Chapter 5
Epilogue
2by Buckminster Fuller
3 In 1889, six years before I was born, Rudyard Kipling wrote:
4 Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
5 Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat.
6 My co-author, Anwar DU, born in Jullundur, Punjab, and I, Buckminster Fuller, born in Milton, Massachusetts, 180 degrees of both latitude and longitude apart, could not be more realistically representative of East and West. And in this book we meet and discuss the meeting of world- around minds. Once again, Kipling demonstrates the poet’s extraordinary prophetic insight.
7 We and all our fellow Earthian humans are now hovering twixt mass entry into heaven versus continuance aboard our now-to tai-humanity-annihilating atomic-bombmounted Planet Earth. We are presently standing at ‘‘God’s great Judgement Seat.’’
8 Whether humanity is to continue and comprehensively prosper on Spaceship Earth depends entirely on the integrity of human individuals and not on political and economic systems.
9 The cosmic question has been asked: Are humans a worth-while-to-Universe invention?
10 When it is incontrovertibly established that, within the available lifetime to correct it, there exists an insurmountable condition of inadequacy of life support for all humans present, and when there is clear evidence that some of those present are incurably diseased and praying for termination of their lives, then the head of a healthy and unselfish family might with integrity adopt a selfish survival strategy for all those dependent on him or her.
11 We know that our spaceship Earth is approximately four billion years old. We know that only within the last three million of these four billion years have humans been aboard our spaceship-planet.
12 We know something about human activity aboard Spaceship Earth with documentable accuracy for only the last eight thousand years.
13 Until only two hundred years ago, humanity was ninety- eight percent illiterate. During the twentieth century, humanity has suddenly become sixty-five percent literate. Two-and-three-quarters billion humans are now in on the critical information. That is, there are now more literate, informed people than all the humans on our planet eighty years ago.
14 Many times in the eight thousand years of known history lethal inadequacy of life support has existed in many areas of Spaceship Earth’s inhabited surface.
15 Because of these facts, evolution made selfishness imperative in the struggle for existence. Only in the twentieth century did that start to change. During the twentieth century, life expectancy has doubled as the prospects of fortunate survival suddenly improved. Between the years 1900 and 1983, we have gone from less than one percent to the majority of all humanity enjoying a higher standard of living than any potentate of 1900. The change has been brought about by the invisible technology of a 99.999 percent invisible realm of electromagnetic, metallurgical and chemical reality.
16 In 1970, for the first time in history, it became technologically feasible to make all humanity a success. Because the invisible technology can now produce so much high performance per each pound of material, erg of energy and second of time invested, the invisible technology developed the sustainable capability to take care of all the physical needs and constructive pleasure of all humans aboard our Spaceship Earth and to do so within only ten years of design science revolution.
17 Comprehensive physical success for all can now be accomplished by converting all the materials and metals now invested in weaponry as well as the mass-manufacture machines and tools into producing only livingry. This sustainably-advanced standard of living for all can be attained while concurrently phasing out all use of fossil fuels and all electric energy generating by atomic reactors.
18 This being so, integrity can no longer tolerate selfishness.
19 Yesterday’s condonable selfishness does not yet know that the conditions have changed. The challenge now facing the integrity of all Spaceship Earth’s individuals is how to inform first themselves and then all the power structure leaders of the world that we now have the historically unprecedented option to ‘‘make it’’ for everyone and set about to exercise that option before the bombs go off.
20 Pacific Palisades, California
21 March 31, 1983
22 One of the last pictures of Buckminster Fuller in his Pacific Palisades home during the Fuller and DU series of meetings © 1983 Kamran Anwar Dil.
