Introduction: Twilight of the World’s Power Structures

Introduction: Twilight of the World’s Power Structures

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3HUMANITY IS MOVING EVER DEEPER into crisis—a crisis without precedent.

4 First, it is a crisis brought about by cosmic evolution irrevocably intent upon completely transforming omnidisintegrated humanity from a complex of around-the-world, remotely-deployed-from-one-another, differently colored, differently credoed, differently cultured, differently communicating, and differently competing entities into a completely integrated, comprehensively interconsiderate, harmonious whole.

5 Second, we are in an unprecedented crisis because cosmic evolution is also irrevocably intent upon making omni-integrated humanity omnisuccessful, able to live sustainingly at an unprecedentedly higher standard of living for all Earthians than has ever been experienced by any; able to live entirely within its cosmic-energy income instead of spending its cosmic-energy savings account (i.e., the fossil fuels) or spending its cosmic-capital plant and equipment account (i.e., atomic energy)—the atoms with which our Spaceship Earth and its biosphere are structured and equipped—a spending folly no less illogical than burning your house-and-home to keep the family warm on an unprecedentedly cold midwinter night.

6 Humanity’s cosmic-energy income account consists entirely of our gravity-and star (99 percent Sun)-distributed cosmic dividends of water-power, tidal power, wave power, wind power, vegetation-produced alcohols, methane gas, vulcanism, and so on. Humanity’s present rate of total energy consumption amounts to only one four-millionth of one percent of the rate of its energy income.

7 Tax-hungry government and profit-hungry business, for the moment, find it insurmountably difficult to arrange to put meters between humanity and its cosmic-energy income, and thus they do nothing realistic to help humanity enjoy its fabulous energy-income wealth-in fact, they send their government ‘‘revenooers’’ out into the mountain forest to fine and to destroy the equipment of any civilian so ‘‘treacherous’’ as to apply private enterprise in the alcohol-from-Sun-energy-photosynthesis harvesting to personal advantaging. If any citizens start making their own automobile-powering alcohol, the ‘‘revenooers’’ will have to pounce on them just as they do on those making moonshine ‘‘likker.’’

8 Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to ‘‘make it’’ economically on this planet and in the Universe. We do. It can only be accomplished, however, through a design science initiative and technological revolution.

9 For three-quarters of all the trillions of nights humans have been on board planet Earth, the Moon has been their most intimate sky companion. For millions of years humans assumed it to be obvious that no one would really touch the Moon. Those who did not assume that to be obvious were obviously loony-lunatics, ‘‘Moon touchers.’’

10 In the battle of human power systems to see who is to control the world’s people and their economies, the communist U.S.S.R. and the capitalist U.S.A. had been taught by World War II that whoever could fly the highest would gain the observational advantage for controlling the fire-power of their guns and thus win the military supremacy of the world. In the ‘‘cold’’ Third World War the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. inspired by the German rocketry, saw that whoever could maintain the greatest number of around-the-world-outer-space-platforms could control around-the-Earth firepower. The Moon was just such a ‘‘permanent’’ sky advantage.

11 Greatly challenged by the Russians’ initially most successful space-operating accomplishments, President John Kennedy authorized the funds for the Apollo Project, which had first to do all of the tasks here on Earth preparatory to getting a team of humans ferried over to the Moon, to land, and then to return safely to Earth.

12 There were obvious first things first to be accomplished—second things before third things and 7308 things before 7309 things. Some were going to take longer than others. There would be a pattern of start-ups and lead-ins of differing time lengths. This complex, shad-bone-like pattern would be known as ‘‘the critical path.’’ The critical path of overall human history’s technological evolution involved two million ¹ things that had to be done before blast-off of the first Earth-to-Moon ferrying-over-and-back.

14 Fortunately early humans, having no knowledge that what they were doing would someday lead to humans physically, safely visiting the Moon, had already accomplished one million of those essential tasks before President John Kennedy allocated the federal funds to accomplish the remaining one million. Suddenly it was evident—but only to those few students who cared about the overall significance of such non obvious, vast-time-scale inventories of evolutionary, historical, technological accomplishments-that without the million items already accomplished, it would be impossible to realize any of the Apollo Project’s one million additional technical requirements—let alone accomplish them within the critically ‘‘effective’’ U.S.A. vs. U.S.S.R. competition time limit. Evolution is methodically synergetic and omni-meaningful.

15 Now, in 1980, a large number of all humans ten years of age and under, all of whom were born after humans reached the Moon, have learned so much about the Apollo Project as to be quite familiar with its critical-path accomplishment. They have entered the evolutionary scenario at a spontaneous conceptual level twice as well informed initially as were any pre-Apollo Project humans, and they find it logical to think about the solution of major evolutionary challenges in the comprehensive terms of both the all-history critical-path lessons as well as those of the as-yet-clearly-remembered and -documented special-case lessons of the Apollo Project’s one million additionally accomplished, critical-path tasks. The under-ten-year-old post-Moon-landers are saying, ‘‘Humans can do anything they need to do.’’ They are writing me letters saying so and asking why we don’t make our world work satisfactorily for all humans. This is encouraging.

16 By 1989 those successful Moon-ferry-over conditioned, thoughtful young ones will be twenty. That’s just the right age for commanding and executing the 1989 world-embracing design science revolution, which will result in the conversion of all humanity into an integrated, omni-harmonious, economically successful, one-world family.

17 As of 1980 the successful solution of the myriad of social-economic-psychological problems now existent is obviously a more difficult task for humanity to address than was the achieving of the Apollo Project. For those who care to know how we’re going to accomplish the 1989 omni-success of humans on Spaceship Earth, it is necessary to invest the rest of this hour in reading this Introduction, which contains the minimum information leading to ultimate comprehension of the fact that humanity now—for the first time in history—has the realistic opportunity to help evolution do what it is inexorably intent on doing-converting all humanity into one harmonious world family and making that family sustainingly, economically successful.

18 It will take all the evenings of one week to read the Fuller:1981vc book itself. This is the minimum time investment necessary to discover what roles may be effectively performed by humans individually in support of the 1989 design science realization of the success of humanity.

19 History shows that, only when the leaders of the world’s great power structures have become convinced that their power structures are in danger of being destroyed, have the gargantuanly large, adequate funds been appropriated for accomplishing the necessary epoch-opening new technologies. It took preparation for World War III to make available the funds that have given us computers, transistors, rockets, and satellites to realistically explore the Universe. In the one hour of concentrated introductory reading about the critical path that must be accomplished in order to achieve understanding that we have the option to ‘‘make it,’’ the first thing first is to understand what the world power structures are and of what their unique technical levers and strategies consist.

22 Throughout the history of land and sea transport those who have gained and held control of the world’s lines of vital supply have done so only by becoming the masters in the game of establishing supreme human power over all other subpowerful organizations—ergo, invisibly over all humanity.

23 The historical development of massively keeled and ribbed, deep-bellied ships, which came into human use in the 3000--1000 B.C. era of the Phoenicians, Cretans, and Mycenaeans, altogether altered and vastly enlarged the interregional and international physical-transporting means of the world’s lines of supply. The change was the shift over from that of the armed-horsemen-escorted, way-station-fortressed, twixt-city-states, overland, mule-horse-and-camel-borne caravaning to the thousandfold-greater cargo-and armaments-carrying capacity of the fighting-crew-manned fleets of those massively built, wind-sailing and slave-rowed, seagoing ships.

24 Ancient Troy was a powerful city-state and commanded much of the overland traffic between Asia and Europe. The Mycenaeans’ siege of Troy—when their supplies were continually replenished by their fleet of those heavily ribbed, deep-bellied ships—reversed the city-state’s former supremacy over invaders, whose brought-with-them food had theretofore become exhausted long before exhaustion of the food supplies stored in the great granaries of those inside the walls. The fall of Troy saw the supremacy over human affairs pass from the masters of the overland, Asia-to-Europe, inland-sea ferrying and caravaning lines of supply to the masters of the high-seas, maritime lines of supply.

25 The center of the stage of history’s most critical events moved ever westward and mildly northward. Thus unfortified Venice became in due course the headquarters of the masters of the Mediterranean lines of supply.

26 The fifteenth-century Europeans’ adoption of Arabic numerals and their computation-facilitating ‘‘positioning-of-numbers’’ altogether made possible Columbus’s navigational calculations and Copernicus’s discovery of the operational patterning of the solar system and its planets. Facile calculation so improved both the building of the ships and their navigation that the ever-larger ships of the Mediterranean ventured out into the North and South Atlantic to round Africa and reach the Orient. With Magellan’s crew’s completion of his planned circumnavigation, the planet Earth’s predominantly water-covered sphericity was proven. The struggle for supreme mastery of human affairs thus passed out of the Mediterranean and into the world’s oceans. Ships could carry vastly greater cargoes of the fabulous riches of the Orient to the European market than could the overland caravaning. One European ship completing one successful round trip to the Orient could realize a great fortune for its owners.

27 In 1600 Queen Elizabeth I and a few intimates founded the East India Company. Exercising her crown privileges, the queen granted the company limited liability for losses on the part of the enterprise backers. They could lose their money if the ship were lost, but they could not be held liable for the lives of the sailors who were drowned. While the owners could insure and very greatly limit the magnitude of their losses, the sailors and their families could not. ‘‘Ltd.’’ —limited, in England—and ‘‘Inc.’’ —incorporated, in the U.S.A.—and other similar legal definitions in all capitalist countries constitute ‘‘for ages uncontested’’—ergo, custom-validated and legal-judgments-upheld-royal decrees greatly favoring big-money capitalism over the mortal, breadwinner-loss-taking vast majority of the poor.

28 Elizabeth’s East India Company scheme was to have her national navy (and armies) first win mastery of the world’s sea-lanes. This advantage would thereafter be exploited by her privately owned enterprise. This scheme became one of the first of such national power structure bids for establishing and maintaining world-trade supremacy through dominance of the world’s high seas’, ocean currents’, trade winds’, critical straits’, and only-seasonably-favorable passages’ world-around line of vital and desirable supplies. All the other world-power-stature individuals who vied for supreme mastery of the world’s high seas lines of supply also operated invisibly through monarchs and nations over whom they had sufficient influence. Through such behind-the-throne influence the influenced nation’s resources could be politically maneuvered into paying for the building and operation of the navies and armies that would seek to establish and protect their respective privately owned enterprises.

29 With the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 the British Empire won ‘‘the world’s power structures championship’’ and became historically the first empire ‘‘upon which,’’ it was said, ‘‘the sun never sets.’’ This is because it was the first empire in history to embrace the entire spherical planet Earth’s 71-percent maritime, 29-percent landed, wealth-producing activities. All previous empires—Genghis Khan’s, Alexander the Great’s, the Romans’, et al.—were unified European, North African, and Asian-continental, river-, lake-, and sea-embracing, flat-out land areas completely surrounded in all lateral directions by the infinitely unknown. All earlier empires were infinite systems—open systems. The British Empire was history’s first spherically closed, finite system. Building and maintaining the world’s most powerful navy, the 1805 supremely victorious British Empire was to maintain its sovereignty over the world’s oceans and seas for 113 years.

30 Concurrently with its 1600 A.D.—initiated two centuries of maritime and military struggle for world dominance, England was also developing a civilian army of the world’s best-informed and Empire-backed scientific, economic, and managerial personnel for the most economically profitable realization of its grand, world-embracing strategies. To educate the army of civil servants was the responsibility of the East India Company College located just outside of London. (In 1980 it is as yet operating.) Its graduates went to all known parts of the planet to gather all possible data on the physical and human culture resources to be exploited as well as information on the local customs of all the countries, large and small, with whom Great Britain and the East India Company must successfully cope and trade.

31 In 1800 Thomas Malthus, later professor of political economics of the East India Company College, was the first human in history to receive a comprehensively complete inventory of the world’s vital and economic statistics. The accuracy of the pre-Trafalgar 1800 inventory was verified by a similar world inventory taken by the East India Company in 1810. In a later-post-Trafalgarbook Malthus confirmed in 1810 his 1800 finding that world-around humanity was increasing its numbers at a geometrical progression rate while increasing its life-support production at only an arithmetical progression rate, ergo, an increasing majority of humans would have to live out their short years in want and misery.

32 ‘‘Pray all you want,’’ said Malthus, ‘‘it will do you no good. There is no more!’’

33 A half-century later Darwin expounded his theory of evolution, assuming that nature’s inexorable processes were the consequence of the ‘‘survival only of the fittest species and individuals within those species.’’

34 Karl Marx compounded Malthus’s and Darwin’s scientifically convincing conclusions and said, in effect, ‘‘The worker is obviously the fittest to survive. He is the one who knows how to handle the tools and seeds to produce the life support. The opulent others are ‘parasites’ ’’. The opulent others said, ‘‘We are opulent and on top of the heap because we demonstrate Darwin’s ‘fittest to survive.’ The workers are dull and vision less. What is needed in this world is big-thinking enterprise, courage, cunning, and fighting skill.’’ For the last century these two ideologies, communism and free enterprise, have dominated the political affairs of world-around humanity. Each side says, ‘‘You may not like our system, but we are convinced that we have the fittest, fairest, most ingenious way of coping with the lethal inadequacy of life support operative on our planet, but because there are those who disagree diametrically on how to cope, only all-out war can resolve which system is fittest to survive.’’

35 Those in supreme power politically and economically as of 1980 are as yet convinced that our planet Earth has nowhere nearly enough life support for all humanity. All books on economics have only one basic tenet—the fundamental scarcity of life support. The supreme political and economic powers as yet assume that it has to be either you or me. Not enough for both. That is why (1) those in financial advantage fortify themselves even further, reasoning that unselfishness is suicidal. That is why (2) the annual military expenditures by the U.S.S.R., representing socialism, and the U.S.A., representing private enterprise, have averaged over $200 billion a year for the last thirty years, doubling it last year to $400 billion-making a thus-far total of six trillion, 400 billion dollars spent in developing the ability to kill ever-more people, at ever-greater distances, in ever-shorter time.

38 Weighing only fifty-five pounds, with a wingspan of ninety-six feet, the human-powered Gossamer Albatross was able to fly across the English Channel because the structural materials of which it was built were many times tensilely stronger than an equal weight of the highest-strength aircraft aluminum. The tensile strengths of the Albatross’s structural materials were sixty times stronger per equivalent weight than the strongest structural materials available to Leonardo da Vinci for realizing the design of his proposed human-powered flying machine. The Albatross’s high-strength carbon-fiber and Mylar materials were all developed only a short time ago since World War II.

39 A one-quarter-ton communication satellite is now out-performing the previously used 175,000 tons of transatlantic copper cables, with this 700,000-fold reduction in system-equipment weight providing greater message carrying capacity and transmission fidelity, as well as using vastly fewer kilowatts of operational energy.

40 Continuing to attempt to fit our late-twentieth-century astronautical man-on-Moon-visiting capability into a nineteenth-century horse-and-buggy street pattern, house-to-house-yoo-hooing lifestyle (and a land baron racket) is so inefficient that the overall design of humanity’s present social, economic, and political structuring and the physical technology it uses wastes ninety-five out of every 100 units of the energy it consumes. (Our automobiles’ reciprocating engines are only 15-percent efficient, whereas turbines are 30 percent, jet engines 60 percent, and fuel cells used by astronauts 80 percent.) In the United States, throughout all twenty-four hours of every day of the year—year after year—we have an average of two million automobiles standing in front of red stoplights with their engines going, the energy for which amounts to that generated by the full efforts of 200 million horses being completely wasted as they jump up and down going nowhere.

41 Environment-controlling buildings gain or lose their energy as ‘‘heat or cool’’ only through their containing surfaces. Spheres contain the most volume with the least surface—i.e., have the least possible surface-to-volume ratio. Every time we double the diameter of a spherical structure, we increase its contained atmosphere eightfold and its enclosing surface only fourfold. When doubling the diameter of our sphere, we are not changing the size of the contained molecules of atmosphere. Therefore, every time we double a spherical structure’s diameter, we halve the amount of enclosing surface through which an interior molecule of atmosphere can gain or lose energy as ‘‘heat or cool.’’ Flat slabs have a high surface-to-volume ratio, and so flat slab fins make good air-cooling motorcycle and light-airplane engines. Tubes have the highest surface-to-volume ratios. Triangular-or square-sectioned tubes have higher surface-to-volume ratios than have round-sectioned tubes. Tall slab buildings and vertical, square-sectioned, tubular-tower skyscrapers have the maximum possible energy (as heat or cool)-losing capability.

42 One two-mile-diameter dome enclosing all the mid-Manhattan buildings between Twenty-second and Sixty-second streets and between the Hudson and East rivers, having a surface that is only one eighty-fourth that of all the buildings now standing in that midtown area, would reduce the heating and cooling energy requirements of that area eighty-four-fold.

43 The human pedal-powered airplane and the communication satellite are only two out of hundreds of thousands of instances that can now be cited of the accomplishment of much greater performance with much less material. The inefficiency of automobiles’ reciprocating engines—and their traffic-system-wasted fuel—and the energy inefficiency of today’s buildings, are only two of hundreds of thousands of instances that can be cited of the design-avoidable energy wastage. But the technical raison d’etre for either the energy-effectiveness gains or losses is all completely invisible to human eyes. Thus, the significance of their omni-integratable potentialities is uncomprehended by either the world’s leaders or the led.

44 Neither the great political and financial power structures of the world, nor the specialization-blinded professionals, nor the population in general realize that sum-totally the omni-engineering-integratable, invisible revolution in the metallurgical, chemical, and electronic arts now makes it possible to do so much more with ever fewer pounds and volumes of material, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per given technological function that it is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a ‘‘higher standard of living than any have ever known.’’

45 It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival. War is obsolete.

46 It could never have been done before. Only ten years ago the more-with-less technology reached the point where it could be done. Since then the invisible technological-capability revolution has made it ever easier so to do. It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry. The essence of livingry is human-life advantaging and environment controlling. With the highest aeronautical and engineering facilities of the world redirected from weaponry to livingry production, all humanity would have the option of becoming enduringly successful.

47 All previous revolutions have been political-in them the have-not majority has attempted revengefully to pull down the economically advantaged minority. If realized, this historically greatest design revolution will joyously elevate all humanity to unprecedented heights.

48 The architectural profession—civil, naval, aeronautical, and astronautical—has always been the place where the most competent thinking is conducted regarding livingry, as opposed to weaponry. Now is the time for the comprehensive architectural profession to reorient itself from the six-months-per-one-residence work schedule to the millions-per-day, air-deliverable, sewer-and-water-mains-emancipated, energy-harvesting, dwelling-machine-production world with its unpurchasable, air-deliverable dwelling machines only rentable from a Hertz-Hilton-Bell- Tel service industry, able to accommodate at unprecedentedly high standards of living all humanity’s remote-from-one-another living accommodations. Now is also the time for the architectural profession to reorient itself from the years-to-build, human-need-exploiting cities to the all-in-one-day-air-deliverable-or-removable, human-need-serving, singly-domed-over cities. We have to satisfactorily rehouse the alternately convergent and divergent shuttling phases of four billion uprooting, around-the-world-integrating, sometimes transient, sometimes resident, sometimes in cities, sometimes in the country humans—before 2000 A.D.

49 Technologically we now have four billion billionaires on board Spaceship Earth who are entirely unaware of their good fortune. Unbeknownst to them their legacy is being held in probate by general ignorance, fear, selfishness, and a myriad of paralyzing professional, licensing, zoning, building laws and the like, as bureaucratically maintained by the incumbent power structures.

50 Dismaying as all this paralysis may be, it will lead eventually to such crisis that comprehensive dissemination of the foregoing truths ultimately will be accomplished through (1) the world-around-integrated electronic media broadcasting and (2) the computerized switchover from the inherently-inadequate-life-support accounting assumption of yesterday to the adequate for-everyone-and-everything, time-energy accounting comprehensively employed by the multi-billion-galaxied, eternally regenerative Universe itself. An exclusively-to-be-accomplished, world-around-integrated, computer facilitated, cosmically compatible accounting switchover will make it popularly comprehensible that we do indeed have four billion billionaires on our planet, thereby publicizing that fact and thereby inducing the systematic release of their heritage to all Earthian humans. All this accounting switchover must also be accomplished before 2000 A.D.

51 Those who make money with money deliberately keep it scarce. Money is not wealth. Wealth is the accomplished technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growful needs of life. Money is only an expediency-adopted means of interexchanging disparately sized, non-equatable items of real wealth.

52 A shoemaker has ten milk-drinking children. He wants to acquire a milk cow to convert grass into milk to take care of his children. The shoemaker makes his shoes out of cowhide, but that is not the reason he wants the cow. If and when the cow gets too old for milk production, he can butcher it for its meat and obtain a goodly supply of cowhide for his shoe making.

53 A cow breeder wants a pair of shoes. He and the shoemaker agree that it takes much more time and individual inputs to produce a milk cow than it does to make a pair of shoes. They agree that you can’t cut the cow up and still milk it. So they employ metal, which, being scarce and physically useful, has high and known exchange value and which could be cut apart into whatever fractions are necessary to implement the disparate values of interexchanging. That’s how we got money.

54 Computers do not have to see or feel anything. Computers do not deal in opinion judgments; they simply store, retrieve, and integrate all the information given them. The more relevant the information they are given and the more accurate that information, the better the answers that the computer can give as to the consequences of doing thus and so under a given set of circumstances. Only the computer can cope with the astronomical complexity of integrating the unpredicted potentials of the millions of invisible technology gains in physical capabilities already accomplished.

55 Only world-considerate computer accounting will be able to produce the figures that will persuade all humanity to divert high-science technology from weaponry to livingry. Computer capability will clearly manifest that we indeed now have four billion real-wealth billionaires.

56 Computer capability will distribute only-computer-readable credit cards to all humanity, whose constant living, travel, and development use will continually integrate all the production starts and holds on world-wide coordinated supplying of the needs of a world-around dynamically dwelling humanity. Computers will relegate all gold to its exclusively functional uses as a supreme electromagnetic conduction-and-reflection medium-with its supremacy amongst metals also manifest as rated in weight and bulk per accomplished function. The computer will relegate all physical substances to their uniquely best functional uses.

57 All the foregoing considerations demonstrate clearly why the computer accounting switchover is not only possible but mandatory and must be accomplished before the fear and ignorance of the billions of humans involved in the power structure’s bureaucracies panic and push the atomic-bomb release buttons. What makes us say ‘‘panic’’ of the major political, religious, and business bureaucracies? Bureaucracies will panic because all the great political, religious, and—most of all—big-business systems would find their activities devastated by the universal physical success of all humanity. All the strengths of all great politics and religion and most of business are derived from the promises they give of assuaging humanity’s seemingly tragic dilemma of existing in an unalterable state of fundamental inadequacy of life support.

58 There are two more prime obstacles to all humanity’s realization of its option to ‘‘make it.’’ One is the fact that humanity does not understand the language of science. Therefore it does not know that all that science has ever found out is that the physical Universe consists entirely of the most exquisitely inter-reciprocating technology. Ninety-nine percent of humanity thinks technology is a ‘‘new’’ phenomenon. The world populace identifies technology with (1) weapons and (2) machines that compete with them for their jobs. Most people therefore think they are against technology, not knowing that the technology they don’t understand is their only means of exercising their option to ‘‘make it’’ on this planet and in this life.

59 Fortunately the mathematical coordinate system that has been and as yet is employed by science is not the coordinate system employed by the physical Universe. Nature is always most economical. Science’s coordinate system is not most economical and is therefore difficult. Nature never has to stop to calculate before behaving in the most economical manner. Scientists do. Also, fortunately, we have discovered nature’s coordinate system, which is elegantly simple and popularly comprehensible. (See Fuller:1975uw and  Fuller:1979vp  [Fuller:1975uw; Fuller:1979vp] ).

60 Synergetics will make it possible for all humanity to comprehend that physical Universe is technology and that the technology does make possible all humanity’s option to endure successfully. The other prime obstacle to realization of the ‘‘great option’’ is the fact that the world’s power structures have always ‘‘divided to conquer’’ and have always ‘‘kept divided to keep conquered.’’ As a consequence the power structure has so divided humanity—not only into special function categories but into religious and language and color categories—that individual humans are now helplessly inarticulate in the face of the present crisis. They consider their political representation to be completely corrupted, therefore they feel almost utterly helpless.

61 Asking a computer ‘‘What shall I do?’’ is useless. You can get an informative answer, however, if you program your question into the computer as follows: ‘‘Under the following set of operative circumstances, each having a positive or negative number value in an only-one-value system, which of only two possible results will be obtained if I do so and so? And by how much?’’

62 In 1953 my friend the late Walter Reuther, then president of the United Auto Workers, was about to meet with the board of directors of General Motors to form a new and timely post-World-War-II-oriented labor pact. At that time the first of the ‘‘new-scientists’’-prototyped computers ever to be industrially manufactured were being assembled, put in running order, and fine-tuned by Walter Reuther’s skilled machinists. Walter had all his fine-tuning machinists put the following problem into their computers: ‘‘In view of the fact that most of General Motors’ workers are also its customers, if I demand of General Motors that they grant an unheard-of wage advance plus unprecedented vacation, health, and all conceivable lifetime benefits for all of its workers, amounting sum-totally to so many dollars, which way will General Motors make the most money: by granting or refusing?’’ All the computers said, ‘‘General Motors will make the most profit by granting.’’

63 Thus fortified, Walter Reuther made his unprecedented demands on General Motors’ directors, who were elected to their position of authority only by the stockholders and who were naturally concerned only with the welfare of those stockholders. Reuther said to the assembled General Motors board of directors: ‘‘You are going to grant these demands, not because you now favor labor (which, in fact, you consider to be your enemy), but because by so granting, General Motors will make vastly greater profits. If you will put the problem into your new computers, you wiII learn that I am right.’’

64 The directors said, ‘‘Hah-hah! You obviously have used the wrong computers or have misstated the problem to the computers.’’ Soon, however, all their own computers told the directors that Walter was right. They granted his demands. Within three years General Motors was the first corporation in history to net a billion-dollar profit after paying all government taxes—with their profits increasing steadily thereafter for twenty years.

67 In the electrical-power and light-generating industry the privately owned ‘‘public’’ utilities’ largest customers are the industries. The public utilities must always generate enough electricity to ensure their customers’ never having a shortage and that electricity be cheap; otherwise the industrial customers would install their own generating equipment. What the customers don’t use of the surplus generated power is pure loss to the ‘‘public’’ utilities. To cope efficiently with the foregoing variables, each utility has plotted the peak and valley patterns for each second of each day of all the years since the ‘‘public’’ utilities entered the business. The utilities have many stand-by generators, most of which are in operation for only a small fraction of the time. All of each company’s past peak-and-valley history is combined with probability mathematics to determine how many generators to have in operation at any given time of any given day of each newly evolving year.

68 In the 1930s Wendell Willkie was first to discover that with integration of the electrical-generating networks of neighboring localities, whose peaks and valleys inherently differ to some degree, the excess of any of the network’s member utilities at any one moment is frequently used by other grid members’ peaks. When this happens, it brings pure profit to the excess-power-generating seller.

69 The practical limit on the distance of electrical power delivery from the time of World War I until twenty years ago was 350 miles. However, 350 miles could not span the distances between any two of the continent’s four national time zones. Twenty years ago, as a consequence of the new technologies of the space age, ultrahigh-voltage, superconductivity, and other technical developments occurred that made 1500-mile delivery of electricity possible, practical, and economical. This reach provided the ability to span continental time zones, whose peaks and valleys obviously differed greatly from one another, and this meant greater profits to be derived from across time-zone-integrated electrical-energy networks.

70 Responding to 1929’s Great Crash, the New Deal set up the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built many huge dams and enormous hydroelectric-power-generating capability. This solved all the flood problems of that area. It also greatly irritated the ‘‘private sector,’’ which said government had no right to enter into competition with ‘‘private enterprise.’’ Subsequently the government set up its Rural Electrification Administration (REA). The government was interested in rehabilitating the country’s Depression-ruined farms. The private sector’s electrical-generating industry was not interested. They thought it could be done only at a great loss. The electrical grids financed and administered by the REA interspersed all the great urban centers’ electric grids in the United States.

71 When the 1500-mile electrical-delivery reach unpredictably occurred and potential grid integratings across the time zones loomed, the government-administered rural grids became strategically involved. The boards of directors of all the private sector ‘‘public’’ utilities said they would never integrate electrically with government—they were completely against government being in their game. However, they obviously could not integrate across the time zones except by employing the government’s Rural-Electrification-established-and-financed grid.

72 The problem, with all its pro and con data, was put into the computer by the engineers of both the government and the private sector. The question was asked: ‘‘In which way would the private sector make the most money—by integrating with the government’s network, or not?’’ The computer said the private sector would make 30-percent greater profit by integrating with government.

73 The private sector undertook to do so. When both sides found that great profit would occur for the private sector—which for many years had been the prime financial backer of the Republican party—great political barriers developed in the Democratic administration which had to be overcome. President Lyndon Johnson, acting on behalf of the federal government, used his power over the Democratic party to remove enough barriers to permit the government to agree to integrate with the private sector. The ‘‘private sector,’’ which theretofore had always backed the Republican presidential candidates, apparently became confused and backed Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s successful bid for re-election.

74 Time and again in their short history computers have demonstrated their ability to reverse historically assumed-to-be-unalterable positions of both sides of the opposed political/economic power structure’s directorates or committees. Computers can remember accurately and can cope with and integrate the vast amounts of all known, relevant information on complex problems, uncopeable—with prior to the computer. What we had prior to the computer were respected opinions and only-selfishness-conditioned reflexes on how to cope. Though an opinion might be wrong, there was no practical and convincing way to prove it. Unchallenged, the opinions became respected precedent, then exceptionless concepts, and sometimes even civil and academically accepted social law.

75 Computers will be used more and more to produce the opinion-obsoleting answers to progressive crises-provoked questions about which way world society as a whole will enduringly profit the most. Computers will correct misinformed and disadvantaged conditioned reflexes, not only of the few officials who have heretofore blocked comprehensive techno-economic and political evolutionary advancement, but also of the vast majorities of heretofore-ignorant total humanity.

76 Within the crises times immediately ahead-into which we have already entered-the computer is soon to respond: ‘‘We must integrate the world’s electrical-energy networks.’’ We must be able to continually integrate the progressive night-into-day and day-into-night hemispheres of our revolving planet. With all the world’s electric energy needs being supplied by a twenty-four-hour-around, omni-integrated network, all of yesterday’s, one-half-the-time-unemployed, standby generators will be usable all the time, thus swiftly doubling the operating capacity of the world’s electrical energy grid.

77 A half-century ago I discovered with my non-visibly distorted, one-world-island-in-one-world-ocean, 90° longitude-meridian-backbone, north-south-oriented, sky-ocean world map that a world energy network grid would be possible if we could develop the delivery reach. Since I was on the watch for it, when the 1500-mile-reach capability was technically established twenty years ago, it was immediately evident to me that we could carry our American electrical network grid across the Bering Straits from our Alaska grid to reach the extreme northeastern Russian grid, where the U.S.S.R. had completed a program of installing dams and hydroelectric-power-generating stations on all their northerly flowing rivers all the way into eastern Kamchatka. About 1500 miles could interconnect the Russians’ Asiatic continent electric integrated power grid with the Alaskan grid of the industrial North American electric energy grid.

78 In the early years of Trudeau’s premiership of Canada, when he was about to make his first visit to Russia, I gave him my world energy network grid plan, which he presented to Brezhnev, who turned it over to his experts. On his return to Canada, Trudeau reported to me that the experts had come back to Brezhnev with: ‘‘feasible …desirable.’’

79 I therefore predict that before the end of the 1980s the computer’s politically unbiased problem-solving prestige will have brought about the world’s completely integrated electrical-energy network grid. This world electric grid, with its omni-integrated advantage, will deliver its electric energy anywhere, to anyone, at any one time, at one common rate. This will make possible a world-around uniform costing and pricing system for all goods and services based realistically on the time-energy metabolic accounting system of Universe.

80 Ultra-High-Voltage World Electric Grid

81 Grid line of world’s ultra-high-voltage, 1500-mile, intergenerator connection reach

82 Establishing electric current currency for whole world: 1¢ = 1 kwh

83 B. Fuller’s Dymaxion Sky-Ocean World Map

84 PERCENTAGE OF WORLD POPULATION

85 South America 6%

86 Central America 1%

87 North America 7%

88 Africa 11%

89 Europe 16%

90 Asia (54% land, 7% water) 61%

91 100%

93 In this cosmically uniform, common energy-value system for all humanity, costing will be expressed in kilowatt-hours, watt-hours, and watt-seconds of work. Kilowatt-hours will become the prime criteria of costing the production of the complex of metabolic involvements per each function or item. These uniform energy valuations will re-place all the world’s wildly intervarying, opinion-gambled-upon, top-power-system-manipulatable monetary systems. The time-energy world accounting system will do away with all the inequities now occurring in regard to the arbitrarily maneuverable international shipping of goods and the top economic power structure’s banker-invented, international balance-of-trade accountings. It will eliminate all the tricky banking and securities-markets exploitations of all the around-the-world-time-zone activities differences in operation today, all unbeknownst to the at-all-times two billion humans who are sleeping.

94 The world energy network grid will be responsible for the swift disappearance of planet Earth’s 150 different nationalities. We now have 150 supreme admirals, all trying to command the same ship to go in different directions, with the result that the ship is going around in circles—getting nowhere. The 150 nations act as 150 blood clots in blocking the flow of recirculating metals and other traffic essential to realization of the design science revolution.

95 In treating with the many immediate, most important survival problems, each question will be programmed into the computer asking which way society will experience the lowest-cost optimum living: by giving all humans handsome fellowships, with an income adequate for a high standard of living, or by having them go on earning their livings. The computer will show that 70 percent of all jobs in America and probably an equivalently high percentage of the jobs in other Western private-enterprise countries are preoccupied with work that is not producing any wealth or life support—inspectors of inspectors, reunder-writers of insurance reinsurers, Obnoxico ² Change: Fix ref to Chpt 6 promoters, spies and counterspies, military personnel, gun makers, etc.

97 The computer will also have verified both of the important findings of the brilliant Denver, Colorado, oil geologist, François de Chardenedes: (1) the script of his scenario of ‘‘Nature’s Production of Petroleum,’’ and (2) his economic findings regarding the amount of energy employed as heat and pressure, for the length of time initially that it took nature to photosynthetically process Sun radiation into the myriad of hydrocarbon molecules that comprise all the vegetation and algae, which later are consumed and growthfully multiplied by a myriad of other biological species, a large percentage of which Sun-energy-nurtured-and-multiplied molecules are ultimately processed into petroleum.

98 The script of de Chardenedes’s ‘‘Scenario of Petroleum Production’’ makes it clear that, with all that cosmic-energy processing (as rain, wind, and gravitational pressure) and processing time (paid for at the rates you and I pay for household electrical energy), it costs nature well over a million dollars to produce each gallon of petroleum. To say ‘‘I didn’t know that’’ doesn’t alter the inexorable energy accounting of eternally regenerative, 100-Percent-efficient—ergo, 100-percent-concerned-physical-energy Universe.

99 We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980 jobs in their cars or buses, spending trillions of dollars’ worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn’t take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home.

100 History’s political and economic power structures have always fearfully abhorred ‘‘idle people’’ as potential trouble-makers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky.

101 One would hope the at-home-staying humans will start thinking—‘‘What was it I was thinking about when they told me I had to ‘earn my living’—doing what someone else had decided needed to be done? What do I see that needs to be done that nobody else is attending to? What do I need to learn to be effective in attending to it in a highly efficient and inoffensive-to-others manner?’’

102 Comprehensively and incisively programmed with all the relevant data regarding education, it will be evidenced that the physical and social costs will be far less for individual, at-home-initiated, research-and-development-interned self-teaching than having individual students going to schools, being bused, and so on. This mass-production baby-sitting is only continued because of the union-organized response to the fear of the teachers about losing their jobs. Their political clout has for long been strong enough to guarantee continuance of this inefficiency to the present moment.

103 The computer will make it clear that by far the most effective educational system for human beings—all the way from birth through early childhood and on—is that to be derived from the home video cassette system and its supporting books, the pages of which are also to be called forth on world-satellite-interlinked video ‘‘library’’ screens as published in any language. The computer will also make it very clear that, freed of the necessity to earn a living, all humanity will want to exercise its fundamental drive first to comprehend ‘‘what it is all about’’ and second to demonstrate competence in respect to the challenges. The greatest privilege in human affairs will be to be allowed to join any one of the real wealth-production or maintenance teams.

104 Fortunately, the computer-directable design science revolution option does exist by which all looming problems can and may be effectively solved. Evolution does seem intent upon making humans a success.

107  Fuller:1981vc comprehensively traces all the important trends of history that have led to this moment of humanity’s potential first-stage success and its opening of a whole new chapter of humanity’s ever functioning in local support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.

108 To know now what we could never have known before 1969—that we now have an option for all humanity to ‘‘make it’’ successfully on this planet in this lifetime—is not to be optimistic. It is only a validation of hope, a hope that had no operationally foreseeable validity before 1969. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. The race is between a better-informed, hopefully inspired young world versus a running-scared, misinformedly brain-conditioned, older world. Humanity is in ‘‘final exam’’ as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe as mind, with the latter’s access to the design laws--called by science ‘‘the generalized principles’’—governing eternally regenerative Universe.

109 Human minds have a unique cosmic function not identifiable with any other phenomenon—the capability to act as local Universe information harvesters and local Universe problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe.

110 At the present cosmic moment, muscle, cunning, fear, and selfishness are in powerful control of human affairs.

111 We humans are here in Universe to exercise the Universe—functioning of mind. Only mind can apprehend, abide by, and be led by truth. If human mind comes into control of human affairs, the first thing it will do is exercise our option to ‘‘make it.’’

112 If you read the entire Fuller:1981vc book carefully, including its some times long but essentially detailed considerations, and pay realistically close attention to these considerations, you will be able to throw your weight into the balancing of humanity’s fate. While you could be ‘‘the straw that breaks the camel’s back,’’ compressively you can also be the ‘‘straw’’—straw of intellect, initiative, unselfishness, comprehensive integrity, competence, and love—whose ephemerally effective tension saves us.

113 The invisibly tensive straws that can save us are those of individual human integrities—in daring to steer the individual’s course only by truth, strange as the realized truth may often seem—wherever and whenever the truths are evidenced to the individual—wherever they may lead, unfamiliar as the way may be.

114 The integrity of the individual’s enthusiasm for the now-possible success of all humanity is critical to successful exercise of our option. Are you spontaneously enthusiastic about everyone having everything you can have?

115 For only a short time, in most countries, has the individual human had the right of trial by jury. To make humanity’s chances for a fair trial better, all those testifying must swear ‘‘to tell the truth, all the truth, and nothing but the truth.’’ But humans have learned scientifically that the exact truth can never be attained or told. We can reduce the degree of tolerated error, but we have learned physically, as Heisenberg discovered, that exactitude is prohibited, because most exquisite physical experiment has shown that ‘‘the act of measuring always alters that which is measured.’’

116 We can sense that only God is the perfect—the exact truth. We can come ever nearer to God by progressively eliminating residual errors. The nearest each of us can come to God is by loving the truth. If we don’t program the computer truthfully with all the truth and nothing but the truth, we won’t get the answers that allow us to ‘‘make it.’’

117 When we speak of the integrity of the individual, we speak of that which life has taught the individual by direct experience. We are not talking about loyalty to your mother, your friends, your college fraternity, or your boss, who told you how to behave or think. In speaking of truth we are not talking about the position to take that seems to put you in the most favorable light.

118 It was the 1927 realization of the foregoing that brought the author to reorganize his life to discover what, if anything, the little, penniless, unknown individual, with dependent wife and child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that would be inherently impossible for great nations or great corporate enterprises to do. This occasioned what is described in my "Self-Disciplines,’’ Chapter 4. Change: Add ref to Chapter 4

119 With world-around contact with youth, generated by invitations to speak to the students of over 500 universities and colleges during the last half-century, I can conclude at the outset of 1980 that the world public has become disenchanted with both the political and financial leadership, which it no longer trusts to solve the problems of historical crisis. Furthermore, all the individuals of humanity are looking for the answer to what the little individual can do that can’t be done by great nations and great enterprises.

120 The author thought that it would be highly relevant to the purpose of this book to enumerate those self-disciplines that he had adopted and used during those fifty years. Only those self-disciplines can cogently explain why he adopted the design science revolution and not the political revolutions (the strategy of all history). Only by understanding those disciplines can we understand the strategy governing the development of the artifacts, which strategy is called ‘‘critical path’’—ergo, the name of this book.

121 Each year I receive and answer many hundreds of unsolicited letters from youth anxious to know what the little individual can do. One such letter from a young man named Michael—who is ten years old—asks whether I am a ‘‘doer or a thinker.’’ Although I never ‘‘tell’’ anyone what to do, I feel it quite relevant at this point to quote my letter to him explaining what I have been trying to do in the years since my adoption of my 1927-inaugurated self-disciplinary resolves. The letter, dated February 16, 1970, reads:

122

123Dear Michael,

124Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning ‘‘thinkers and doers.’’

125The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done-that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.

126Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are intensely interested in. Don’t be disappointed if something doesn’t work. That is what you want to know—the truth about everything—and then the truth about combinations of things. Some combinations have such logic and integrity that they can work coherently despite non-working elements embraced by their system.

127Whenever you come to a word with which you are not familiar, find it in the dictionary and write a sentence which uses that new word. Words are tools—and once you have learned how to use a tool you will never forget it. Just looking for the meaning of the word is not enough. If your vocabulary is comprehensive, you can comprehend both fine and large patterns of experience.

128You have what is most important in life—initiative. Because of it, you wrote to me. I am answering to the best of my capability. You will find the world responding to your earnest initiative.

129Sincerely yours, Buckminster Fuller

130 The political and economic systems and the political and economic leaders of humanity are not in final examination; it is the integrity of each individual human that is in final examination. On personal integrity hangs humanity’s fate. You can deceive others, you can deceive your brain-self, but you can’t deceive your mind-self—for mind deals only in the discovery of truth and the interrelationship of all the truths. The cosmic laws with which mind deals are non-corruptible.

131 Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.