attacks through subversion, vandalism, and skillful agitation of any and all possible areas of discontent within the formally assumed enemy's home economics.

In carrying on this new and unfamiliar world-warring they do not have to send ideological proselytizers to persuade the people of the other side to abandon their home country's political system and adopt that of their former enemies. Instead they can readily involve, induce, and persuade individuals of the other side to look for discontent wherever it manifests itself and thereafter to "amplify" that condition by whatever psychological means until the situation erupts in public confusion, demonstrations, terrorism, etc. The idea is to make a mess of the other's economy and customs and thus to discredit the other's political system in the eyes of the rest of the world and to destroy the enemy people's confidence in their own system.

Because the active operators are sometimes engaged on a basis of just gratifying their own personal discontent, they are often unaware that they are acting as agents. Because almost everyone has at least one discontent, a well-trained conscious agent can invoke the multiplyingly effective but unwitting agency of hundreds of other discontent promoters and joiners -- in ever-larger, more amplified, masses.

As a consequence of this new invisible phase of world-war trending, a most paradoxical condition exists. The highly idealistic youth of college age who are convinced that they are demonstrating against war are, despite the most humane and compassionate motives, often in fact the front-line soldiers operating as unwitting "shock troops." Meanwhile the conventionally recognized soldiers engaged in visible "war-zone" warfare (either of ambush or open battle) are carrying on only a secondary -- albeit often mortally fatal -- decoy operation.

This invisible world-around warring to destroy the enemy's economy wherever it is operative, above all by demonstrating its homeland weaknesses and vulnerabilities to the rest of the world, and thus hoping to destroy the confidence of the enemy people in themselves, is far more devastating than could be a physical death ray, for it does everything with nothing. 'Furthermore it operates as "news," which moves around the Earth by electromagnetic waves operating at 700 million miles per hour.

At the moment the highly controlled political states have a great defensive advantage over the "open, freedom-nurturing"· states by virtue of the former's controlled "news." For it is the omniexcitable news in the "free" countries that is primarily exploited to publish and spread and thus create a chain reaction of dismay throughout any and all of their organized-discontent actions.

With the United States and Russia jointly spending over $200 billion a year getting ready for an ultimate showdown between them, they each average about $20 billion a year waging psychoguerilla warfare. Both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. were intent to break down the other one's economy before coming to the far more costly all-out war. The brilliantly trained individuals in Russia who came out to train other individuals in America did so in such a manner that those trained in America had no idea that what they were being excited into doing had anything to do with Russia. The American students' idealism was often brilliantly exploited by Russia to break down America's confidence in advanced education. Theretofore Americans had such blind confidence in education that they would elect any politicians promising to provide state-financed advanced-education facilities.

What the Russians' strategists knew was that the presidents of the U.S.A. universities, public or private, were "sitting ducks" for their psychological shooting. The university presidents of both private and state universities were primarily involved in the politics of raising funds for their institutions. The presidents had no internal "defenses" because they had never had need for them. They found that neither the faculty nor the students knew much about the presidents and that it would be very easy to attack their on-campus positions. They could effectively exaggerate any faults manifest by the presidents.

Within one year the presidents of 100 universities of America were "shot down." None of them were defended by their faculties, whose numbers were scared to death of losing their tenure. The determination of the students to do their own thinking was readily exploited in attacking the university presidents.

While all the foregoing curves of the rising and falling of the technical evolution of weaponry have taken place, there has also occurred, all unnoticed by all parties to the warfaring, a vast "fallout" from the "defense" technology into the domestic technology of ephemeralization's doing ever more with less. Within two-thirds of a century this unnoticed and inadvertent fallout has converted 40 percent of total humanity from have-not-ness to a high standard of living have-ness and makes clear that the only way all of humanity may be elevated to such advantage is by further acceleration of the technical invention revolution.

It becomes evident that all of youth's world-around clamor for peace can only be realized through technological revolution, which will do so much more with so much less per each function as ultimately to produce enough to support all of humanity. It is also clear that such a task can only be accomplished by the technical design revolution.

As those many who have become involved in the new invisible warfaring discover that their aims can be attained only through the design revolution, all the young world-around idealists will have to face up to the question of whether they prefer to keep on agitating simply because they have come to enjoy a sense of power and importance by so doing. All who are really dedicated to the earliest possible attainment of economic and physical success for all humanity -- and thereby realistically to eliminate war -- will have to shift their efforts from the political arena to participation in the design revolution. The latter course involves the development of ever-self-regenerating and improving scientific and technical competence. In turn this means that the individual must plunge earnestly and dedicatedly into initiating self-development, using the resources of the educational system.

• • •

All the aforementioned class-one evolutionary trending provides powerful long-distance prognostication data. Keeping track of die integrated ephemeralization and acceleration trends and their socioeconomic resultants, per each world human, made possible my 1938 Nine Chains to the Moon and my 1950 magazine-published Prognostication that by 2000 A.D. all humanity either would be enjoying a higher but generally unfamiliar standard of living than any humans had ever known -- or would have altogether perished.

This book has already mentioned many of these class-one evolutionary trendings.

• • •

In naval science we have four scientifically developed prognosticating arts. In my own semantic formulating "prognosticating" is both subjective and objective: subjective -- "if I don't do anything, such and such will happen"; objective -- "if I do so and so, such and such will happen." Pure science means "setting in order the facts of experience and therefrom deducing generalized principles if and when they are manifest." Applied science means "the development of technological procedures for objective employment of a plurality of the generalized principles." Art means "the skillful realization of humanly satisfying or challenging special case applications of the theoretical schemes of applied science."

The number-one naval prognosticating science and art is that of designing and producing the generalized tools -- machine tools -- that, when housed and assembled in navy yards or floating dry docks, can produce both macro and micro special-case tools -- with both the generalized and special-case tools operative at degrees of dimensional controls beyond that of human sight; at temperatures above and below humans' organic tolerance; at weights and sizes beyond human muscle-maneuverability; at electromagnetic frequencies beyond the range of human optical or tactile tunability or tolerance; at quantation determination and integration of metallurgical and chemical formulations, in temperature and pressure regions beyond humans' direct sensorially apprehending control.

The number-two naval prognosticating science and art is that in which, employing the number-one prognosticating science and art tools, we design fleets of ships and special case ships and other special case tools as a complex of intersupportive technology capable of coping with nature's conditions at the interface of sea and sky while traveling on, over, or under the seas to any part of the world reachable by the deep water's continuum -- i.e., to three-quarters of all the surface of planet Earth; with the sea-transport capability of integrating the world's remotely occurring, unique, and intercomplementary physical resources; and with the ability to protect such sea commerce against any and all pirates or others hostile to class-two evolutionary phenomena.

The number-three naval prognosticating science and art is that of celestial navigation, which permits us to reliably prognosticate the arrival of our ship anywhere around the world at such and such an hour and on such and such a date.

The number-four naval prognosticating science and art is that of ballistics -- "the art and science of controlling the trajectory of an explosively hurled missile." Ballistics is divided into two parts -- interior and exterior. Interior ballistics deals with all the controllable variables governing the trajectory of the gun's explosively hurled missile, which controllable variables are operative before the gun is fired; exterior ballistics deals with all the controllable variables operative after the gun is fired. These controllable interior- and exterior-ballistics variables altogether govern the trajectory of the gun's explosively hurled missiles.

Interior-ballistics variables include the design of the gun, its bore, its length, its metallurgy, its expansion and contraction in changing temperatures, and similar factors. Interior ballistics is also concerned with the design of the missile itself, with the gunpowder to be used, and with the temperature of that powder. The interior variables are exhaustively studied, scientifically recorded and controlled.

The exterior-ballistics variables relate to the direction and velocity of the winds blowing between the firing ship and the target ship. The exterior-ballistics variables include all weather conditions. They are concerned with the course and speed of the gun-firing ship as well as of the target ship. The exterior- ballistics variables are numerous but not as numerous as the interior-ballistics variables. The exterior-ballistics variables include the information regarding the relative accuracy of the previously fired missile and the swiftly calculated corrections to bring the trajectory on to the target.

In the science of ballistics the variables entering into the problem of firing from a swiftly moving, steerable ship on a heaving sea at a variably steerable target ship moving at unannounced variable speeds on a heaving sea are much more numerous than the variables entering into the firing of a gun from a fixed position on the dry land toward another fixed-position target on the same dry land.

In naval gunnery in the precomputer days large charts, containing titles and spaces for all the known variable data of both interior and exterior ballistics, were printed. These charts were laid out and tacked to a great table in the "plotting room" in the most structurally protected positions within the bowels of the ship. All the interior-ballistics data was corrected when any of its data changed and was immediately entered onto the chart. There was no use entering any exterior-ballistics data until the enemy ship was located, after which all the up-to-the-minute-and-second changing data of the exterior ballistics were entered onto the charts. When all the data were in, complex mathematical integration of the data took place, and the proper angles of elevation and horizontal compass orientation of the guns themselves were arrived at. Guns were at first individually, then coordinatedly, aimed at the target ship by both horizontal and vertical angle controls, being separately and continuously human-eye-and-hand aimed at the target ship by easily spun hand-wheels geared to power-driven equipment that kept the big guns in constant adjustment to the rolling, pitching, and yawing of the firing ship. The rate of changing of interior-ballistics data was -- and as yet is -- very slow compared to the rate of change of the data of exterior ballistics.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:41 am

PART 2 OF 2

As a naval officer I was once concerned with all these matters. I became gradually interested in the possibility that all the variables involved in naval ballistics might be identified with all the variables operative in the most complex problems of Universe. I intuited that the combined sciences of navigation and ballistics might embrace all the variables governing Universe- event prognostication. It could be that: (1) navy yard industrialization, (2) fleet operation and individual ship design, (3) astronavigation, and (4) ballistics constituted the four "special case" comer complexes of a generalized tetrahedral complex of variable design factors governing all human-mind-controllable participation in all cosmic, alternative-intertransforming potentials.

It was eminently clear that astronomy, enormously advantaged by Newton's mass-interattraction law, having acquired comprehensive data regarding the ever-changing interpositioning of celestial bodies, groups of bodies, and galaxies of bodies, was extremely successful in prognosticating for many years, centuries, and millennia ahead the relative interpositioning of all known celestial bodies to split-second accuracy almost anywhere within millions of light-years around and away from Earth. We could say that the more cosmically comprehensive the consideration, the more accurate the prognosticating.

I therefore decided to always include the most micro-macro. cosmically inclusive data in all my prognosticating. Obviously this was not "crystal-balling" nonsense but a very elegantly inclusive and incisive integration of the four naval sciences and arts of prognosticating.

Quite clearly the four special case design systems of the naval sciences and arts can be generalized to accommodate the realization of all the objective initiatives of humanity. The four-cornered tetrahedron is the minimum structural system in Universe. It excludes all the irrelevant information of Universe and includes all the information relevant to the system. The tetrahedral structure system has six unique interrelationships existing among the system's four unique groups of system variables.

We have also mentioned elsewhere in this book and in other books the differentiation between craft and industrial tools -- i.e., craft tools are all the tools that can be invented and produced by one individual alone in the wilderness, such as spears, bows and arrows, pottery, baskets, fire, etc., whereas the industrial tools are all the tools that cannot be produced by one human. Because it takes two humans to produce the need to communicate and to invent the means of that communication, we say that the spoken word was the first industrial tool. "In the beginning [of industrialization -- i.e., technologically effective human cooperation] was the word." The spoken and comprehended word greatly expedited the development of humanity's information on how to cope with life's challenges.

The four naval sciences and arts make it possible for us to sort out the human capabilities provided by class-one-evolution-developed industrialization as a human-cooperative-interadvantaging system -- differentiated from all the illusory propaganda of industrialization's exploitation by exclusively monetary-profit-motivated business or personal-kudos-profit-motivated politics. Our "Legally Piggily" chapter clearly recounts the manner in which business took over industrialization for its own special-case self-advantaging. See this Time magazine item of August 6, 1979, to clarify the aptness of the word "Piggily."

Those Record Oil Company Profits

With memories of long gasoline lines still fresh, the earnings reported by many oil companies last week could hardly be expected to be greeted by cheers. All told, the industry had its best second quarter ever. Profits of the 23 biggest U.S. firms totaled $5.47 billion, a rise of 66% over the same period last year. Among the five large international companies, Texaco's earnings leaped by 132% to $365 million. Earnings of the others: Exxon, up 20% to $830 million; Mobil, up 38% to $404 million; Socal, up 61 % to $412 million; and Gulf, up 65% to $291 million. These gains came on top of strong earnings in the first quarter. For the first half, the combined profits of the five giants came to $4.6 billion, or an increase of 49% over the same period last year.


See also p. 401 of Chronology in Appendix II.

The strictly government-operated NASA Apollo Project -- its Cape Canaveral blast-off base in Florida; its Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas; its design- and theory-development base in Alabama; and its administration headquarters in Washington, D.C. -- employed business's industrial facilities but was a human-endeavor cooperating project. It held at bay any importantly diverting manifests of selfishness, even amongst its dramatically publicized astronauts. Their individual names have faded into a dim admixture of identities -- omnisublimated by the magnificent demonstration of humanity's industrially cooperative capability to accomplish history's most imaginatively "impossible," scientifically "possible" feat -- rocket-ferrying of humans over to the Moon and returning them safely back on board our Spaceship Earth.

We now directly address the accomplishing by humanity of a less visually dramatic but far more difficult task -- that of rendering comprehensively and eternally successful a failure-prone, competitively greedy, selfishly wasteful, fearful, and inferiority-conditioned humanity -- and of doing so in a decade.

Starting in 1927 (fifty-three years ago) I developed an as-comprehensive-as- possible inventory of relevant scientific and industrial data and set about making systemically scientific prognostications regarding trends affecting our Spaceship Earth and all of its passengers. This attempted scientific prognosticating involved the comprehensive inventorying of resources aboard our Spaceship Earth. These resources broke down into all the energy associative as matter and all the energy dissociative as radiation. The metaphysical resources broke down into all the inventory of generalized principles and all the inventory of special case knowledge considerations.

To ensure that I was comprehensively adequate in dealing with cosmic-scale prognosticating, I undertook in 1927 and thereafter to discover and scientifically demonstrate nature's own mathematical coordinate system. I had intuitively initiated that search in 1899, at the age of four. This latter search and its successful discovery of that cosmic-coordination system is treated with both comprehensively and incisively in my two-volume Synergetics (Macmillan, 1975 and 1979) -- each volume about 800 pages. All those who would like to understand the relatively high accuracy of my prognosticating science will find it necessary to become students of those two volumes of Synergetics. They make ~lear that I have found a method of guaranteeing that my prognostications include all relevant variables.

For those who do not have time to study Synergetics or my books such as Nine Chains to the Moon, I will point out such studies as my 760-year. long chart of the chemical element isolations by humans, which discloses the interrelationship of pure science with technological science as applied to world-encircling, human-protecting and -transporting, environment controls and the accelerating acceleration in human evolution that it undeniably discloses.

In 1942 I sought a means of discovering whether any regular rate of occurrence of scientific events existed. I, of course, discovered that the relative importance of a suitable cut and classification of the events into pure and not-so-pure scientific events had first to be accomplished.

As I started so to do, I immediately realized that there was one single pure-science set of events that belonged to one family -- that is, the history of human scientists' progressive isolation of the family of ninety-two regenerative chemical elements -- a family of exactly and successively numbered members whose membership qualifications could not be confused-one electron, one proton; two electrons and two protons. I decided to make a chart of the isolations plotted against time.

The first known isolation by a human -- that of arsenic -- occurred in Italy in 1250 A.D. SO I designed my chart to be 760 years long, running from 1250 A.D. to 2010 A.D. I made my chart high enough to accommodate twenty posturanium isolations, should any occur. One year after I made and posted my chart, the first posturanium element was isolated. The last of the first ninety-two to be isolated -- promethium, chemical element #61 -- was not discovered until 1954, twelve years after I designed and posted the chart. The preuranium element isolations did not occur without regularity.

Image

FIGURE 39. PROFILE OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AS EXPOSED BY THE CHRONOLOGICAL RATE OF ACQUISITION OF THE BASIC INVENTORY OF COSMIC ABSOLUTES -- THE 92 ELEMENTS

I planned the designing of my 760-year-long chart in such a manner that vertical room was left for 112 horizontal steps, so that as each element became isolated, the position of it went one step higher. When history opens, humans bad already at some earlier times isolated and put to use nine chemical elements. Nobody has any idea how, when, and where the isolations of carbon, lead, tin, mercury, silver, copper, sulphur, gold, and iron occurred. They were found already in use in different parts of the world when humans first made record of the fact long before 1250 A.D. Because nine isolations had already occurred, I started plotting my chart nine steps high. I posted arsenic, chemical element #33, on the tenth step. The next isolation came 200 years later -- chemical element #51, antimony. This was followed by a 220-year hiatus running to 1670, when science isolated chemical element # 15, phosphorus. Another sixty-two-year lag brought us to the isolation of chemical element #27, cobalt, in 1732, and later in the same year element #78, platinum. Thereafter they arrived at an average rate of one every two years.

The rate accelerated markedly for the next forty years until element # 5, boron, was isolated; during those forty years thirty-one other elements were isolated. Between boron, in 1810, and gallium, element #31, there is a slowing down in the rate, with seventeen more elements being isolated. Between gallium and europium, chemical element #63, another twelve were isolated. There is a very steady rate of acquisition by humans of the next five isolated chemical elements -- from europium to polonium, element # 84. Then there is a marked slowing down of the rate of isolation from actinium, #89, to rhenium, #75. In the isolation of the next five elements, technetium, #43, to plutonium, #94, there is an almost vertical rate of isolating, all five isolations taking place during 1930-1931 although not announced until years later. Between 1932 and 1969 ten elements were isolated, from curium, element #96, to lawrencium, element # 103 -- the 103rd successive isolation. Not only is there a very steady rate of climb of these transuranium element isolations but all of them are successively isolated in the order of their successive atomic numbers, whereas none of the pre-uranium -- before element #92 -- isolations occur by their successive numbers.

What we have been witnessing is a series of accelerations and slowdowns. The accelerations always occur in peacetime and the slowdowns in wartime. In wartime the military uses what the scientists developed in peacetime. Quite clearly the purest of pure science activity, chemical-element isolating, occurs under peaceful conditions.

This whole 760-year curve of pure-science isolations is altogether a curve of acceleration against calendar time.

I then recalled that what pure science does today does not get into the academic curricula for a few years. A few years later again applied science makes special case objective use of the pure-science finding as some invention. Use of the invention by industry begins to alter the environment of the everyday happenings. The altered environment calls for an evolutionary advancement of everyday human life.

I then said to myself that history makes it clear that environmental advancements alter life-styles and introduce new economic eras.

Because environmental-technology advancements embodying the technical advancements are clearly implemented by pure science's discoveries, and the altered environments introduce new eras in human experience, I asked myself to isolate out from all other inventing of history the unique stages of human-advantaging environment controls that made it possible for humans to thrive under conditions in which the humans would, but for the new environment control, perish and, from within the uniquely advanced life-style within the environment, accomplish control of energies operating outside the environment control, and therewith propel the environment-controlling device and its human occupants in one occupant-controlled complete circuit of the Earth.

Along the top of the chart, in 1520, we see how Magellan used a sailing vessel in which he went most of the way around the world before he was killed. His crew completed the circumnavigation, which took two years. Three hundred fifty years later, humans circumnavigated the globe in a steel steamship. Seventy-five years later, they circumnavigated in a special-alloy aluminum airplane. Thirty-five years later, they circumnavigated in an exotic metals rocket. The wooden sailing ship took two years to circumnavigate; the steel steamship, two months; the aluminum airplane took two weeks and the exotic metals rocket capsule took only a little over one hour to encircle the planet Earth.

In the successive circumnavigation arts no one at each successive stage could dream of the next stage of circumnavigation. We have on this chart .the curve of the basic acceleration of science accomplishments as plotted against time.

We have on the chart a second-degree acceleration manifest in the contraction of the lags between the successive circumnavigation from 350 years to sixty-five to thirty years between four states of the art of circumnavigation and a third-degree acceleration manifest in the contraction of time taken to circumnavigate from two years ... to two months ... to two weeks ... to one hour. It is implicit in the rate of contraction between completely inconceivable later arts that by 1985 we should be able to transmit humans around the globe by radio scanning or an equivalently unexpected means.

* * *

For those who wish to gain only a cursory concept of my prognosticating I point to my fifty-three-year-maintained curves of ephemeralization as manifest in a number of charts -- for instance, the one recording the annually decreasing pounds-per-delivered-horsepower of aircraft engines. The· tenth-anniversary issue of Fortune magazine (February 1940) has an article I prepared on industrialization in which many charts of ephemeralization in various technologies are shown.

In such comprehensive surveying of human experiences and the lessons we have learned it became progressively clearer that humans were given their minds to discover generalized principles and to. employ those principles objectively in special case technologies. That led me to assume that the class-two evolution was a designed-in but sometime-to-be-terminated phase of class-one evolution. It seemed logical, as humans progressed from absolute ignorance -- learning only by trial-and-error -- that they would go through a very long period of doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons. Quite clearly nature did not tell the honeybee to go out and cross-pollinate the vegetation. What nature did was to chromosomically program the honeybee to go after honey and inadvertently -- at right angles -- to cross-pollinate the vegetation. What nature told humanity chromosomically was, "I'm hungry, my kids are hungry; I'm cold, my kids are cold. Go after that food and that coat. They cost money -- go after money. They say you have to earn it. OK, I'll earn it." Buzz, buzz, honey-money bee. No human chromosomes say make the world work for everybody -- only mind can tell you that.

In support of the integrity of ecology's complex regeneration of life on planet Earth, class-one evolution first designed all the vegetation to photo-synthetically (syntropically) convert the randomly occurring en tropic Sun radiation into highly orderly molecular structures, which are consumed by other orderly molecule-proliferating biological organisms. That syntropic complex of ecological interactions not only made possible the gradual conduct of human society by mind instead of by cunning and muscle but also led to human minds' consciously acting as local-in-Universe information-harvesters and local-in-Universe problem-solvers, all in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.

It seemed that the time would come evolutionarily when humans might have acquired enough knowledge of generalized principles to permit a graduation from class-two (entropically selfish) evolution into class-one (syntropically cooperative) evolution, thereafter making all the right moves for all the right reasons.

This book should make it quite evident that I think humanity has now reached that critical moment of potential transformation of humans' affairs from class-two evolution into class-one evolution. Assuming that to be so, we look upon "Legally Piggily" (see Chapter 3) as the last and highest tide of doing all the wrong things for the unknown right reasons, just before reaching the condition of all of humanity having acquired enough of the right information to graduate from class-two evolutionary entropic nonsense into consciously competent syntropic participation in class one's eternally intertransforming evolution in support of the integrity of cosmic-scenario- Universe's eternal regeneration.

Prognostication is often a subjective science -- it anticipates what is going to happen to us. Navigation and ballistics are always objective sciences, for they make possible prognostication of what will happen if we employ the full family of mathematically integratable factors governing local systemic intertransformabilities, as permitted by the generalized principles, which always provide six alternative moves with every turn to play in "the game of Universe." These permitted six moves for each turn to play are the six edges of the tetrahedral system and are clearly explained in Synergetics, vol. 2, § 537.40.

Class-one evolution has succeeded in ever increasing the range, frequency, and safe velocity of human travel, exploration, and information growth. Further, humans have developed environment-controlling vehicles and local environment-controlling habitats that permit their survival under conditions uncopable-with prior to the technological evolution. All these are resultant upon human mind's being given access to the generalized principles governing the design of the successfully operating, eternally regenerative, scenario Universe.

The space programs entered into by the Russians and the Americans, because of the military implications of possible containment of one by the other, were class-two evolutionary events; however, they opened the possibility for humanity to participate consciously in class-one evolution's continual increase in the range, speed, and frequency of humanity's travel and information- gathering in local Universe as well as its participation in ever-more local problem-solving within the ever-greater ranges of Universe thus reached.

The space program integrated the sciences of navigation, ballistics, astrophysics, metallurgy, chemistry, and bio-anthropology. Bio-anthropology is the positive class-one evolution's anticipatorily undertaken improvement of both subjective and objective, energetic, environmentally controllable events in order to keep already-healthy life even healthier, whether in safely penetrating environments theretofore lethally hostile to human life or in just improving the chances for the healthiest to continue their optimum health or in multiplying the numbers of humans who enjoy optimum health -- working eventually toward avoiding any humans ever losing their optimum health.

Bio-anthropology is class-one evolution's takeover and expansion of class-two evolution's medicine, which copes essentially only with humans who have lost their good health.

The space program, as an integration of the plurality of projective-objective sciences, called for the employment of what is known as the "critical path" as the comprehensive design science's individual parts production, subassembly, general assembly, progressive full assembly testings, and launch scheduling.

A critical path develops an exhaustive list of all that has to be accomplished in order to arrive successfully at a given objective theretofore never reached. The Apollo Project was the official name of the undertaking that was to ferry humans over to and land them on the Moon and return them safely to mother -- Spaceship Earth.

The critical-path organization of the Apollo Project disclosed some two million tasks that had to be successfully accomplished before the human astronauts were to be returned safely to Spaceship Earth. NASA's Apollo management then put a scientifically and technically competent control group to work to identify all the approximately two million tasks, a million of which required technological performances the design, production, and successful operation of which had never before been undertaken by humans.

In this book we have set down our prehistory, our techno-social history of "Humans in Universe," and then in the "Legally Piggily" chapter we have chronicled the overall pattern of class-two evolutionary events that have, during the last half-century, gone critical -- bringing humanity to a moment of crisis adequate in magnitude to springboard humanity into oblivion or into a relatively utopian future.

Because automobiles were becoming ever-more popular in the 1920s and because they were using inherently exhaustible fossil fuels, such an approaching critical moment in human history as we are now experiencing was clearly visible to me and many others a half-century ago. I did not, however, know of any other humans who thought there was anything that they personally could do about this problem and any other such "too big" problems. Nonetheless, I committed my life to dealing only with total Spaceship Earth and all its passengers' regeneration. I have therefore included the chapter on the self-disciplines I adopted at thirty-two years of age at the 1927 outset (or soon thereafter) of my lifetime commitment. These disciplines were adopted in view of the physical magnitude and the metaphysical integrity involved in the balance-of-my-life commitment. Many of the disciplines are importantly relevant today in respect to the way in which unknown, economically insecure, individual humans may function effectively in this world crisis.

Soon after 1927 I developed the World Game as an especially important integration of the complex of self-adopted disciplines and tasks I found myself progressively adopting as the years passed and as my inventory of discovered errors and lessons thereby learned multiplied. Our chapters on the Geoscope and the World Game provide important frames of reference in the formulation of a critical-path chart of what humanity must accomplish within a decade -- or probably perish.

This last section of the book focuses on the critical path itself and constitutes my own single human being's inherently limited, 1927-and-thereafter, anticipatory formulations of the order of absolutely essential tasks to be successfully accomplished between 1927 and crossing of the epochal threshold into happy continuance of all humans in Universe. Others can and will vastly improve upon my critical path. What is now needed, however, is an "icebreaker" critical-path submission. Here it is, in the order of my spontaneous formulations of it.

In presenting it I need first to develop, if possible, some powerfully integrating generalizations of already-introduced concepts. For instance, we have developed the earlier concept of a system as dividing all the Universe into all the Universe outside the system -- the presently tuned-out, irrelevant macrocosm -- all the Universe inside the system -- the presently untuned-in, irrelevant microcosm -- and all the small remainder of the present, individually tuned-in Universe of which the Universe-dividing system consists, together with all of its presently integrated, common knowledge of tuned-in, omnirelevant considerations. Systems scientifically describe conceptual ramifications of thoughts and ideas. This omnicosmic, four-dimensional, geometrical conception of a system is a scientific generalization (see "System -- 400.00" in Synergetics, vols. 1 and 2).

Human organisms are systems. They are complex but very important systems of energetically operative, integral tools. Some of them are internally operative in manufacturing, maintaining, repairing, and replacing the whole inventory of specialized interior as well as generalized exterior tools. All of the integral exterior tools such as the human hand and eyes have highly generalized but circumstantially limited capabilities -- for instance, they cannot work nakedly above or below a very small temperature range, but within their temperature limits their uses are myriad.

Human mind, discovering principles, devises special case, less frequently employed, nonintegral, from-self-detached, craft tools. In due course human mind, discovering more principles, uses the organically integral tools to operate the simple, detached craft tools such as the stone hammer and knife, to produce much more effective generalized industrial tools, such as a blacksmith's forge and anvil, metal hammers and tongs, with which the smith in tum produces even more specialized tools, such as metal horseshoes and forged metal carpenter's hammers, to outperform wooden mallets and stone hammers. Human mind, stimulated by the succession of experiences attendant upon hitching an ox, a water buffalo, a camel, or an elephant to an earth-working tool, came to the discovery of the windmill and the waterwheel, and then coupled the windmill or waterwheel with a grain-grinding stone milling wheel; then in time conceived of the principle of using energy other than human muscle to operate a class of tools known as the machine tools, consisting of lathes, drill presses, metal planers, milling machines, grinding machines, shapers, slotters, etc. Each such machine tool performs in far finer, more powerful degree the metallic-substance-forming and surface-finishing functions initially performed in principle but under much more limited conditions only by the human hands and other of the integral organic exterior tools.

All of the foregoing involves energy as work and as matter and a complex of energy interexchanging. All such complex internal and external energy intertransforming and exchanging can be spoken of as interior and exterior metabolics.

We are gradually working toward a complex integration of many of our already-introduced complex concepts into a generalization of interior and exterior ballistics, which as energy intertransforming and exchanging can be spoken of as interior and exterior metaboIics.

How apt a name for the human organism is "an interior and exterior metabolic system." We find that in these interior and exterior metabolic systems, the interior tooling is highly generalized, while the exterior tools are highly specialized and able to cope with many variables, but that the data regarding the different toolings vary hardly at all, which is to say that the more nearly generalized the system, the less variable the inventory of its constituents, wherefore the great scientific generalizations are eternal and never vary. We find in the succession of naval science and arts that the navy yard machine tools varied hardly at all, being improved upon only slowly, and that the number-two science and art of designing fleets and ships and their integral interior ballistics varied more frequently than did the design of the navy yard machine tools, whereas the exterior ballistics and navigation dealt with swiftly changing sea and weather conditions, though the navigational mathematics of spherical trigonometry itself consisted of eternally invariant generalized principles.

We find our concept of industrialization to be an exterior-to-humans metabolic system.

We find our critical path to consist of a succession of omnirelevant, frequently varying, widely ranging, highly specialized exterior metabolic systems, being operated by humans, which humans themselves are limited-range, rarely variant, interior and exterior metabolic systems.

A. In the "Self-Disciplines" chapter of this book, I recounted that the larger the number of humans I undertook to serve, the more effective I became, wherefore I concluded that if I committed myself to serving everyone, I would be optimally effective.

B. I find the foregoing (A) to be sociologically akin to the hard-science fact that astronomy and astrophysics -- dealing in total-known-Universe -- enjoy humanity's farthest-ahead-in-time, reliable prognosticating record by a reliably proven prognosticated-events-margin of hundreds of years.

C. There seems to be a scientific generalization at work here that relates intimately to the phenomena synergy -- behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior or integral characteristics of any parts of the system when the parts are considered only separately. What is inferred here is that a competitive employment of the whole family of generalized principles employed to serve the successful human functioning in Universe renders one maximally effective.

All scientific generalizations are synergetic -- that is, they describe scientifically discovered interrelationships of system parts that vary in respect to one another at only mathematically describable different rates of change, which interrelationships are in no way suggested by separate inspection of anyone part of the system.

D. The generalization discovered to be commonly operative in the foregoing paragraphs A, B, and C says, "To be optimally effective, undertake at outset the most comprehensive task in the most comprehensive and incisively detailed manner."


In undertaking our critical-path development of a practically realizable means of bringing about all humanity's spontaneously realizable escape from fearfully ignorant self-destruction -- and entrance into a design-science-artifacts- produced-and-induced, sustainable, and unprecedentedly high standard of living for all, to be accomplished within a generation -- we are being taught by the foregoing paragraphs A, B, C, D, to immediately "undertake the greatest task with thorough commitment of attention to every detail."

We are being taught by all the foregoing to assume as closely as possible the viewpoint, the patience, and the competence of God.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:41 am

CHAPTER 8: Critical Path: Part Two

IN THE PRECEDING CHAPTER, "Critical Path: Part One," I sought to forestall any hesitance on the part of humanity to go "for the works." It is to be everything for everybody or oblivion.

While it is fairly simple to write a list of socioeconomic conditions we consider to be fundamental to omnihumanity's sustainable physical and metaphysical success, we must remember that our grand strategy is based on producing the artifacts that will induce the right behaviors rather than depending on politically enacted and enforced reforms. What we count on is political reaction in its bipartisan tail-of-the-dragon function, now flappingly, now snappingly, yielding one way or the other to society's vivid realization of the arrival of historically unprecedented crises and dawning awareness of the availability of possibly effective but unfamiliar technophysical means of coping with the ever-more-frequently-occurring crises as are occasioned by the practical development and availability of hitherto-nonexistent artifacts. Much of the successive emergencies will prove to be caused by society's adoption of only a few of all the artifacts -- development only of those artifacts that could be turned into the most immediate profits as fostered by the armaments appropriations.

The emergency-wrought political adjustment will go on until, in the stress of ever-greater emergency, society spontaneously adopts all of our critical path's artifacts. The great emergencies may finally force political society to "do the right things" for the right reasons. (I found my way into so doing, half a century ago, as occasioned, however, only by total crises in my own life -- why should not others do so?) If political society does decide to do the right tasks for the right reasons, it will probably find our critical-path artifacts to be both cogently and specifically essential.

In contradistinction to the critical path of the Apollo Project -- one-half of whose two million or so tasks to be accomplished involved the development of technology that was nonexistent at the outset of Apollo -- our critical path's inventory of essential technologies consists of 100-percentalready- developed technologies (see Appendix I, "Chronology of Scientific Discoveries and Artifacts"). Most of these are in use but in the production of the wrong systems-in the "weaponry" systems or in the "money-making- for-the-few" systems instead of in "high-wealth-livingry-production-for-all" systems.

For the foregoing reasons most of the tasks that need to be attended to in such a manner as to make all humanity sustainingly successful involve only the right application of the already-developed technologies which have been funded and applied to the wrong tasks. It must be remembered that the overwhelming reason for their being applied to the wrong tasks is the assumption of those commanding the political and economic power structures that there is a fundamental inadequacy of life support on our planet -- that it has to be "you or me," nowhere nearly enough for both.

Our 1927 and thenceforth developed critical path has no as-yet-to-be-accomplished technologies. It needs only the education of the world regarding the fact that invisible ephemeralization and acceleration now make what had previously seemed to be inadequate life support for all humanity to be rendered bounteously adequate.

The development of our omni-world-integrating electrical-energy network grid, which will realistically put all humanity on the same economic accounting system and will integrate the world's economic interests and value systems and lead most swiftly to the realistic elimination of the 150 sovereign- nation systems, needs only a relatively few geographical interlinking operations. It does not need the invention and development of new technologies.

Inasmuch as society's educational system's conditioned reflexes are half a millennium out of gear with the discovered facts of cosmic operation, a TV-accomplished, swift reorientation of humanity's reflexes to accord with the discovered facts is a high-priority critical path task. If humanity's reflexes were already updated and we were as yet behaving as ineptly as we are at present, then there would be no hope. You may recall that I have scientifically demonstrated the half-millennium-out-of-gearness with facts by demonstrating the misconditioned reflexes of humanity's leading scientists -- I have tested many audiences of scientists, who all admit they are as yet seeing the Sun "go down," though science has known for 500 years that this is not what is happening. Remember the wind blowing from the northwest when a low pressure to the southeast of us is drafting the wind by us. Remember we have established that there is no "up" or "down" in Universe, no "wide-wide-world," no "four-corners of the Earth," etc., etc.

It was the fact that my 1927 fifty-year critical-path technological stages had already been acceleratingly completed that made it possible for me to make public announcement ten years ago that it was feasible within a ten-year design science revolution -- while melting all weaponry and using those metals for livingry -- to have all humanity living at a sustainably higher standard of living than any humans have ever experienced while simultaneously phasing out all further use of fossil fuels and atomic energy -- because we can live comfortably and luxuriously on daily energy income from the Sun in its many derivative phases.

Because all the technology inventing and all the metals mining and other chemical materials necessary for developing sustainable, omniphysical, and increasingly metaphysical success for all humanity have already been accomplished, our critical path's overall strategy of realization differs greatly from that of the Apollo Project.

Our critical-path realization requirement is one of an omnihumanity TV and printed-media familiarization with the retrospective inventory, by dates and items, of history's totally known scientific discoveries and artifacts, all of which have been influential in such a manner as to induce the chain discovery of the relevant next-to-be-discovered-and-invented items, but also the social uses of them and the resultant reconditioning of human reflexes thereby brought about. The synergetic effect of all the discoveries and artifact inventions altogether plays a major part in implementing realization of the function of humans-in-Universe in support of the omni-self-regenerative scenario Universe. This whole history of already accomplished scientific discovery and technological invention is intimately relevant to our ten-year design science revolution wherein we divert all that accomplished technology from exclusively weaponry or money-making objectives to omnihumanity's omnisustainable physical success. Realization of this physical success is enabled by the now existence of the critical-path technologies needing only to be redirected from killingry to livingry purposes. What must be accomplished is the world-around TV and printed-media reorientation of humanity by the realistic scenarioing of the peaceful uses of the already-accomplished half-century accrual of the 1927-to-1979 critical-path-artifacts developments.

We discover, of course, that our half-century critical-path undertaking -- designed and initiated in 1927 -- is a class-two (or humanly contrived) evolution, which by good fortune (or by God's guidance) has coincided, along almost all of the half-century-long way, with the Universe's class-one evolutionary development -- possibly because we undertook at outset to design our human-contrived path as closely as possible to the way our mind told us "God" would design it.

I had, in 1927, little of the experience that people have today in critical-path designing. I did, however, think of it in exactly those same operational terms and stages as those employed by the Apollo Project's conceivers: "What are the first-things-first?" -- the number-one, -two, -three, and so forth artifacts to be accomplished in order to develop the ultimate environmental controls whose artifacts would be so safely, obviously operable and economically favorable as spontaneously to persuade humanity how to behave in grave moments of emergency in order to make decisions leading expeditiously to economic and physically sustainable success for all humanity.

Here follows my critical-path program of realization as first inscribed in 1927 and many times revised thereafter as Part IV of what I call: "Comprehensively Anticipatory Design Science's Universal Requirements for Realizing Omnihumanity Advantaging Local Environment Controls, Which are Omniconsiderate of Both Cosmic Evolution Potentials and Terrestrial Ecology Integrities."

Phase I, Individual

CRITICAL PATH TO ULTIMATE

IV. Realization


The whole program of realization is to be considered in the following order, which breaks into two primary categories or phases: (A) the initial work to be undertaken by the individual prior to engagement of the aid of associates, and (B) original and initial work to be undertaken by the first group of associates. These two phases may be organized as follows:

A. Research and development by initiating individual -- prior to inauguration of design action and development action involving fulltime employment of others. Inauguration of a general work pattern as a natural pattern coinciding with best scientific procedure, to wit:

Preliminary

Initiation of diary and notebook

Initiation of photographic documentation

Initiation of tactical conferences

1. Comprehensive library study of accrued arts

a. Past

b. Contemporary

c. Theory of design-pertinent arts to be studied by the initiating individual include:

(1) Anthropological data

(2) Energetic-synergetic geometry -- the philosophy of mensuration and transformation, relative size

(3) Theory of structural exploration

(4) Theory of mechanical exploration

(5) Theory of chemical exploration

(6) Energy as structure

(7) Dwelling process as an "energy exchange"

(8) Dwelling process as an "energy balance sheet"

(9) Theory of structural complex

(10) Theory of service complex

(11) Theory of process complex

(12) Theory of structural and mechanical logistics

(13) Theory of complex resolution

(14) Tensioning by crystalline, pneumatic, hydraulic, magnetic means

(15) Compressioning by crystalline, pneumatic, hydraulic, magnetic means

2. Listing therefrom of authorities available for further information:

a. Local, personal contact

b. Remote correspondence

3. Pursuant to information thus gained, calling at suggested local laboratories:

a. University

b. Industry

c. Setting up of informative tests for firsthand knowledge in own laboratory

4. First phase of design assumption:

a. Consideration of novel, complex interaction unique to project

b. Preferred apparatus from competitive field

c. Design of appropriate ftowsheets

5. Flowsheets submitted to:

a. Those competitive specialists who have proved helpful in steps 3b and 3c

b. Industrial producers of similar equipment and assemblies

c. Make informative tests for closure of gaps supporting assumed theory

6. Submit specifications and drawings of general assembly and unique component parts for informative bids by manufacturers:

a. Second redesign of flowsheet based on available and suggested apparatus, price information, etc.

7. Prepare report consisting of diary of above, supported by photographic documentation and collected literature -- with trial-balance conclusions in indicated economic advantage (which, if positive, will inaugurate Phase II)

Phase II, Collective

IV. B. Design and development undertaking -- involving plural-authorship phase and specialization of full-time associates. Consideration of relationship of prototype to industrial complex by constant review of principles of solution initially selected as appropriate to assumptions. Adoption of assumptions for realization in design of pertinent principles and latest technology afforded.

1. Comprehensive survey of entire sequence of operations from original undertaking to clientele synchronization. Realization strategy number 1 by individual (Phase I). Realization strategy number 2 by associates (Phase II).

a. Physical tests in principle of the design assumptions' unique inclusions not evidenced in available data

b. General-assembly drawings (schematic) providing primary assembly drawing schedule reference

c. General-assembly assumption, small-scale models, and mock-up full size

d. Primary assembly, subassembly, and parts calculations (stress)

e. Trial balance of probable parts weights, direct manufacturing costs (approximately three times material costs; includes labor, ,supervision, and inspection), forecast of overall cost magnitudes, and curve plotting -- at various rates of production, ratioed to direct costs per part and "all other costs" -- i.e., "overhead," tool and plant "amortization," "contingencies," "profit"

f. "Freezing" of general assembly and its reference drawing

g. Drawing for first full-size production prototype commences in general assembly, primary assembly, subassembly, and parts

h. Budget of calculating and drawing time is set, with tactical deadlines for each

i. Parts drawing and full-size lofting and offset patterns

j. Prototype parts 'production on "soft tools" commences

k. Subassembly and primary assemblies replace mock-up parts

l. Physical tests of parts and subassemblies with obvious corrections and necessary replacements (not improvements or desirables, which must be deferred until second prototype is undertaken, after all-comprehensive physical tests have been applied)

m. Photography of all parts and assemblies

n. Full assembly completed and inspected-cost

o. Static load tests

p. Operation tests

q. Assembly and disassembly

r. Photography of all phases

s. Packaging and shipping tests

t. Estimates of savings to be effected by special powered field tools

u. Opinion testing

v. Final production "clean-up" prototype placed in formal calculation and drawing with engineering budgeted deadlines

w. Parts cost scheduled by class A tools and time

x. Production tool layout fixed

y. Production tools ordered

z. Production dates set

a-1 Lofting and offsets produced of full-size test "masters" and templates

b-1 Fabrication of special jigs and fixtures

c-1 Production materials ordered

d-1 Production tool-jig-fixture tune-up

e-1 Parts and assembly testing

f-1 Field operation scheduling

g-1 Field tools ordered

h-1 Distribution strategy in terms of initial logic limitations

i-1 Field tests with special tools

j-1 Fidd tools ordered or placed in special design and fabrication

k-1 Test target area selected for first production

l-1 Production commences

m-1 First field assemblies with power tools

n-1 Maintenance service instituted and complaints

(1) Alleviated

(2) Analyzed

(3) Change orders of parts instituted

o-1 Plans for "new" yearly model improvement run through all or previous steps-for original production

p-1 Cycle repeated

2. Production and distribution velocity assumption

3. Plotting the assumed progressive mass-production curbs to determine basic velocities of new industry

4. Tensioning by crystalline, pneumatic, hydraulic, magnetic means

5. Compressioning by crystalline, pneumatic, hydraulic, magnetic means

6. Consideration of manufacturer's basic production forms-relative to proposed design components for determination of minimum steps, minimum tools, and minimum waste in realization

7. Establishment of priority hierarchies of effort

8. Time-and-energy cost budgeting

9. Assumption of industry responsibility for field practices, not only in mechanical and structural, but in economic design

10. Designing for specific longevity of design appropriate to anticipated cycles of progressive obsolescence and replacement ability as ascertained from comprehensive economic-trend curves

11. Designing with view to efficient screening of component chemicals for recirculated employment in later designs

12. Maxima and minima stated and realized performance requirements per unit of invested energy and experience, and capital advantage of tools and structures employed and devised

13. Logistics assumptions, compacted shipping considerations as original design requirement in

(a) Nesting

(b) Packaging

(c) Compounded package weight

(d) Relationship to carriers of all types

(e) Field delivery

(f) Field assembly

(g) Field service and replacement

14. Consideration of tool techniques

15. Consideration of materials' availability

16. Consideration of materials' ratio per total design

17. Elimination of special operator technique forming

18. Elimination of novel soft-tool designing

19. Numbers of

(a) Types

(b) Repeat parts

(c) Subassemblies

(d) Primary assemblies

20. Number of forming operations

21. Number of manufacturing tools by types

22. Schedule of forming operations included on parts drawings

23. Decimal fraction man-hours per operation

24. Designed-in overall one-man-ability at every stage of operation

25. Schedule of design routines and disciplines

26. Establish a "parts" inventory of "active" and "obsolete" drawings -- from beginning

27. Establish a "parts" budget of "required" designs of "parts" for assemblies and major assembly and general assembly and molds

28. Drawing dimension standards

29. Establish a numbering system of controlled part

30. Establish purchasing techniques, jig-and-fixture, lofting techniques

C. Public relations -- to run concurrently with all phases of IV (B)

1. Education of public

Rule 1: Never show half-finished work

a. General magnitude of product, production, distribution. But no particulars that will compromise latitude of scientific design and production philosophy of IV (B)

b. Publicize the "facts" -- i.e., the number of steps before "consumer realization"

c. Understate all advantage

d. Never seek publicity

e. Have prepared releases for publisher requests when "facts" are ripe

• • •

That my 1927 half-century critical path's realization is seemingly two years overdue is an illusion -- it took two years to design it, so it did not become effectively operative until 1929 -- which is just over a half-century ago.

My 1927 path designing was deliberately undertaken with the following first-things-first objectives:

I must avoid setting too short an overall consummation period for my critical path. It was of prime importance that I adopt a target date so far in the future as to avoid making uneasy any of the power structures of 1927 -- which might feel that their interests were threatened by what I was proposing. It was necessary that I reach so far beyond the power structures' research-determined vision of their most forward development that my concepts would appear to be either a pleasant "pipe dream" or innocuous nonsense.

I was able to do exactly that. The most powerful people I knew found me utterly unaccreditable but "interesting" -- and to some "fascinating." This induced them to invite me to their parties to entertain their guests with my "dreaming out loud." For this reason the power structure's press very frequently gave my projects prominent publicity -- because they found my concepts popularly entertaining, they published them ever more frequently and prominently, hoping for advertisements-inducing, increased readership. In 1930 the author of "Buck Rogers" told me that he frequently used my concepts for his cartoons.

I will now discuss the probable order of livingry-reoriented realization of the socioeconomic results of our already-accomplished, half-century, critical- path-artifacts development. I will discuss the operationally introduced sequence of their realizations in terms of the many critical-path-relevant subjects that I also have introduced throughout this book.

For instance, we have pointed out that the geologist Francois de Chardenedes wrote for me a scenario of the technology of nature's producing petroleum which disclosed that the amount of energy employed by nature as heat and pressure for the amount of time required to produce each gallon of petroleum, if paid for at the rate at which the public utilities now charge retail customers for electricity, must cost over a million dollars a gallon. Combine that information with the discovery that approximately 60 percent of the employed in U.S. America are working at tasks that are not producing any life support. Jobs of inspectors-of-inspectors; jobs with insurance companies that induce people to bet that their house is going to be destroyed by fire while the insurance company bets that it isn't. All these are negative preoccupations ... jobs with the underwriting of insurance underwriters by other insurance underwriters -- people checking up on one another in all the different departments of the Treasury, the Internal Revenue, FBI, CIA, and in counterespionage. About 60 percent of all human activity in America is not producing any physical life protection, life support, or development accommodation, which physical life support alone constitutes real wealth.

The majority of Americans reach their jobs by automobile, probably averaging four gallons a day -- thereby, each is spending four million real cosmic- physical-Universe dollars a day without producing any physical Universe life-support wealth accredited in the energy-time -- metabolic -- accounting system eternally governing regenerative Universe. Humans are designed to learn how to survive only through trial-and-error-won knowledge. Long-known errors are, however, no longer cosmicly tolerated. The 350 trillion cosmic dollars a day wasted by the 60 percent of no-wealth-producing human job-holders in the U.S.A., together with the $19 quadrillion a day wasted by the no-wealth-producing human job-holders in all other automobiles- to-work countries, also can no longer be cosmicly tolerated.

Today we have computers that enable us to answer some very big questions if all the relevant data is fed into the computer and all the questions are properly asked. As for instance, "Which would cost society the least: to carry on as at present, trying politically to create more no-wealth- producing jobs, or paying everybody handsome fellowships to stay at home and save all those million-dollar-each gallons of petroleum?" State~ evermore succinctly the big question will be: "Which costs more -- paying all present job-holders a billionaire's lifelong $400,000-a-day fellowship to stay at home, or having them each spend $4 million a day to commute to work?" Every computer will declare it to be much less expensive to pay people not to go to work. The same computers will also quickly reveal that there is no way in which each and every human could each day spend $400,000 staying at the most expensive hotels and doing equally expensive things; they could rarely spend 4000 of the 1980-defiated dollars a day, which is only 1 percent of a billionaire's daily income.

Why would all the people not continually buy all kinds of expensive things? Answer ... because they will want to travel around the world, and they will quickly discover that while you can't take it with you into the next world, you also can't take it with you around this world. They will each discover for themselves that the greatest luxury in the world is to be able to live unencumbered while able to get any information you want in split seconds and any desirable environmental condition you want in a day.

The actuarial curve indicates an eighty-year life expectancy by 2000 A.D. This amounts to 700,800 hours per lifetime. I would like to make some assumptions regarding the future use by humans of those hours. I'm assuming the present average is a forty-hour work week and forty-nine work weeks per year. This amounts to 156,800 potential birth-to-death work hours per lifetime. If we spent only forty of our eighty years at work, that would be 78,400 lifetime work hours. As of our present life-style, we would be giving 11 percent of our lifetime to work in producing for self or for others.

For instance, a four-day work week of five hours per day with a three-day weekend would result in living in the same spot and clogging up the highways with local weekend to-and-froing. We now propose instead of chopping life into work-week increments that we consolidate our work service potential into a few years of continuous six-day-per-week, eight-hour-per- day service as in the military or medical internship.

Assuming that as a result of technological advances, the machines can produce adequate life-support in half the present time. Present-day custom would adopt a three-day, five-hour-per-day work week. This means twenty hours per week is all that is necessary to tend the machines that accomplish adequate life-support production. The internship service concept is composed of an eight-hour-per-day, six-day work week, a total of forty-eight hours per week. Because of mechanical advance, we are now assuming that the forty-hour week is reducible to a twenty-hour work week. This means that our originally required lifetime work service of 78,400 hours has through technical advance been reduced to 36,200 lifetime work hours. At the constant intern service rate of 48 hours per week, the 36,200 hours of lifetime production can be accomplished in 754 weeks or fourteen and a half years.

We are now going to assume a college- or university-level education available to all humans -- probably to be effected through a stay-at-home, video call-up procedure involving six years in all. We assume that there is great advantage to the individual of having work-years' experience intervening between the bachelor degree and graduate work. We assume entry into bachelor work at eighteen years of age. This means that at twenty-one years of age the students can enter upon their internship production service consisting of forty-eight-hour work weeks. The students will then enter upon four years of this total fourteen and a half years of production service responsibility. This brings them to age twenty-five. They will then enter upon their three years of graduate work greatly informed by their production-work years. At twenty-eight the graduate students will enter upon their final ten years of production service. At thirty-eight they will have completed their service in direct production support of humanity. With their wisdom probably evolved, they will have more than half their lives still to live. They will be extremely well informed. They will be free to initiate their own mind-informed commitments to the improvement of human functioning in support of the eternally regenerative integrity of Universe.

It is very probable that the technological advances will be far greater than those of the foregoing assumptions.

At present all the great new city office buildings have fancy plumbing (with which only the typewriters sleep) while a majority of city people sleep in inferior quarters with poor plumbing. The moment we start giving everyone those handsome life fellowships, we will find almost all the great new business buildings in the cities being depopulated to such an extent that we shall, in quick order, be able to turn those buildings into great apartment houses and hotels to accommodate the free-will residential convergences of humanity in central cities. Although such skyscrapers are far less efficient than the "ultimate" city buildings, they will provide a satisfying step forward in accommodating humanity's successively occurring desires and needs to deploy into wilderness country or archeological research country or sports country or to converge to meet with other humans for conferences or other collateral developments of which there will be an ever-multiplying, exciting availability.

* * *

Along with making it economically feasible to permit a large majority of people to remain at home in country or city, to think fearlessly and unselfishly, we will permit all children to study at home, eliminating the schoolhouse, schoolteachers, school janitors, and school-bus systems, which cost unnecessary trillions of dollars world-around each school year. At home we shall provide each child with a private room, television set, and video-education cassettes as well as world-satellite-interrelayed computer and controlled video-encyclopedia access. These will make it possible for any child anywhere to obtain lucidly, faithfully, and attractively presented authoritative information on any subject.

Students will be able to review the definitions and explanations of several authorities on any given subject, as there are different viewpoints of a number of great scholars on any given subject. The system will never get tired of answering the questions or even the same questions asked and answered until the child is sure that he or she has understood. To make children evermore confident of their understanding and useful enjoyment of their thoughts, each will be given access to basic tools and direct experiences in the purposeful use of the tools.

Children and grown people will be able to get their continuing intellectual education ... at their home terminals. They will get their social experience and tool-handling education in locally organized neighborhood activities when humans wish to converge.

All those who have attained high scholarly capability assure us that the only real education is self-education. They also say that this self-disciplining is most often inspired by great teachers who make it seem apparent that it will be excitingly worthwhile to take the trouble to bring oneself to apprehend and then comprehend variously pertinent data, phenomena, and derived principles. The intimate manuscript records of all the great self-educated individuals show that they discern intuitively when and what it is that they want to learn. Thereafter they arrange to do so by four main strategies. The first is by self-conducted experiments, if they are scientists. The second is by going to those live humans who have educated themselves from direct experiences. The third is to contact through books those who have discovered and learned but are now dead. Fourth, they sometimes have recourse to the esoteric and often exquisitely valuable information contained within the word-of-mouth information system relayed almost exclusively from generation to generation by the craftsmen-artists.

At heart fearful of losing their jobs, the tenured professional educators of today and all those earning a living by teaching are relentlessly fighting video. Since it would damage their position to tell the truth regarding their motives, the tenured pedants rationalize, "What the children need is the personal equation." What I've long observed in the moving picture world is millions and millions of human beings falling in love with female heroines or male heroes, though knowing only their photographic images cast upon a blank wall. All "the personal equation" was, and as yet is, transmitted probably a little more poignantly by electronics than would ever be feasible in ordinary, personal-contact life.

After beginning to receive their home-research lifetime fellowships and trying the video educational system themselves, professors and researchers won't protest anymore about loss of the "personal equation" in education.

I am certain that none of the world's problems -- which we are all perforce thinking about today -- have any hope of solution except through total democratic society's becoming thoroughly and comprehensively self-educated. Only thereby will society be able to identify and intercommunicate the vital problems of°total world society. Only thereafter may humanity effectively sort out and put those problems into order of importance for solution in respect to the most fundamental principles governing humanity's survival and enjoyment of life on Earth.

* * *

I find one result after another of the last half-century's critical path of now-fulfilled, relevant artifact-inventions and developments demonstrating unexpectedly intimate interrelatedness and unanticipated synergetic ecosocial productivity. Number one, we shall find that we do indeed have enough "good-life resources" to go around. The computer will continually direct us back to basics. The computer will call our attention to the many relevant new potentials of the synergetic integration of critical-path events. If we continue to use our resources -- metaphysical and physical -- properly, there will continue to be ample to take care of all humanity: food, energy, shelter, travel, research, cultural development, inventive initiative in all the technologies, etc.

Obviously the first step is to pay people the handsome fellowships to stay at home and say to themselves, "What was I thinking about before I was first told, convincingly, that I had to 'earn a living' by doing what someone else said I had to do?" Then let them discover that their fellowship income will permit them to travel objectively to search and research and engage in creative or productive endeavors anywhere around the world.

With complete freedom of choice, much of humanity will begin to discover that it loves to work at tasks of its own choosing -- that it loves to discipline itself to demonstrate its competence to others -- that it will compete with the many to demonstrate its competence to serve on one of the multitude of production teams. There would be no pay for the work. It would be like qualifying for the Olympic team to be allowed to do what you want to do. You would have to prove that you could do the job you wanted to do better than anyone else available to get onto the production teams. Permission to serve on the world's production teams will be the greatest privilege that humanity can bestow on an individual. There is no joy equal to that of being able to work for all humanity and doing what you're doing well. It is difficult to match the gratification of not just crudely crafting a plaything for one child (which indeed can be very rewarding), but of producing exquisite somethings for a billion children. Activities of this kind are reinspirational to a mystical degree.

As with all humanity there would be no life-support problems whatever for those on the production teams. There would be no attempt to block automation to keep human muscle and repetitive-selection jobs operative. If any individual wants to leave a team to have other experience or to serve elsewhere, a replacement would be found on the waiting list of others who want to take on the job. There would be the continual inspiration to invent more automation -- to emancipate humans from performing only sterile muscle-and-sorting functions. Those who are real craftsmen and are good at developing the tools-that-make-tools and love their work will be the heart of the production teams. There will be no need to earn more because your fellowship will always get you more than you want. You won't be able to buy any nonconsumables -- you will only be able to rent. If you are renting more than you can use, the system will call the excess back.

Those who love to teach and have something valuable to teach can discipline themselves to qualify for membership on the subject-scenario-writing teams or on the video-cassette or disc production teams. Great scholars will thrive -- whatever their fields may be. They will be free to devote their entire time to their labors of love. Vast numbers will discover that they are earnest, capable independent-research scholars. What they have to say, if unique, can become the subject of a video-cassette, world-satellite-relayed encyclopedia entry.

In 1927 the only plastics we had were celluloid -- a nitrocellulose development, by-product of explosive nitroglycerine. Celluloid was hygroscopic and highly flammable. Quite clearly plastic materials of many kinds were desirable substances, as transparent and waterproof as glass but not easily breakable and of much lighter weight. We had in 1927 hard rubber fountain pens and casein (milk-derived) poker chips but nothing larger. Wanting better materials and looking at one's own fingernails, one could say that such and such a material is ostensibly feasible, so it will be developed. You then made a comprehensive list of all the desirable materials, and you kept a dated list of the times of their actual accomplishment. With a list of all the desired technologies you also kept a chronological chart of their successive realizations. You then compounded the information these observations were providing with your list of all the successively advancing structural-strength and mechanical-workability properties of all the metals. You continually compared these development records with your list of desired materials -- those that would make possible solutions of various livingry problems. Such scientific research and engineering development of prototyping technologies to ever profit the total life-support and accommodation facilities will be one of the most popular production-team tasks.

The critical path already accomplished in the last fifty years makes all this and much more immediately possible of development. It would not be possible to consider many of these strategies prior to the invention on this planet of certain artifacts: for example. the rocketry-accomplished satellites or recent decades' proliferation of computers would not have been possible without the discovery of transistors, which would not have been possible without the prior discovery and development of all the discovering and inventing of all history. (See Appendix I.)

It was, however, possible in 1927 to see that such only-now-in-1980-physically- possible capabilities were and would always be desirable for society. Without being able to predict the discovery of transistors, chips, optical fibers, etc., it was easily possible to dream in 1927 that anything we needed to do could be done -- never mind how -- and to say to oneself, "I want a device like a fairy wand, which I need only wave while stating audibly the results I wish," and that this would be accomplished by subvisible, atomic behaviors. Whether this was to be done at the push of a button was of no real consequence. It is what we need and want to do that is reasonable that counts. My fifty-three-year critical path has proven that. I did not just state what was desired. I saw that it was my responsibility to undertake to design the artifacts that would best produce the desired results. Then, as first presented with new discoveries and developments by others, I must redesign my artifacts to take advantage of the now-proven additional technical capabilities.

For a number of reasons I felt doors that would open automatically on a human's approach would be desirable, and so I specified such automatically opening doors in my 1927 Dymaxion House. I also specified that they should fold sidewise in accordion pleats, so that the opened door-edge would not intercept the approaching human and cause a collision. My brother was an engineer on the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, staff of General Electric. A year after I had incorporated the foregoing equipment in the design of my proposed Dymaxion House, my brother telegraphed me to let me know that a General Electric scientist had just invented the photoelectric cell which, upon interruption of a light beam focused upon it, would activate a door opening by a miniature electric motor. As a practical and very reliable engineer, my brother considered my serious inclusion, in my designing, of technology that had not as yet been invented to be "lying" to myself and others. The critical-path concept had not as yet been conceived and incorporated in engineering-school curricula, so his telegram read, "Thank God, the just-invented photoelectric cell has saved you from being a liar. You can get one from General Electric for seventy dollars." The accordion-like foldable door also had not yet been invented in 1927. It was invented ten years later, once more saving me from "being a liar." So it went with hundreds of my half-century-to-come critical-path artifact inclusions of 1927.

Therewith I made the working assumption that "wishes are reasonable," that wishes defined the functions of not-as-yet-invented but highly desirable technology. It is, in fact, the as-yet-ungratifiable everyday needs that always inspire inventors in general. What you want for yourself may never be gratified. What you want for everybody, because you can see the total benefits that can accrue, is usually reasonable and technologically gratifiable, and to be realized possibly within your own generation.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:43 am

PART 1 OF 2

CHAPTER 9: Critical Path: Part Three

WITHOUT LOSING SIGHT of all the foregoing, to which I will return later, I'd like to turn our attention to soil and land conservation and its essential functioning in support of total ecological regeneration and the work of those who would like to be on the productivity teams for reforesting the world as well as those working on ways to hold onto and regenerate the fertile topsoils -- the people who are concerned in a very major way with the planet Earth as a total crystalline, hydraulic, and pneumatic system.

We can harness great streams and let gravity pull water inward to the sea while returning and reducing the runoff of topsoil-carrying-water. We can dam areas to recover washed-away topsoil as yet resident in freshwater lakes and streams and, using off-peak wind-power generation, repump bottom silts to dry land to enrich the soil's surfaces.

The engineering and planning teams of our post-1980-1990 world crisis period will look at our whole planet only omniconsiderately, whether dealing with the conservation of the soil or with how to employ gravity hydraulically, in an omni-intelligent and omniconsiderate manner: for instance, to irrigate most effectively, never again thinking in terms of individual local economies or individual material advantage terms, but thinking only in terms of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe as aided locally by total planetary ecology support and thereby omnihuman support. In respect to optimum omniecology conservation there are some immediate-past-history experiences to be considered.

As recounted in our "Legally Piggily" chapter, during the time of the 1926 "bad hog market," which led to the 1929 Great Crash, which led in turn to the 1933 New Deal, after all the farmers had been displaced by the banks foreclosing on their farm mortgages and their farm machinery, the no-longer-worked-and-irrigated land dried out, and the wind-storm "dust bowls" began to grow and to blow away the topsoils; this sequence, followed by heavy rains, brought about vast land erosion.

The 1933-inaugurated New Deal instituted a program to rebuild the soil and get the farmers back on the land. They erected what they called "shelterbelts," produced by high hedges initially produced with swiftly and thickly growing Osage orange trees augmented progressively with other varieties of slower- but higher-growing bushes and trees. These high hedges enclosed square "sections" -- quarter square miles -- of potentially rich farmland. These shelterbelts wrought miracles in recapturing the as-yet-wind-borne soils and new, daily, stardust receipts of our planet. Altogether they rebuilt the soil throughout the last flat plains and prairies of the United States.

Using the knowledge gained in producing the U.S.A. shelterbelts, the recovery of fertile land from desert in Israel, accomplished twenty years later, was an extraordinary vindication of the New Deal agricultural department's soil-building theory. The Israeli shelterbelts were started in deserts with the water-capturing eucalyptus trees -- all of whose roots collect local ground water. In the shelterbelt growth there is a decade-long series of planting of different kinds of tree and bush growths, which growth finally forms huge, high, dense, linear barriers of trees and bushes.

As they put farmers back on the land, the New Deal discovered that the productivity in America was such that with only 7 percent of the world's population here in North America (including the people of Canada and Mexico), the North American farms greatly overproduced its people's needs. Had they been able to look realistically at the whole Earth in terms of total productivity of the planet and the needs of all its people, administered by one world government, it would have been a different story. It still can be a different story.

Until after World War II there was no mechanical refrigeration of railway or highway vehicle transport. From 1900 until 1950 we had progressively re-iced refrigerator freight cars for railway transport of fresh meat and fruit. So many of the artifacts that now make possible special-environment- maintaining container-car conditions were not available until after World War II. In 1933 the technology was not yet suitable for serving the rest of the world's food needs from America, so farm overproductivity became frequent. In the game of food marketing in America entrepreneurs gain as money, in minutes of market trading, the major portion of the real life-support wealth produced by the farmers' year-long labor. For instance, cattlemen produce the original cattle that are sold to feeding and fattening farms in a series of price markups before the food finally reaches the dining room table. Of the present price paid by you and me for beefsteak, the cattlemen receive only a small percentage. Incidentally, all the com and other grains fed to the cattle to fatten them renders those grains and kernels saleable as fat for prices tenfold what they bring simply as grain. The fat is useless to the buyer, but the hoax-myth that it makes the meat more palatable makes it impossible to buy the beef without the fat. If all the com and grain going into useless fat were converted into alcohol for driving our cars, it would take care of much of our energy fuel needs.

In the 1920s and 1930s overproduction in U.S.A. farming frequently drove the prices paid to the farmer substantially below his costs, let alone his unpaid-for labor and worry. So the New Deal established what it called "the ever-normal-grainery," which recognized the farmer as the one to be protected. In "the ever-normal-grainery" the U.S.A. government stockpiled against periodic crop shortfalls. Under this program local representatives of the government would seal the farmers' harvests in local grain bins and pay them a fixed price adequate to cover their operating costs. Keeping surplus grain off the market kept the prices up. The New Deal U.S.A. government was, in fact, engaging in across-the-board price-fixing of everything -- metals, oils, rents, wages, bank loans, etc. The farmer was paid to keep much of his land out of production, thus fostering productive acreage crop rotation for rebuilding the soil and other sound cultivating practices. For instituting all of those periodically unproductive acreage practices the government awarded the farmer a generous annual per-acre bonus.

This is how the government came to pay farmers for keeping acreage out of production as well as fixing prices so that farmers would not be victimized by the greed of the middlemen. Now for the "Legally Piggily" side of the story.

During the half-century since 1926 another set of class-one evolution events occurred which often seemed to be only-humanly-planned-and-contrived class-two evolution. In the "Legally Piggily" chapter we noted how the farmers' machinery was seized by the banks when the banks foreclosed on the farms. When the New Deal arrived, the banks owned vast quantities of farm machinery. It was rarely sold back to the individual farmers. They had no money or income enough to warrant a loan to them. Private-enterprise mobile brigades for mechanically planting, cultivating, and harvesting were formed and bought much of the bank-replevined farm machinery, which they transported by trucks from state to state, town to town, and farm to farm. These mobile farm-operating brigades start in the Deep South in early spring, moving north with the spring and their truck-mounted farm machinery. They travel together in caravans, with human mechanics aboard to operate the machinery which they unload at their local stops. Their crews occupy all the motels in the small farm towns along the way. Plowing and sowing seeds all the way northward, they turn around at the northern borders of the U.S.A. and return to the South to progressively reap the now-ready harvest with their CB radiotelephone-interlinked reaping-machinery crews. The grain harvested is now stored in the former "ever-normal-grainery" bins. The mobile-harvesting teams' managers then go to the local banks and are given certificates of receipt, which they then forward to the offices of the no-longer-locally-resident owners of the farmlands. These owners are no longer "farmers" or even nonfarmer individual humans. They are great business conglomerates.

In most areas of the American economy huge conglomerate money-making businesses have swept together many smaller money-making acquisitions; no single product name can adequately describe the vast moneymaking characteristics of these new conglomerates. Only a unique collection of alphabetical letters now identifies them. These conglomerates had nothing to do anymore with the "personal equation" idea of history's originally locally-owned-and-managed businesses.

"Practical" -size farm acreages rapidly grew from a hundred to thousands of acres, serviced mechanically by the already-described roving teams of workers. When the great corporations bought these farmlands, they bought with them the U.S.A. government's agreements to pay annual per-acre bonuses to the owners to compensate them for their nonearning, soil-conserving, rotationally unused acres.

Sponge-sucking together of a plethora of profit-wise-successful small enterprises -- both of the invisible, metallurgical, chemical, and electronic revolution and of the highly profitable, successful, older visible-product companies -- has produced conglomerates so powerful as to overwhelm the credit and business-doing capabilities not only of approximately all small single-category-of-production corporations but of all the old individually owned general store businesses.

Just as humans' names at one time indicated their occupations -- Smith was a blacksmith, though successive generations of his progeny Smiths no longer smote -- in the same way today's corporations' names mean nothing. International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) company now owns and operates book publishing companies, makes musical instruments, bakes bread, and engages in hundreds of other essentially unrelated businesses. For this reason these super-supermarket conglomerates are now adopting multi-initial names and logos without providing the public any means of knowing what the initials stand for.

Many of the great conglomerates have such power and size -- as, for instance, Exxon, OM or IBM -- that anyone of their annual business acreages, values of machinery, numbers of employees, budgets, etc., dwarf the corresponding acreage, plants, structures, budgets, and population of many of the world's nations.

A man named Edward Higbee was the first ever to write an article on this subject for Time magazine (June 29, 1962, pp. 10-11). Everyone at that time assumed that the American farmer was on the land and was a great political power. As I've mentioned earlier, when I was young, 90 percent of humanity in America lived and worked on the farms. "There resided the great grass-roots votes." Today only 7 percent live and work on the farms. Higbee caught on long ago to the fact that the farmers were no longer living and working on the farmland, though all the politicians in Washington thought they were on the land. The politicians were misinformedly doing everything they could to curry the voting favor of those vast-majority-of-the- population "farmers" supposedly living and working "out there" on the land. There were, however, almost no real, live human farmers out there on the farms whose votes they could curry with their favors. In a magnificently well-written two-page article in Time Higbee suddenly brought some but not all of the politicians to the realization that their picture of the "farmer" was mistaken. Many of the politicians found it "worth their while" to maintain the old picture in the public's concept. It provided invisible latitude for their wheeling and dealing.

Because everybody was living in cities, thousands of miles away from the farms, the public illusion that all the farms were being lived on and were being worked by those farmers has persisted to this day. The illusion persists despite the fact that superhighways- and automobile-touring Americans drive and fly ever more frequently across the vast farmlands of the country. The illusion is sustained by the clusters of tree-surrounded farmhouses, barns, chicken houses, silos, and sometimes windmills, which always lie on the horizon because the farmers did not wish to live or have their livestock near the roads, and the superhighways have been led along the outer "section lines." The fact that they are unoccupied cannot be seen at remote distances. Once in a while one of those farms is occupied by a conglomerate superintendent. The smoke from his house implies that all the farms are occupied. Seen from airplanes, the same illusion exists.

The big corporations have been taking advantage of all the favorable-to-the- corporations' sentimental illusions of the presence of farmers, gaining along with their enormous uncultivated farmland acquisitions large subsidies paid out by the U.S. government for "farmers' " rotationally unused farmland acreage. Billions of dollars of government subsidies now go to the conglomerate farmland owners.

In the "Legally Piggily," lawyer-capitalism-controlled time of Eisenhower Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Butz said, "You conglomerates can cut out all the green belts. There is a tremendous amount of valuable bonus-earning unused acreage under those shelterbelts." Suddenly all the shelterbelts were bulldozed away, so the conglomerate farmland owners could now legally claim the bulldozed-in to-existence unplanted land to be "withheld production acreage," upon which they could realize very sizeable government subsidies. In 'vain did the few Mennonite and other religious sect farmers of Kansas's -- and other states' -- corn and wheat lands complain about the returning dust bowl occasioned by the bulldozing away of those shelterbelts.

We've talked in this book about entropy and syntropy: The entropic stars exporting energy as radiation; and the syntropic loci in Universe where energy is being imported and converted from radiation to matter. We noted how; despite Boltzmann's brilliant reasoning, the syntropic importing loci of Universe have not been scientifically accreditable as existing because they are astronomically invisible. They are invisible because of not giving off any radiation. We noted that the planet Earth is one of those syntropic energy-importing places -- the only one we know of -- where the entropic Sun radiation is constantly being impounded by the syntropic photosynthesis of the vegetation and converted from random radiation receipts into beautiful, orderly molecular structures (matter), with other living creatures and organisms in turn consuming the vegetation-produced molecules and thereby syntropically "growing" physically by themselves, producing large numbers of chemically orderly molecules. We observe this great syntropic operation pattern to be manifest in the natural ecology of our planet.

Some of the businesspeople described in "Legally Piggily" and others in political bureaucracies are willfully entropic, arguing that "ends justify means." For instance, almost all businesspeople undertake to make all the money they can in as short a time as possible both for their stockholders and themselves. The money they make is not the medium of exchange -- gold, silver, and copper coinage -- but the entirely "abstract," matterless numbers of digit dollars entered into their respective, legally valid credit accounts in the bank ledgers, or as manifest in the stocks and bond portfolios of individuals certifiably owning the corporate shares. Such abstract dollar entropic "worth-making" is the antithesis of syntropic-energetic-wealth-making by producing more service function with ever-less weight and volume of material, or by vegetation-and-its-physical-growth by ever-multiplying and -regenerating molecular structuring. The business and political entropy occurs in many ways. For instance, to make the most money with least costs, corporations put fumes into the sky and other wastes into the sluiceways; they cut out the shelterbelts, letting the topsoil blow away; they cut out employees to save money, while making the customers stand in line for long periods of time, often wasting the valuable productive time of those in line. Furthermore, the banks loan your (real-life-support, wealth-representing) dollars to others at 10 percent or more interest, which 10 percent the bank keeps, wherefore the banks' transaction, having produced no additional physical life-support wealth itself, means that the banks simply took their legally attested 10 percent away from your real-wealth account.

By and large the function of life on the planet is designed to be syntropic -- to impound the radiation, conserve .it, and use it to produce further syntropic functioning in overall support of the syntropic integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. The tendencies of many human beings -- wanting to cultivate the soil, to care for the animals, the drive of artists to create, of artisans to build, of inventors to invent and develop time- and trouble-savers for others -- are all manifests of the designed-in syntropic propensities of humans. The generous, compassionate propensity of humans is primarily syntropic. The selfish are "entropic." In order to keep Universe regenerative nature has placed human beings on this planet for their syntropic functioning.

We may safely assume that class-one evolution is syntropic and that class two is often entropically diseased. The drive to make money is inherently entropic, for it seeks to monopolize order while leaving un-cope-with-able disorder to overwhelm others. We must remember that the majority of those convincedly committed to "making money" are motivated to do so primarily because of their mistaken conviction that there is a fundamental (external) inadequacy of human life support on our planet. That has been true until yesterday. They were right until the syntropic, class-one evolutionary accelerating ephemeralization reached a point of doing so much more work with so much less effort, because of the reduction in weights per strength ratios, that we came ten years ago to the point where we could, by proven design, take care of everyone at standards higher than any have ever known.

In the vast majority of humans there is an innate inclination, propensity -- even drive -- to make sense and to produce order in consonance with universal order. The assumption by many humans that there is only entropic disorder seemingly present in Universe is brought about by looking only at the phases of energy separating out from anyone system and by not looking at the same disengaging energies always joining syntropically in the production of other systems.

We will now consider other ramifications of the about-to-be-realized synergetic integration of all the objectives of the great half-century critical path. All the artifacts needed for its synergetic fulfillment have been accomplished. (See historical table of realized scientific and technical accomplishments, Appendix I.) The generalized principles calling for their inclusion in the critical-path conceptioning of fifty years ago have been realized objectively in special-case discoveries, inventions, or designs taking place only during the last half-century.

It is a fact that we can now technologically recover and sort out the valuable chemistries in all the chimney-escaping or sluiceway-escaping "wastes," which, though unwanted by the local manufacturers, are necessary chemical-element components in the overall syntropic success of eternal regeneration of Universe. Nature has no pollutions -- it has very valuable chemistries that function only under special conditions, so the critical-path strategy is to get all the money-maker-unwanted chemistries shunted into all their syntropically functioning routes. Pollution is simply energy -- in the form of unfamiliar matter -- which the timing of the omniregenerative cosmic system cannot immediately use but must use later.

We will now seek for the causes and solution of smog as a special case syntropic problem -- whose solution, however, leads to understanding of how many other such problems will be solved.

We have places on our planet, like Los Angeles, that are world-famous for what is called "smog."

With the Earth revolving from west to east, the morning Sun heats the eastern slopes of mountains. In the afternoon it heats the western slopes as the eastern slopes cool off. The Northern Hemisphere's prevailing winds are being sucked from the northwest highs by low-pressure areas of the tropics in a southeast direction for the Northern Hemisphere observer, which phenomena we misidentify as "northwest winds." They are in reality southeast drafts. These prevailing southeast drafts dominate the environmental conditions of the 90 percent of humanity living north of the Equator -- the majority of our planet's moist, life-support land is also north of the Equator. From the vast expanses of the North Pacific cool airs of the evening impinge upon the warm western slopes of all the Pacific islands and upon the West Coast mountains of the United States.

In the 1950s physics discovered that temperature differentials are equivalent to electrical-potential differentials and that what we have been calling "condensation" into water of water vapor is, in fact, electrolytic formation of atoms into water molecules. We have heating on one side of the mountains and cooling on the other. This produces an electric-potential differential between the eastern and western slopes as well as between the warm western slopes and the cool Pacific Ocean air.

Since what we used to call "condensation of moisture" is in fact electrolytic fixation -- the low-floating, West Coast mist clouds of California are produced by the cool airs impinging on the warm mountainside, bringing about electric-potential differential and electrolytic fixation, which produces those lovely mists riding the western mountain slopes, particularly of Southern California, but also of all the western slopes of all the mountained Pacific islands.

We next observe the great twentieth-century influx of industry onto the California coast. Overnight settlements became towns and towns became cities, each with its own chamber of commerce doing its best to attract ever more industry. In order to pay for town governments taxes are necessary. In order to pay political obligations the elected town administrations need money to hire people to carry on all the legislatively conceived tasks -- some of them necessary, many of them unnecessary, but all requiring large sums of money.

The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles government did everything they could to invite industry to move into their domain because industries produce the greatest amount of taxable money-making. Industries also produce jobs 'and thereby in turn wages that can be taxed. Los Angeles did everything it could to attract industries and businesses. Having many locally occurring petroleum wells, one of the most logical of industries brought into Los Angeles was that of oil drilling, pumping, refining, storage, and shipping, such as those of the concentrated operations of the oil fields and harbor area of Los Angeles's Long Beach. Los Angeles built a vast number of huge refineries in the southwest part of the city. On its southeastern side Los Angeles positioned its steel mills to satisfy the large demand for steel products in the building of the oil refineries, their storage tanks and pipelines.

The fumes from these industries then loaded the mist and the warm airs, and the Sun-exposed upper cloud surfaces and their shaded lower surfaces produced temperature differentials, which in turn produced layer inversion, with the fumes locked in on the underside, which then acted as a widespread lower atmospheric lid, holding the industrial gases and fumes close to the ground throughout the whole Los Angeles basin. Thus smog became an industrially produced phenomenon.

Los Angeles's citizens became politically articulate about this "air pollution" and went to their city government saying, "We mustn't have this in our city." The city government then went to the utilities, refineries, and steel manufacturers and said, "Stop putting your smog-producing fumes into our sky. We've looked into the situation and find there exists equipment that makes it possible to precipitate that fume. But you don't have that equipment." The companies responded, "If we put in that fume-precipitation equipment, it will cost us so much more to produce here in L.A. than it does companies producing in places that don't have such controls that we won't be able to compete in our industry. We'll be forced out of business. So we're either going to have to cut out this nonsense about fume precipitation or move out of your city." The municipal government said, "For Heaven's sake, don't leave. Your tax base is essential to our political survival. We're politicians, we'll fix it up in some other way."

Soon thereafter the L.A. city government made the following pronouncement: "People, the smog is your fault. It's your backyard incinerators that are producing this smog." The people said, "Sure enough, we are incinerating in Los Angeles. We are in the wrong. We must stop incinerating." So a law was passed saying that nobody could incinerate within the city limits. The people did stop incinerating, and the smog abated -- but only in minor degree. The real offender was the industrial fumes. Along came World War II, and the issue was buried under more immediately pressing matters.

When World War II was over, great numbers of additional citizens moved into California. Suddenly the smog problem was back, and the whole act of pre-World War II was repeated. The people complained to the municipal government, and the omnichanged government personnel had entirely forgotten about what had happened twenty years earlier. They went after the big corporations, which threatened to leave town, and the city once again pleaded, "Don't leave town. We need you here."

Once more the city blamed the people: "It's the fumes from your automobiles that are producing the smog. We have taken samples, with scientific instruments, of the below-the-smog air, which samples when analyzed proved the obnoxious fumes to be those of your automobiles." With their greatest election-fund support coming from the oil men, and with the most powerful regulation lobbying being carried on also by the oil men, the politicians of America took up the cry, "It's the automobiles." The people said, "Why, sure enough. We'll have to do something about it. We'll pass laws to limit the level of fumes coming out of each car and require the manufacturers to produce and install special smog-control equipment in each car." The automobile companies loved that. It meant more accessories to be manufactured and sold and an obvious way to rationalize increasing the price of their cars.

Christmas and New Year's Days are celebrated everywhere in America, but Los Angeles, being a relatively new and gigantic social body, is able to alter its celebration customs. The L.A. refineries and heavy industries have learned that the people of California want to take a Christmas vacation. So the holiday becomes a ten-or-more-day vacation starting the weekend before Christmas and continuing through the weekend after New Year's Day. It pays all the refineries and other heavy industries to shut down their plants. As the holiday proceeds, the air gets clearer and clearer, until on New Year's Day -- the traditional Rose Bowl Day -- you find throughout Los Angeles a dreamy-clear view of all the surrounding, often snow-capped mountains. If you went out with scientific devices to measure the fume-level from the cars, your instrument would read approximately zero. The only reason that auto fumes were previously measurable was that the industrial-fume-laden ceiling held the auto fumes down and locked them in at the level at which you and I are breathing. I have taken many New Year's Day pictures from the hills of Los Angeles showing it to be absolutely clear. Then, on back-to-work industrial Monday, you see a vast, molasses-brown cloud rolling in from the southwest gradually to obscure the whole of Los Angeles.

There is no question about it. It is the refineries, the steel and other mills, and the public utility fumes that produce the smog. But no municipal government anywhere in America is going to let its industry go away. Therefore, cities are always going to find political ways of absolving the industries while blaming the people. Air does not stay in anyone place. There is a preposterously stubborn myth about "this being my or someone else's airspace .... This is my air." Air keeps moving right through the geometry of our environment to continually recircle the Earth. The air belongs only to everybody on our planet.

We're going to have to gradually recognize that whatever our central government be -- whether it's our United States government or a world government -- it is going to have to put in equipment to precipitate fumes -- no matter what it costs. Companies must install the precipitators or be put out of business. No one will be allowed to put fumes into the sky or noxious chemistries into our waters ever again. We do have the well-proven physical equipment to deal with this problem today. At the end of the year, when we figure a company's taxes, we will rebate the company taxes by whatever the cost of the fume- or chemical-precipitating equipment and the cost of its operation may be. All companies will be able to compete on a fair basis despite the initial and operative cost of the equipment. But the valuable recovered chemistries must be turned over to the government by the companies. Society must become aware of the high value of these recovered chemistries. For example, the amount of sulphur coming out of all the chimneys around the world annually exactly equals the amount of sulphur mined from the ground and purchased annually by industry to keep its wheels turning. The computers will quickly show that the value of the recovered chemistries turned over to the government will more than pay back the cost of their rebates to the industrial companies. The computers will also show that the reduction in cost of respiratory ailments and other deleterious smog effects brought about by elimination of the smog constitutes an out-and-out profit to society.

The recirculation of metals and other chemistries is now being handled only by what we call "mongers." Before World War I society wrongly assumed that metals and chemicals traveled only a one-way street to the rusting dump heaps. A company that produced iron assumed it to be consumed like food or rusted away until it had entirely disappeared. All physical substances were assumed to be entropic -- i.e., to waste away, never to return. It was not until the enormous amounts of metals produced in World War I began to come back again into the market in the 1930s that those concerned with such matters began to recognize the economic advantages existing in obsolete-form metals returning as scrap, which metals were more highly refined and concentrated than were the newly mined ores. Scrap became extremely important.

The scrapmongers are in business to make money. They sell their scrap metals only when they feel sure they are getting the highest possible prices. To increase prices the profit-motivated mongers held onto their scrap. As a consequence their yards get bigger and bigger as well as more and more unsightly. This constitutes a blockage in the world's metals-recirculatory system. This means that world government is going to have to take over altogether all the functions of recirculation.

Talking about scrap, which is more accurately to be called recirculation, is analogous to talking about the bloodstream or other circulatory systems of humans and other organisms. We are an integral stage in an omniregenerative cosmic system. The Universe is 100-percent regenerative. Terrestrial ecology has been but is no longer 100-percent regenerative. Recirculation is regenerative. Blockages in that recirculation occur when money-making people, seeking special economic advantage for themselves, hold back the flow of regenerative essentials to increase their prices.

Governments are going to have to take over the function of eliminating any and all stoppages in the recirculatory integrity of our planet. All corporations are going to have to turn over to the government all the chemicals they recover by fume precipitation or filtered sluiceway condensations. Hoarding of any kind must be banished from human affairs. Today, in the copper industry, the quantity of recirculating scrap copper is so great that it dwarfs the newly mined copper production, which provokes the world copper-mine-owning cartel into maintaining a powerful Washington lobby that seeks to increase government stockpiling of copper.

All special-interest lobbies are entropic. Class-one evolution is progressively eliminating all blockages to recirculation. Regenerative recirculation of metals has the unique function of realizing the twenty-two-and-one-half-year recirculation cycle. It is these cyclically produced technological gains that make it possible to take care of ever-more humans at ever-higher standards of living with ever-less pounds· and volume of matter and ever-less ergs of energy and seconds of time per each technical-function performance.

I was able to arrive at that figure of a twenty-two-and-one-half-year metals- recirculating cycle in 1936. I was working for the Phelps Dodge Company, who had asked me to give them some prognostications about the uses of copper in the future of world industry.

Copper is the most plentiful of the most efficient electric-power-production and -conduction metals. World War I was a power-production war. And copper is the most plentiful of nonsparking metals and is therefore logically employed in connection with gunpowder-handling equipment such as the shells inserted into the gun breeches. Because of these facts, the demand for copper in 1917 was epochally great.

Not long before World War I and its huge demand for copper, copperore- to-pure-metal reduction by the vastly less expensive flotation process and the also much less expensive electrolytic refining brought the cost of mining and refining copper so low that the cash value of the average amounts of recoverable gold and silver co-occurring with the copper -- which gold and silver are automatically purchased by the U.S. government mint -- exactly paid for all the mining and refining of the copper itself. The whole price paid for copper was profit. The mineowners then decided to mine only when the prices bid for copper were at a peak. The prices bid always peaked in wartime. With World War lover the world copper cartel waited and worked for the start of World War II.

In the 1930s the big copper companies were badly bothered by the influx of copper scrap into the marketplace. Up to the time when I came to study the copper situation, the rates of evolutionary change were so slow that the mineowners had no idea that the copper they sold would ever come back on the market to disturb their price.

By 1936 the copper price controls were completely challenged by the scrap influx. Phelps Dodge asked me to do some research on the problem, so I reviewed all the known, published data of the metals world. In the metals world very accurate records are kept about how metals have been and are now being used. Very profitable publications are maintained by the affluent metals businesses. Very accurate inventories exist detailing, for instance, how much of any given metal is built into an automobile. In 1936 there was only about thirty pounds of copper in each American automobile. Copper is expensive, and the auto manufacturers try to keep the use of expensive metals to a minimum. However, considerable copper is used in a gas station -- for instance, in all the gas-tank-filling nozzle equipment -- because it is nonsparking. You couldn't possibly use a sparking metal such as steel around gasoline.

I was able to arrive at that previously undiscovered twenty-two-and-one- half-year recycling figure by very carefully integrating the total inventory of the in-use tonnages of metals in all the main categories of their use -- for instance, the inventoried copper in all extant buildings, in old roofings, gutterings, and flashings, brass pipes, and so forth. The total inventory of copper in old buildings, both business and residential, is an inventory that becomes obsolete and is scrapped and recirculated on an overall average of once every fifty years. Within the building category copper comes out faster from big city buildings than from single-family country residences.

What makes obsolete any of the major categories of metals in use is the rate at which the new technologies occur that make obsolete the older technologies. In the electronics industry there exists only a two-year lag between the discovery or invention of new functions and improved techniques and their acceptance and employment by the electronics industry. This short lag is occasioned by the fact that the physical phenomena involved operate at subvisible-to-human-sight levels. This means that the behaviors are considered only on a basis of figures. If this one works better than the others to a sufficient, numerically expressible degree without lowering contiguous behavioral efficiencies, it can be reliably calculated that adoption of the newer facility will produce universal advantage. No human opinions on the merits or demerits of the discoveries and their invented technical realizations are involved.

In the aeronautical arts -- airframe, power plant, instrumentation, airport facilities, and ground-controlled flight-pattern technologies -- there is a five-year gestation period between invention and industry's adoption for use. The discoveries and technical inventions in the aeronautical arts are both visible and invisible. When invisible, the decisions to adopt are made scientifically through instrumentally derived numbers -- where visible, the decisions are made on past experience and opinionated comparisons. Where there is room for opinion and personal prejudice, the decisions to reject or to adopt take longer. The more science and the less opinion is involved, the quicker the new technology is adopted. It is the rate at which new inventions are adopted that spells the rate of obsolescence of the technologies they are to replace.

By taking the invention-gestation rates in the different industries, which we've discussed elsewhere in this book (two years in electronics between invention and use, five years in aviation between invention and use, ten years in automobile manufacturing, fifteen in railroad, twenty-five years in big buildings, and fifty years in single-family dwellings), we integrate the amount of copper in each use-category and their respective number of years of use, and thus find the average rate at which copper (and all the metals) come back as scrap to be every twenty-two and one-half years.

The unprecedentedly great World War I copper production occurred primarily in America. In one year, 1917, humanity took more copper out of the ground, refined it, and put it to work than had been cumulatively produced in all the world throughout all previously recorded history's years.

This produced in 1917 a vertical cliff on the "all-history charts of world copper production." Adding twenty-two and one-half years to 1917 would bring the date of reappearance of the crest of that 1917 world-record production scrap to July 1939. So I told Phelps Dodge in 1936 that three years later, in July 1939, they were going to be overwhelmed by scrap. Meanwhile, I became the science and technology consultant on the editorial staff of Fortune magazine in 1938. In July 1939 the head of research for Phelps Dodge called me up on the telephone and said, "Bucky, your twenty-two-and- one-half-year scrap-return prediction is absolutely right. Go down to the New York docks and observe." I did so. Alongside all the great cargo ships were cargo barges filled with scrap metals, piled enormously high.

Copper is plentiful enough to be trustworthily used but scarce enough to be used only in the most efficient manner. Copper is a sensitive metal -- the so-called bellwether of the metals. Whatever copper does indicates exactly what the other metals are going to do in the price and production markets; for instance, steel scrap was also coming back at exactly the same rate as copper -- twenty-two-and-one-half years after production from newly mined ore. Hoping to protect their anticipated very high prices when World War II came along, and all unbeknownst to the general public, all the U.S.A. metals owners in 1939 were selling all their scrap metal to Germany and Japan to fire back at America two years later when World War II did come along. It was not a moral thing for the scrapmongers to do. The public in general had not the slightest idea what was going on -- the American business public didn't catch on to the idea of metal-scrap recirculation until long after World War II was over. The American and world public at large have not as yet caught on to the significance of recirculating scrap metals making almost obsolete further mining of metallic ores in general. The authors of the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" had never heard of scrap-metals recirculation.

I now point out again that with acceleration of ephemeralization -- doing more with less -- came the acceleration of the rate of gaining information on how to do more with less in the invisible world of electronics, metallurgy, chemistry, and atomics. By the time the metals came around in their twenty- two-and-one-half-year cycles, we had learned so much more that we could take care of many more people at a much higher standard of living with the same amount of metals. Wherefore, as we have earlier pointed out, metals became the very bloodstream-of-realization of class-one evolution -- which class-one evolution is nature's way of taking care of ever-more people at ever-higher standards of living accomplished with the same quantity of metal -- until all are cared for, at ever-higher standards of living, without further thought of anyone having to earn that right to live. This coming realization of sustainable physical success for all humanity has been earned by all the lives of all people in all past time.

I am progressively reviewing the evolutionary integration of all these now-timely and available technologies that together produce a situation unlike any encountered ever before in this planet's multibillion-year history -- that of all humans becoming economically sustainable at higher standards of living than ever known and doing so without consciously earning that living. Meanwhile the people have begun recirculating around the world, introducing their thoughts and experiences to all countries. All the great religions have become transnational, each operating in every country permitting them so to do. Backed by wealthy central headquarters, various of the most powerful religions of history were amongst the first to send their monks and missionaries around the world to build the strength of their parent organizations. Not only the religions but all the big ideologies have now become transnational. Neither "free enterprise" nor "socialism" recognize any geographical limits. Today, big business, as detailed in "Legally Piggily" (Chapter 3), is completely transnational.

Now only the world's people are left bound within their respective 150 national pens. The separate national pens were evolutionarily logical in former times, when nature deployed all people so that they could learn how to cope only under the special conditions occurring at specific loci around our planet Earth. But now the full family of different experiences and the therefrom-developed technological artifacts are being integrated by class-one evolution.

Something transcendental to any organized human planning happened in America in the early 1930s, something that exhibited the cosmic-scale qualities of class-one evolution. The record of consistently increasing annual immigration to America and the United States since the Mayflower landed in 1620 peaked in 1910 at over a million persons a year. In the early 1930s, however, for the first time the number emigrating began to exceed the number immigrating to America. A 300-year pattern had reversed. The people of the world had come in to the United States, had cross-bred, and had started to become outbound again, but this time as cross-bred and as yet further cross-breeding world people.

Overall class-one evolution, as manifest in Chapter 1 of this book, showed us how humanity first established itself in the southwestern Pacific Ocean (Austronesia) of planet Earth. It showed us how, having built rafts, Pacific Ocean humans drifted north and eastward on the Japan Current to Alaska and then southward along the west coast of North and South America, then westward again to where they had started. This drift pattern left small colonies vast millennia ago, whose progeny are now intermixed with much later arrivals.

Next came the westward, overland migration. Artifacts of history show us how people -- pioneering ever westward and mildly northward -- coped as successfully as they did. In due course the swords and later the guns of the ever-faster-westward-colonizing or gypsying human families and individuals offered protection against unfriendly intruders until the colonies gradually developed common defense on an ever-larger scale. Mobile tribal hordes eventually became settled farming nations, and then built up so-called national defenses. We have reached the class-one evolutionary point now in the last half of the twentieth century where the largest and most powerful abstract institutions -- religious, financial, and political -- have all become transnational. Humans, trapped in 150 nation-state pens, are being manipulated from outside the nations by big ideological, religious, or big-money interests. The power of lobbying imposed on local governments by big world money or big world ideological systems is incredibly corrupting. Preemption of the metals supply by the expanding arms industry plus the trade barriers prevent the free circulation and recirculation of metals. This means we have 150 sovereign blood clots interrupting our recirculating metals, which would otherwise serve as the industrial, productive lifeblood with which we might realize our class-one evolutionary gains.

Class-one evolution makes it clear that all 150 of the world's sovereignties must go. There was a time when the United States was incredibly powerful -- right after World War II. Today most of the people in America still think of their nation as being the most powerful of world nations -- ergo, free to make its own most constructive moves. Quite the opposite is now true; as we've shown in the "Legally Piggily" chapter, the United States is both internally and externally bankrupt -- it is also overpowered by Russia's navy and conventional arms.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked me to speak to them five years ago, as documented in the Congressional Record of May 22, 1975. They asked me where our country and its people were going, and I said, "Not only have all the big corporations become transnational and taken all the former U.S.A. gold and other negotiable assets with them, but they have also left all the world's people locked into their 150 national pens, with those 150 nations blocking the flow of lifeblood metals without which we cannot realize the increasing know-how of all humanity. Very soon the nation- state sovereignties will have to be eliminated," or humanity will perish.

A nation's dictator need not consult with his people at all. A dictator can make a deal with another dictator to give up their respective sovereignties. A dictatorial party, such as the Russian Communist party, which is composed of only 1 percent of the Russian people, can make a deal with other dictators or dictatorial parties to give up their respective sovereignties. In a quasi-democracy such as America the president or prime minister's first oath of office is to protect the nation's sovereignty against all foreign incursion.

If any president of the United States or prime minister of any other quasi democracy even so much as discussed possibilities of desovereignizing, he or she would be immediately impeached. In discarding its sovereignty the United States of America faces the most difficult of all situations. Therefore class-one evolution is about to put the U.S.A. out of business through international bankruptcy. This will be a powerful example of class-one evolution at work. The bankruptcy need not be the end. It is simply nature's way of ridding the planet of the most powerful of yesterday's sovereignties and thereby setting off a chain of 149 additional desovereignizations, altogether removing the most stubborn barrier to the free circulation of the Earth's world-around metals, foods, and income energy supplies and people.

We are now in a position to get rid of the 150 sovereignties and have a recirculatory, interaccommodative, world-around democratic system.

We now have the immediately realizable capability to exercise our often-repeated option to make all the Earth's people physically and economically successful within only a decade by virtue of the already-executed fifty-year critical path of artifacts development which has acquired all the right technology.

In support of that statement we will now examine a live case history of "critical path" planning that I engaged in thirty-eight years ago on behalf of Brazil, a plan whose full-scale realization was set for 1993. Because this plan is successfully gestating at a rate that indicates fulfillment by 1993, it should give high credence to the whole of this book.

• • •

We have already noted in Chapter 5, "The Geoscope" (p. 186), that at Churchill and Roosevelt's pre-World War II secret meeting in the Bay of Fundy, Roosevelt accepted Churchill's grand strategy, which called for the initial landing of the Allies' armed forces in Europe's "soft underbelly" -- i.e., landing in Sicily from the North African coast.

As we have also noted, implementation of the "soft-underbelly" strategy called for the U.S.A.'s swift extension of its radio-triangulated surveying from the already radio-triangulated northeastern U.S.A. to be extended southwestward through Mexico, Central America, Venezuela, and Amazonian Brazil to two of easternmost Brazil's South Atlantic coastal points -- Pernambuco (Recife) and Rio. Next, Pernambuco and Rio were radio-direction- finder-triangulated with Ascension Island in the mid-South Atlantic. Ascension Island was next radio-triangulated northwardly with Dakar on Africa's northwestern coastal bulge and northeastwardly with Lagos on the coast of Africa's Equatorial Gulf of Guinea. These two adequately- far-apart African points were finally radio-intertriangled with two North African Mediterranean coast points occupied by the U.S. armed forces.

What has not been recounted, which is of great relevance to this book, is the story of the price Brazil's then-dictator President Vargas demanded of U.S.A.'s President Franklin Roosevelt for permission to do all that comprehensive radio surveying over Brazil. What Vargas wanted in exchange was a well-informed and far-forwardly-sighted plan for the industrialization of Brazil.

Roosevelt's staff gave the planning task to the U.S. engineering company that had organized many of J. P. Morgan's foreign, electric-power-generating, private enterprises. Vargas rejected their planning as prejudiced exclusively in favor of U.S.A. capitalism's exploitation of Brazil.

At this point the U.S.A. secondhand-machinery business heard through the J. P. Morgan engineering firm that Brazil was considering a comprehensive industrialization. This seemed their opportunity to realize an enormous profit on their gargantuan inventory of secondhand machinery of all kinds, which the dealers had bought at superbargain rates as the U .S.A.'s industrial economy was swiftly modernized for its World War II needs. Vargas saw through their scheming and would have none of it.

Vargas then told Roosevelt that he -- and his Brazilian advisors -- had read all the known authoritative publications by the Russians and other experts regarding the Russians' successive five-year incremented planning of comprehensive industrialization. Vargas and his experts were convinced that much was omitted by those publications regarding the behind-the-political- scenes master strategy of conceptioning and realization of the successive planning stages under the special physical circumstances of Russia's geography and its adjacency to capitalist economies controlled by those who were hostile to communism.
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Re: Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

Postby admin » Tue Jul 28, 2015 6:43 am

PART 2 OF 2

As inspection of my Dymaxion Sky-Ocean World Map will disclose, the whole northern periphery of Russia is in the Arctic and has no adjacent enemy lands. The length of this most-of ten-frozen northern border of the U.S.S.R. constitutes more than half of all its periphery. The other half is mostly in desert and mountain land. Consequently the U.S.S.R. had relatively few vulnerable, natural border entry points to guard. With a population in the 1920s of 150 million -- 95 percent illiterate, hungry farm workers, whose lives were to be reimplemented and reorganized into a primarily industrial economy -- the U.S.S.R. required instant adoption of a schedule of "first things first" to be accomplished, followed by a logical sequence of successively most important acquisitions and functioning capabilities. During the first two of the U.S.S.R.'s five-year-plan realizations approximately eighteen million of their population had to die of starvation in order to obtain their final goal, which was to produce a thereafter-ongoing adequacy of life support for all. The price to be paid in human want and suffering, great as it was, seemed a pittance in comparison to continuance-to- eternity of the "life-grinding-to-death" agrarian serfdom.

Under the circumstances of millions dying and many millions more in want, enemies of the attempt by communism to demonstrate that it could produce a better life for its people than that enjoyed elsewhere -- which would, however, take two whole generations to prove -- obviously produced a highly subvertible social condition, provided only that enemies could readily penetrate and themselves subsist under the restricted life-support condition. Study of the world map shows that Russia's limited physical access gave their five-year planning the optimum chance of succeeding.

Such information as the foregoing discussion of the U.S.S.R. border-control conditions was typical of what Vargas found missing in all the then-published data regarding the U.S.S.R.'s undertaking.

Vargas reminded Roosevelt that, coincident with the 1929 economic Great Crash of the Western world, Russia's first five-year plan had discovered much gold and that the U.S.S.R. had been able to make gold pay for contracts with the theretofore leading but in 1929-33 idle primary production corporations of the U.S.A. These contracts sent proven-"know-how" engineering teams to Russia to supervise the building, equipping, and startup of prototype factories in all categories of industrialization: hydro and steam electrical generating, mining, blast furnaces, steel and other metal producing, glassmaking, cotton and wool fabricating, petroleum producing and refining, etc. Vargas said to Roosevelt, "Almost all of those U.S.A. corporate executive engineers must as yet be alive. Being so expert, they must all be performing very responsible tasks in the U.S.A. today. What I would like you to do for Brazil is to have someone in the U.S.A. contact and interview all those U.S.A. engineers who took part in the across-the-board Russian five-year plans' technical initiations."

Vargas felt that those U.S.A. engineers must have learned a great deal more about the realities of the U.S.S.R. five-year planning than could be found in the literature.

The White House sent this task to the engineering department of the U.S.A.'s Board of Economic Warfare for action. As head mechanical engineer of the board, and in consideration of my background -- as, for instance, in plotting the forward trends of world industrialization for the Phelps Dodge Company (at the time the third largest copper producer in the world) or my experience as science and technology consultant on the staff of Fortune magazine -- I was given the task prescribed by Vargas.

The first thing I did was to contact Loy Henderson of the U.S. State Department, who had occupied the U.S.A. "desk" in Moscow in 1929 before ambassadorial relationships were established with Russia by Roosevelt in 1934. Henderson located for me a member of his 1929 Moscow staff, a man named Habicht who had handled all the travel arrangements for all the U.S.A. engineers who went to Russia in fulfillment of those prototyping contracts. Through Habicht I learned who all those engineers were as well as which ones were most esteemed by the Russian engineers with whom they dealt. I was able to locate them all in the U.S.A. By 1943 most were heads or senior vice presidents of their original companies. All agreed to hold interviews with me, since I had U.S. presidential authority. Thirty-two individuals in twenty-one corporations were interviewed, all of whom had participated in the first three of the successive five-year plans of the U.S.S.R.

My commission was not only to seek nonpublished angles on the U.S.S.R. planning strategy, but also to interpolate the principles into a plan for Brazil, where the geographical conditions were exactly the opposite of Russia's. Anybody could enter 'Brazil from almost any direction. Since that was so, I had to develop use of the principles in an altogether different manner. I inverted the equation. If you couldn't keep exploiters out, you made it easy for them to come in, and if foreign interests wanted, for instance, to explore for and produce important metals for export, they would be permitted to do so provided they also produced for Brazil a stockpile quota, which would always provide Brazil with a quantity of that metallic element equivalent to 2 percent of the quantity of that element known to exist on planet Earth -- since Brazil's population was 2 percent of the world's population.

To prepare myself for serious discussion of such comprehensive world industrial planning, before leaving Washington to visit these U.S.A. engineer executives I contacted the presidents of the four leading U.S.A. foreign-engineering- project corporations. All four of them had heard that Brazil was considering adoption of a plan for comprehensive industrialization.

I asked each to give me a statement of the primary tasks to be accomplished in the industrialization of Brazil, listed both in order of relative importance and in order of production inception. All four corporations, eager for such business, submitted cogent lists.

I then started on my succession of interviews. The following surprising experience occurred as each of my successive interviews commenced. The corporate engineering officer I was interviewing would say something like this: "When I was starting that factory in 1929, the Russian team with which I worked would keep reminding me that we were not only building a cotton mill (or whatever type of production unit they were the experts for), we were also building a fortress." My interviewee would say: "I thought they were crazy talking that way. But now, today, look at those headlines in today's paper. My factory is indeed serving as a fortress. It is under attack by Hitler right this minute! What else did they say to me of importance to which I tended to pay little or no attention?"

This startling retrospective realization on the part of all my interviewees greatly enlivened their memories, and their recalls were many and highly relevant.

On the day following my recording of these Russian experiences and recalled strategic principles, I would discuss the application of their recalled Russian planning-strategy principles to the industrialization of Brazil, a matter in which these corporation officers were also inherently interested.

I then returned to Washington and wrote a plan for Brazil based on all I had learned. I had my plan typed in a narrow vertical column on one side of legal-size paper, leaving plenty of room for readers' note-making. Copies were sent by registered mail to each of the thirty-two interviewees. Each returned their copies with many marginal pencil notes: "Good," or "I didn't say that," or "This is what I said about that ... " I then rewrote the whole plan, throwing out any items that did not have a sponsor from amongst the U.S.A. corporations' leading engineering executives. I then sent the only-by-senior- engineering-executives-sponsored inventory of items of the plan to all thirty-two of the interviewees.

Their responses to the first draft were:

2 were unequivocally against it.

2 were cranky in their letters for extraneous reasons, but distinctly in favor of various items.

7 were without comment.

4 did not express themselves in their covering letters, but indicated approval by comments written on page margins of my texts.

17 were unequivocally for the document, as indicated both in their covering letters and in their itemized comments -- proving that the outline did properly report and interpolate the "area of agreement" (17 of 21 firms or offices favored the outline). They itemized a total of 13 objections and gave 146 itemized approvals, covering 125 individual paragraphs in the outline, and made 52 suggestions for additions or modifications.

Just as my plan was complete, Vargas was deposed as president of Brazil. Forwarding of it to Brazil's new political leader might well be construed as an affront. The president of one of the major U.S.A. corporations involved in my "Compendium" thought so well of it that he took it informally to leading industrialists and powers behind the political scenes of Brazil. From time to time in the subsequent thirty-seven years I have heard of features of my plan being manifest in Brazil's economy.

In March of 1980 I was invited to visit Brazil by the Chamber of Commerce of Sao Paulo, its leading commercial-industrial city. I thought of the "Compendium," which had been sitting in my files for thirty-seven years. I had Xerox copies made and took them with me to Brazil and gave copies to many of its economic leaders. It was their consensus that the plan is now appropriate to their needs in almost all ways. They felt it to have been significant that I had thirty-seven years ago recommended that they switch their energy fuel from petroleum to alcohol, which is exactly what they are now doing.

The "Compendium," as I called it in 1943, and the 1943 reaction to it on the part of leading U.S.A. corporations' engineering vice presidents, now follows. No alterations have been made. It is printed exactly as typed in 1943. Not included are approximately 100 pages of the developmental phases of the undertaking, which included letters from individuals, etc.

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A COMPENDIUM OF CERTAIN ENGINEERING PRINCIPLES PERTINENT TO BRAZIL'S CONTROL OF IMPENDING ACCELERATION IN ITS INDUSTRIALIZATION

Accrued to Experience of U.S. Engineers and Firms Who Participated in the First Three of Russia's Graduated Program of 5-Year Plans

August 13, 1943
R. Buckminster Fuller
Chief, Mechanical Engineering Section
U.S. Board of Economic Warfare


As A DIGEST OF THE INVESTIGATION, thoroughly documented in the main body of this report, the following admonitions, listed in order of interdependent significance, may be forwarded to those Brazilians concerned with control of their future industrialization as truly representing the majority opinion of the U.S. engineers concerned and experienced in this field.

Number One, it was pointed out by all those interviewed that Brazil must make its own plan.

This must be realistic and not a matter of their being coerced into some foreign-designed role, wrapped up under a Brazilian label printed elsewhere. No matter how excellent the consultative advice they may obtain from experiences outside their economy, they must themselves insure the success of their own program by the inherent strength of their own authority, which in turn must derive from specific requirements of their own political trend and from a deep consciousness of the adequacies of their own declared purposes and sequitur decisions.

It was also the consensus of opinion of the interviewed engineers that: in order to plan successfully, there must be more than a singleness of purpose; there must be a dramatically tangible objective.

Determination to raise the standard of living or to "do good" in this world lends no specific design guidance, which latter is essential to effective economic planning. Obviously everyone must do a certain amount of eating and sleeping. They have been doing that for a long time and will continue to do so in some degree without any planning.

It is the conditions under which the planned-for lives are to be lived, as determined by the tangible objectives, that in turn determine the set of physical principles most expediently to be employed.

With a dramatically tangible objective or, better, a progressive series of tangible objectives to be reached and passed as milestones, any sincere planning, no matter how relatively immature, so long as it springs from an educated base, will provide successful survival in some measurable degree superior to any unplanned overall existence.

INTERPOLATED CONCLUSIONS:

1. A workable, overall objective of air-minded Brazil upon which to pyramid its successive stages of plan would be:

(a) To make Brazil the leading skyport of the world. This, of course, means in effect a network of airports, which, in the world integration trends, are functionally called for by the fact that Brazil will represent the increasing air switchyard for (A) all the tropical air traffic which will be advantageously west-bound on the tradewinds from the Near East, Europe, and Africa to the Americas, and (B) north- and south-bound PanAmerican traffic.

(b) That all highway systems shall radiate from the air and water ports of Brazil to its natural resources. That the initiative of individuals tending to explore for resources may thus be expedited.

(c) That Brazil, because it is unfeasible to maintain closure ofits borders, employ that fact to advantage, instead of opposing it ineffectively, and therefore plan to make Brazil the easiest country in. the world to come to or leave -- in effect a nation-wide, ever-renewing world's fair. This should help keep their external purchasing power high. Since Brazil's boundaries touch those of every other South American country except two,' community of interest, specifically pertaining to modernization, must be stimulated throughout all South American countries to prevent border animosities -- no trade barriers, etc., as with Canada and the U.S.

(d) That they should subdivide the whole geographical area of Brazil into approximately 300 small resources-exploration areas of approximately 10,000 square miles each, efficiently interconnected and balanced for interdependence, so that they may never become politically disunited, i.e., Silver, Cotton States, etc., in U.S.

(d.2) Each area should contain its own super airport center or city. These would be centered approximately 100 miles from each other in all directions. This distance is chosen as representing the practical horizon relay distance for an eventual electronics, television, and power network. The means to create this transit system should be established and the Brazilians should apply their surplus human energy to the procurement thereof or there will be no appreciation nor understanding of how or why they became so blessed.

(d.3) That each area not already searched be explored radiantly from the airports.

(d.4) That in choosing the appropriate locations of the decentralized industries, and in determining the methods of original development, stockpiling, and production of discovered resources, that the decisions always be predicated on "work" surveys which will determine approximately the most efficient overall expenditure of energy to the total economy.

(e) That by virtue of the manifold, super airport network development, amplifying Brazil's already established 500 airports, the population will be decentralized from the southeastern coastal area throughout the whole of the country in such a manner that the center of the population will trend towards its geographical center, an essential to stabilization of the economy and to its economic security and its most efficient development energywise.

2. That Brazil must, without vacillation, determine upon the specific mathematical language of its industrialization.

(a) It was the consensus of opinion that they should standardize on the metric system, to which U.S. producer (but not consumer) industries are already adjusted.

(b) That they nominate immediately 60-cycle generation of power. (This choice in power standards will coincide mathematically with requirements of the decimal system of 12, should the latter continue, as indicated by present trend, to be scientifically desirable in Brazil.)

3. That in order to take advantage of the present state of industrial and scientific advance throughout the world, Brazil rent out to appropriate, skilled U.S. engineering firms the development of all its resources to the raw or stockpile stage. This should in no way be construed to refer to their production organizations for domestic consumption. The contracts will be kept in force by virtue of guaranteed schedules of performances; they shall be subject to strict regulation in the matter of labor conditions, interchangeable standards adopted by Brazil, monetary exchange rates, etc., the profits of export of natural resources to be retained in Brazil and "plowed back" into further development of resources.

(a) That all equipment brought in by these concerns shall, if the development leases are terminated, remain in Brazil as part of the nation's accruing resources; that equipment be admitted duty free.

(b) That the rental for these concessions shall be paid to Brazil not only in (A) United States dollar credits, but also in (B) increments in kind of the respective resources thus developed.

(c) That the schedule of increments shall be such that Brazil's approximate proportion of world population (i.e., 2%) shall be protected and instrumented in such a manner that the known world quantity of each resource element involved shall never be reduced to less than 2% remaining available above grade in concentrated storage within Brazil. This increment must be provided to Brazil before any product may be taken out of Brazil. Thus, as Brazil's industrialization develops, no matter what the design configuration may be, its proportion of the world's chemical element resources naturally occurring within its borders will remain such that its population may enjoy no less than the average standard towards which the whole world trends, i.e., towards equilibrious per capita distribution of the chemical elements serving in industrial functions enjoyed by an increasing proportion of all population: -- therefore, towards dynamic equity of all elements per world person in mutually enjoyed services. (d) That the choice of optimum overall sizes of equipment and choice of process methods, etc., be left entirely to the discretion of the licensees. This will eliminate this always inadequate phase of 'detail planning from government officials, leaving technical expediency to private initiative.

4. That Brazil recognize:

(a) That at present the best world source for industrial tools, power, and prime movers is the U.S., by virtue of the most recently overhauled and integrated standards attained by the U.S. economy for war purposes, and to the superior interchangeability of parts developed by the U.S.

(b) The highly developed psychological relationship of the worker and the segregated mass functions of each industrial operation designed into U.S. tools and at present providing the highest overall rate of service or product output per worker, and percentage of overall horsepower effectively distributed per unit operation in the world.

(c) That this initial outfitting at the hands of unit economies shall not be an exclusive, long-time policy, but merely an initial efficiency.

5. That the number one natural advantages to be thus developed will be those of energy sources of all categories. Increments from these energy developments are to be considered in terms of a continuing energy income, to be rapidly amplified by a concept of energy reinvestments for the whole economy. That the power of the Amazon watershed be harnessed and considered by designers as an integrated, moving assembly line for finally carrying forward whatever its major heavy products may be as a feeder gravity assembly line, possibly for mass-production house-assembly line.

6. That the number one immediately available physical resource to be developed (over and above those already functioning) is that of Brazil's hardwoods.

That complementary to the hardwood product developments, phenolic resins and other appropriate plastics and adhesives essential to fabrication of compound curvature plywoods be domestically developed to satisfy the manifold structural and container and vehicular body functions hitherto satisfied essentially by the materials used by expediency in much earlier industrial economies.

That the weight-strength factor of such compound curvature hardwood plywood be recognized as providing an advantage over any of the production steels or aluminum alloys yet developed, while at the same time embodying superior rigidity and other successful features relative to proofness against fire, insects, moisture, corrosion, distortion by heat, etc. Speaking by and large, "equivalent" design solutions in compound plywood weigh 1/6 those of solutions in steel; 1/3 those in aluminum alloys.

7. That insofar as possible, all domestic requirements be solved through the most modern or even new designs for the employment of these integrated, lightweight plastic products-plywood being in effect a plastic material reinforced by wood-fiber.

8. That Brazil, being by natural geography the beneficiary of vast annual vegetable increment, determine upon a national fuel policy developed from alcohols derived from vegetable sources, and that vigorous continuing research be maintained in the direction of new vegetable alcohol sources and products.

9. That a national policy of accelerated universal education be incepted, augmented throughout by the latest moving picture techniques developed for war instruction, particularly relating to translation of theoretical knowledge to technical application.

(a) That individual moving pictures be developed relative to each and every external mechanical function of man: (1) a picture for the best use of all simple tools, then (2) their extension into the machine tools, (3) always compounding the use of the machine tools with the inherent mathematics.

(b) The conversion of all principles of physics and theoretical chemistry into moving picture demonstrations and their further integration through pictures into pilot plant and mass production tool-up processes.

(c) That all primary school work be completely integrated with the vestibule schooling of decentralized local industries, the present war trend be amplified to include their concomitant industrial nurseries, and the whole industrial activity be considered in effect an extension of the old household life, or its subsequent pre-industrial guild life. In effect, that the industrial world and home world are to be realistically integrated to provide improved conditions for both.

(d) That Brazil recognize that the standards of industry are now advanced by prosaic efficiency requirements of the war to realistically include physical conditions so complementary to the human as to make these industries in effect as pleasant if not pleasanter work than hitherto characterizing work organized solely within the home.

(e) International exchange of students in advanced education. Government must subsidize building and equipping technical schools -- even subsidizing students if necessary at first.

Brazil should consider the leased development services of U.S. engineering firms or any consulting services rendered by the latter to Brazil's planning authorities to constitute not an admission of weakness on the part of Brazil, but, on the contrary, to represent the availment of a natural scientific principle often employed but never before clearly comprehended as such; i.e., that the function, for instance, of U.S. engineers in Russia was not so much the well-advertised service of providing the original "know-how," which knowledge Russians could in time have as well gained by traveling abroad, but one of functioning as an unprejudiced third party concerned only with operation of physical laws, who, not even comprehending the local tongue, could unconcernedly break the ice jams of political theory or expediency in an unorthodox manner, thus providing gains that might otherwise be greatly delayed or never attained, because the stranger could break the rules with impunity.

As a corollary to this "relentless robot" sort of function -- "jamming ahead with the work, irrespective of personal feelings or local precedence" -- there was also available to Russia in the U.S. services the incalculable advantage of a scientific perspective upon their plans, developed from outside the framework of reference, the number one essential of all scientifically determined progress.

This perspective ability, gained by foreigners upon any economy, has been well known; for instance, to classical students of government and history. At the turn of the present century, English scholars considered Professor Lowell of U.S.'s Harvard University the greatest living authority on English government and legal precedent. At the same time U.S. authorities recognized Lord Brice of England as the greatest authority on U.S. political history and government.

We here in the United States are today receiving, from Japan in particular, a mortally expensive lesson on the subject of the advantage gained by international perspective. Japan's keen appraisal and selection of the essences of our industrial advantages, from out their settings of concomitant disadvantages -- the latter bred out of local cultural habits -- provided the means for Japan's accelerated advance into a challenging position of our economic prerogatives, despite inferior original position in natural resources.

In other words, Brazil should confidently expect the U.S. engineers to do in many ways a better job for them than those same engineers in many instances did for Russia. Under the outlined circumstances, Brazil may expect from U.S. an even more up-to-date industrial bill of fare than has ever before been concocted, even for the latest war effort, if they will leave the decisions on technical organization of resources development to those American engineers, reserving for Brazilians themselves the philosophy of consumer utilization of their resources, i.e., complete determination of the design of domestic services and products.

BIG "DON'T":

Number one error in "plan" principle discovered by U.S. engineers in Russia was that of their "economic planning. " The Russians divided their whole program into "economic" and "technical" categories. The economic was supposed to come first. The economic planners made the mistake of assuming that the configuration of the latest worldwide industries as discovered at that moment would never change. The economists supposed that by analyzing each industry by materials employed that they could deduce the final technical requirements. Theirs was a static viewpoint. They never got to first base.

To comprehend their failure in this division one must inspect our own important errors. Many ill-advised public relations councilors in the United Nations [i.e. Allied nations) thought that their great productive machine could be valved over to production of any product at a moment's notice, like a soda fountain. Thinking themselves wiser than their engineers, they failed to understand that each product must be tooled from the bottom up; that none of the production set-up, even including its buildings, would be subject to conversion to production of other products. It was those non-mechanical- minded political economists who brought us into the costly mess of non-preparedness.

It was economic planning of political economists in Russia, completely unversed in theoretical, let alone practical mechanics, that almost lost their cause before it was started. The latter decided, for instance, to mass produce tractors, simply because these fitted the political propaganda need of wild promises to farm labor whose support they wooed. They gave priorities to tractor production materials and great tractor factory buildings before considering acquisition of production tools, and the machine tools which must come ahead of them, and the steel which must come ahead of the latter, etc. The plant went tractorless for years after building completion and finally functioned best as a fortress at Stalingrad. Some said this was because the Russians had slyly planned for it. This was not so. It was just thoroughly over-built on paper, which made it a good fortress. Russia got the tractors all right, in the end, but only after introduction of proper engineering methods at U.S. urging which comprehended the completeness of tooling-up problems.

This kind of "economic planning" would, if incepted in 1500 A.D., have assumed that the power utensil industry was the final word of the Almighty on how to solve all equipment problems. It would have started all economic analysis with inspection of the type and content of materials in coaches, sedan chairs, doublets, and have then attempted to say that cumulative totals of lead and tin equivalents represented the desirable priority stockpiling out of which to evolve their forward economy. This accountant type of economist, unfamiliar with mechanics as a dynamic experience, but glib with the classifications, always fails as a planner. Such men were essentially responsible for the progressive failure of the U.S. banking system to anticipate the needs of science-borne industrial evolution. They did not recognize it as a continuing process. They looked upon it as a fixed or finite investment.

Amongst the very real accomplishments of U.S. engineers in Russia was their hard-won success in converting the Russians from European professional engineering practices, which conveyed university science and engineering graduates directly to responsible positions. It was unheard of that such graduates should soil their hands.

Now, as a result of American engineering intercession, all Russian science, engineering, and technical students must after graduation spend two complete years in out-and-out shop and field jobs as laborers and mechanics' helpers. As a result of the lessons of error in the five-year plans, U.S. engineers say that if anything the Russians have now carried this practical side of all education too far.

In this connection a measured drawing replica prepared by technical accountants and draftsmen for Brazil of U.S. industry as is would be as lifeless an affair as was accomplished by the U.S. architectural profession for three-quarters of a century following the Civil War. Their measured copying of the classical "orders" of European architecture was not only inappropriate, wasteful, and useless, but it had the deleterious effect upon U.S. culture of adopting false standards and an inferiority complex regarding its own innate character and ability. The effect of this was to obscure from public recognition the fact that the "unarchitecturalized" engineering forms and buildings springing up to house a new industrial society were the unpresuming and unique architectural form of their own -- grander than any before conceived in history. It took the perspective of clever designers in the very Europe from which U.S. professional architects were copying the "orders," upon the U.S. industrial engineer's forms, to discern the birth of a healthy new modern architecture. They adopted its form, superficially called it international architecture, and the U.S., still not realizing that they were responsible for the creation, asked these European designers to come over and command their architectural schools.

It is necessary that Brazil comprehend distinctly that much of the present industrial configuration of the U.S. economy is that of the nineteenth-century scaffolding work, so to speak, surrounding the net final twentieth-century structure just emerging.

In this connection the railroads, for instance, represented a horizontal scaffolding for temporary delivery services to set up an economy that could then graduate to a modern trackless and wireless economy.

Brazil can now adopt these emerged features because they are now developed to a prefabricated, know-how-degree as a finished phenomenon, eliminating the necessity of re-enactment of the many errors and experiences developed prior to the present state of overall advance.

In this connection it must be remembered that the railroads were first conceived as means to a nationwide real estate development. Because they were so wastefully heavy, they could not pay for their own development except in the terms of the land value increments accruing to the rights of way. They were therefore bonded for half centuries ahead to be financed out of the wealth they would indirectly open up. This expediency, however, served to get the people distributed over the land that they might further explore and develop the resources whose raw or unconcentrated products were then carried great distances to highly centralized and relatively inefficient cramped plants of the industrial east. If technology had been sufficiently advanced, the automobile would have done this much more thoroughly and quickly.

By the railroad means of primary decentralization of national personnel, the American center of population was moved westward approximately 500 miles in the course of a century-and-a-half. Russia, with a relatively minor percentage of the per capita railroad development of the trackless land and air transports, moved its center of population one thousand miles eastward in twenty-five years, while at the same time producing in accelerating volume for the present severe war.

This proved that the deployment of the people to the maximum of land area development does not spring from an initial transportation advantage provided exclusively by railroads. A modern railroad coach with one passenger weighs 140,000 pounds per passenger. The weight per passenger fully loaded is 3400 pounds. This is greater than the weight per passenger when a 1942 automobile carries only one person; i.e., 3000 pounds. Fully loaded, the average prewar auto weighs only 600 pounds per passenger. Postwar cars promise to reduce that average to under 300 pounds. Overall, door-to-door weight per passenger mile-per-minute of postwar air transport will provide advantage over the auto or railroad in ratio of better than ten to one.

It must be remembered that the railroads were developed to a design level, in the course of a century, competent to carry the structural and mechanical equipment and maintaining consumables of a civilization averaging many times as heavy and several times as bulky per unit of function as that comprising our present-day mechanical environment, and hundreds of times the weight and bulk per unit of function of the now increasingly complete equipment of air-borne armies.

Houses and buildings, man's largest and heaviest category of per capita controlled environment, so far but meagerly developed industrially, have averaged, throughout the 75 years between the Civil War and the beginning of present hostilities, a hundred tons per capita, whereas environment control design now well-developed for airplanes, whose stresses in the air or in landing are many times those to which houses may ever be subjected by hurricane or earthquake, nonetheless make possible man's comfortable ascent in minutes from tropic heats in the area of 150° F. to stratosphere temperatures of minus 65° F. This new range of environment control built lightly and sinuously into airplane enclosures indicates postwar housing solutions distinctly advanced in every standard of performance, yet weighing only a few hundred pounds per capita. Thus postwar human container weights of possibly one-quarter ton per occupant are to be compared with the lightest wallboard prefabricated structure of 1942, which weighed twenty-five tons, (not including foundations), or better than five tons per capita, while the so-called permanent housing structures of 1942, including their foundations, still averaged in excess of 100 tons per capita and will be obsolete in ten years.

In order to comprehend the overall foot-poundage significance of transition from a rail-borne to an air-borne economy, it is necessary to envisage this vast change in tonnage per capita inherent in the changing design throughout all services which will be automatically propagated by the mass production industry of such lightweight housing. This industry is certain to take up the slack in world industrial production capacities and know-how created not only by the negative factor of war's end but by the most positive and dire necessity of rehousing the multi-millions of world's people, a rehousing whose standards progression will go on to rehouse the better than two billion population. This will be the greatest industry in all history. Brazil, with its Amazonian watershed, its hardwoods, its aluminum, its superior paper-making potentials (for paper will play a major role in the new houses), is in a unique position of advantage to initiate this industry on the scale required. Its network of jungle airport, scientific, tropic stations and exploration centers, and mechanical-chemical prototyping laboratories should divide up the problem.

It is further pointed out, to bring this prognostication home, that the highest building rate ever attained in the U.S. provided only 280,000 single family dwellings in one year; 1/4 the number required by annual marriages; 1/6 that required to offset annual disaster losses and complete obsolescence -- a rate inadequate to total emergency. Such methods, which failed miserably to keep pace with civilization from 1913 on, obviously could not cope with a totalized world housing problem.

Realistic planning on the part of Brazil means taking advantage in advance of this vast accrual of overall foot-poundage saving per unit of designed environment control. If so, it is simply indicated that air transport can be relied upon by Brazil as the major category of direct physical communication. Air communication may be appropriately augmented in descending order of importance by roadways, waterways, cableways, and only in instance of highly specialized requirements, by railways.

Emerging from an era of steel surplus, shut-down, and scrap-dumping, in which millions were spent to find out how many things could be built of steel, such business being secured on our "substitute" basis by price and service .advantages, we came sharply into the war-caused shortage of steel. It became our job to supply half the world's inherently wasteful, though efficiently energy designed, steel requirements of war. Despite the strong need, it is only within recent months that steel has been importantly reduced in building, so strong were designing habits and so difficult to change were labor and building codes.

In the course of abandoning all-steel buildings, and then steel structural buildings, for reinforced concrete and brick, first steps in real steel economy were taken by the engineer designer, Albert Kahn. These were effected through continuously welded steel reinforcing rods for large spans. Further steel reductions were effected by others through stressed steel wire reinforcement.

Opening just this month is the first steel-less bomber production plant of the Douglas Aircraft, designed and erected by Austin Company at Des Plaines, Illinois. Despite increasing spans unknown to prewar industrial requirements of 150 and 200 feet, with straightaways of several thousands of feet, the Austin Company provided a superior truss construction of laminated wood members not only for the roof but for all structural columns. Steel was eliminated even in the flooring, concrete aprons, and footings, without deleterious effect.

This was not a compromise. It was better building. The equivalent insurance rates indicated equal fire safety to that of a steel building because the structure was completely equipped with sprinklers linked up by plastic conduit. Practically the only steel used in the plant was for tools and equipment.

The tremendous advantage to Brazil, with its hardwoods so eminently suitable for building, as determined by the Ford Company in its Brazilian operations, that is implied in this change of affairs, freeing their industrial growth from any limitation by steel except for use in tools, is evident. It is even indicated that the bases, arbors, and frames of the machine tools themselves, etc., which were formerly made of heavy steel casting and in recent war years were increasingly fabricated out of welded steel sections, could now be expeditiously supplanted in many instances by compound curvature, conical or cylindrical form, phenolic resin laminated hardwood structures. This would eliminate another important category of heavy steel tonnage.

STANDARDS:

While a great deal of additional information was received from the interviews in connection with "optimum" versus "elephantine" or "insectine" sizes of equipment, to be amplified in production capacity by batteries of such optimum units -- such as a thousand-ton blast furnace; 50,000 k.v.a. horizontal generator; grain storage in progressively decentralized 30,000 bushel silos, country-town elevators of half a million bushels and central market elevators of 1, 2, and 3 million bushels, etc. -- these are, of course, only dramatic items amongst millions of optimum standards developed to high degree by the war effort.

Whether determined by guesswork or hard research, for Brazil to depend solely on the efforts of U.S. engineering concerns themselves, whose whole organization is given to maintenance of the latest stage of advance in such matters, is, in any event, inappropriate. This is the consensus of the interviews.

It is worth noting that there has been a long-time trend to increasing decentralization of such industrial operations into the foreign countries by the specialists in such fields, in lieu of the constantly decreasing foreign investment of dollars in uncontrolled operations.

SAFETY FACTOR:

In spite of a clearly defined trend of the major opinion cited in this report, it is worth noting that Russia's first five-year plan was characterized also by complete modernization of their existing industrial plant structure. Their 1914 industrial status was approximately that of Brazil's present stage of industrialization. A broad picture, with ample safety factor for present emergencies and future development, was demonstrated by the Russians, who renovated many old plants and augmented them with much new equipment in European Russia west of the Urals. East of the Urals Russia built its brand-new economy, literally growing its towns out of scientific exploration stations. To this new Russia they shifted their new tools from the European theatre when the enemy advanced and allowed their renovated old industry to take the gaff, essentially liquidating their "foothold" plants of the first five-year operation.

In the same way plans for realistically improving Brazil's present industrial plant may be considered as the stepping-stone of the moment, which Brazil can well afford to scrap when its brand-new scientific industry of the hinterland has gained youthful strength.

USE FORCES -- DON'T FIGHT THEM:

Most urgent scientific admonition towards successfully realizing any plan is to take advantage of each of the trends and to develop them, no matter that it may be in a novel manner, towards the advantage of the populace concerned.

There is no reason, for instance, why Brazil should not develop from the start a completely smokeless industrialization providing a high standard of living. The smoke characterizing early industrialization of the North is now a mark of unattended inefficiency to northern engineers -- important byproducts are being wasted, environment frictions are being increased.

The area of dense jungleland of Brazil is greater than half of the U.S. It has been penetrated by few of. the Brazilians, who, living in the cooler southeast, speak of it as the "green hell of the North." Ford officials say that most Brazilians inquire of them with as much wonder regarding the vast reaches of Brazilian jungles as do New Yorkers regarding the North Pole. Certain it is that the jungle in no way lends itself to the easy, speculative wanderings of homesteaders and prospectors.

An entirely different means for deploying the Brazilian population over the whole of their land for purposes of its development must be devised from those which augmented the pioneering of the U.S., Canadian, and Russian hinterlands.

Almost so simple that it will be shunned by those who prefer to plan the hard way, in order to take advantage of their hard-earned specialized experience of the past, is the technique now provided by modem warfare that would approach this whole Brazilian jungleland from above, bombing it open, then parachuting in with well-planned hand equipment and personal protective devices to carve out a complete polka-dot pattern of island airports over the whole country, into which pattern mechanical devices would be fed progressively as parachute deliveries graduate to plane-landed deliveries, etc. Each area would receive its quota of machine tools, drafting equipment, air conditioning, etc., and then its engineering and designing personnel would amplify the hold on the jungle. This "island" network of "tropical research and development stations" should form the nuclear structure for the new Brazil.

Dramatically emphasized by its absence was any discussion on the part of American engineers of aid to Russia in establishment of communications services, beyond Russian consultations in New York with the Radio Corporation of America. The wireless had supplanted almost completely the wired technique of early American communication. Russia was able to adopt an electronic stage of wireless communication without re-exploring the arduous step-by-step advances in communication by wired means. In the same way it is quite as practical for Brazil to consider accelerated development of its lands by an essentially trackless scheme. They will be able to buy, postwar, if not later manufacture for their own account, thousands of helicopters, which would make this form of functional exploration highly effective and easy to integrate.

INEXHAUSTIBLE WEALTH OF SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLE:

Distinguishing characteristic of this digest is that it takes heed of the war's number one lesson, i.e., the advantage of employing science to satisfy needs stated as functions. Any economy, irrespective of the relative quantities of traditionally esteemed elements in its physical resources inventory, can outperform, per capita, any other economy in direct proportion to the degree of the initial control in planning conceded to science by politics -- that is, "outperform" as measured in terms of services and satisfactions produced per potential consumer.

That Germany will probably be smothered by the Allied war effort should not be allowed to obliterate this lesson. The United. Nations' already developed fuel and hydraulic generation flow and potential manpower, as well as its physical resources in most of the traditionally important economic categories, outranked Germany's initial inventory by one hundred to many hundreds percent. Advancing the physical odds constantly, which is what the continued war effort adds up to, does not change the fact that Germany's operational set-up of overall scientific ingenuity forced the world race committee (in order to maintain its prerogative) into repeatedly calling for new run-offs, at the same time rearranging the handicap until, in a finally "recognized heat," at last won by the United Nations, the handicap ratio was equivalent to starting Germany's horse at scratch in a one-mile mark. And because in the end sheer preponderance of physical advantage volumetrically smothers the scientifically engineered combustion, that blanketing must never be allowed to blind the world to the technical significance inherent in the demonstration. This is it: by discovering the sources of energy available (and every major economy has a scientifically potential superabundance); by decentralizing and enmobilizing parts fabrication and arranging a shifting foci of assembly to adjust to expediency, production may start with anyone of a number of alternative raw sources of the atmosphere, vegetation, water, metallic ores, woods, etc. Concentrated energy in stabilized potentials, in the form of coal and oil, are great conveniences and represent a head start, but no more than that, to science. Thus is independence of immobile structure, tracked, wired, localized, frozen investment accomplished. Thus the economy divests itself of slavery to obsolescence. Thus is energy constantly remounted to provide the human intellect with the greatest hitting power, or an over-alert morphology.

Scrap elements everywhere, even in the form of bombed equipment and fired munitions, only represent an increased abundance of highly concentrated raws, ever more widely distributed. Scrap, actual or potential. i.e., in junkyard or in obsolete building, machine, or fixtures, it must be realized, is a "mine above ground" in highly concentrated forms of the original chemical elements which had been "reworked" by nature many times before man "worked" them. The ninety-two "elements" are never "secondhand." They are primary "electrical behavior" patterns. Energy to rework them is plentiful. They should always be rearranged in their most efficiently useful condition to the service of man. This is pure mathematics. Any evolutionary outcropping of the newer, more efficient arrangement can never be long suppressed.
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