Chapter 3
EARTHIANS’ CRITICAL MOMENT
2Now 75 and bornbefore the automobile, radio, airplane or cinema, my memory spans humanity’s transition from a myriad of vastly isolated, popularly illiterate communities and tribes . . . with only vague awareness of one another . . . now converted into the beginning of an omni-integrated, freely intercirculating, omni-literate world society.
3 I have seen humanity transformed from a condition of less than 1 per cent to 40 per cent of the now doubled world population which is enjoying economic success and living standards superior to any pre-twentieth-centuiy monarchs. Simultaneously the life span of that successful 40 per cent has been doubled. Though large, that 40 per cent is, as yet, a ‘‘minority’’ of all humanity.
4 We are now entered into Earthians’ most critical moment, that of imminent, technically feasible economic success for all humanity. This, however, is frustrated by the large and prosperous minority’s fearful procrastination at the entrance into the unknown, epochal changes, obviously essential to realization of comprehensive human success and total planetary freedoms and enjoyment.
5 On the other hand, the mortally concerned ‘‘have-not’’ majority and vast millions of their well-to-do, youthful, world- around sympathizers are revolutionarily organized or revolution prone. This condition is worsened by the combined expenditures for weaponry, warring and adjunct activities, of all the opposing forces of the world, which now averages an annual two-hundred billion dollars.
6 This not only wastes humanity’s highest productivity, but turns its capabilities and resources toward extinction of humanity. It postpones public discovery of its potential of total human success and deters serious consideration of the means to realize that success,.
7 During my lifetime the world’s physical resource reserves per each world human have continually decreased. Therefore, the eighty-folding of the numbers of economically successful within two-thirds of a century can be accounted for only as the unexpected by-product of the doing-ever-more- with-ever-less resources per each realized function, occasioned by the design science revolution initiated exclusively in world- around weaponry developments and their supporting production techniques. Humanity is acquiring the right technology for all the wrong reasons---and only as driven by looming wars and the fear of being annihilated by the enemy. Humanity could acquire the technology for the purpose of total success and enduring peace of humanity. Under these conditions in the past humans said ‘‘we cannot afford it in peace times,’’ but when the technology is acquired it not only pays for itself, but always constitutes inadvertent acquisition of greater wealth.
8 The known total of in-mine or recirculatable chemical elements of the world is now preoccupied in serving only the 40 per cent minority. At the present halfway stage of the design revolution our resources cannot support economic success, health and expanded longevity for the 60 per cent ‘‘have-nots’’ of all humanity. This is due to the low level of engineering efficiency and capability of presently acceptable standards of technological strategy, i.e., an over-all of only 4 per cent realized of the 100 per cent energy employed.
9 This efficiency can be improved threefold to an over-all 12 per cent under now proven technological alternatives.
10 Political revolution, per se, can only take from one to advantage another. Yet total success for humanity could eliminate war. Total success can be accomplished only by:
11 ° Shunting the high priority airspace electronics industry from preoccupation with killingry to preoccupation with livingry.
12 °The direct application to livingry purposes of the now known, but as yet unemployed, design science stratagems for producing ever-more-physical-performance-with-ever-less resources per function accomplished, and at the same time developing all humanity’s spontaneous awareness of its realizable success and the technological nature of its fulfillment.
13 Such a cooperative spirit and initiative on an ever swifter and broadening scale is essential to realization of the design science revolution, without which humanity at large will undoubtedly perish.