6 The Prospect for Humanity
7.1The Scriptures were right: the meek have inherited the earth. But they do not know it. Though irrevocable, the will has not as yet been finally probated in the court of public comprehension. The will says, "The prospects for humanity are metabolically excellent, intensely interesting, culturally fabulous, and of ever greater intellectual challenge."
7.2 But the will, it must be noted, makes all of humanity its beneficiary. It does not favor or promise unique prosperity to any exclusive blocs of humanity. For the professional secretariat of the Daughters of the Punic Wars; for political spoils systems; for national sovereignties; for annual trade balancing with gold and its concomitant exchange depressions and resultant human wage-and-purchasing-power inequities; for any negative social, economic, or psychological differentiations of human origins or color; for might-makes-right; for purchasable accoutrements, architecture, equipment, and gadgets of distinction; and for the plethora of behavioral obnoxica imposed or induced by the supposed inexorability of the Mathus-Darwin theorem of survival only for the slickest fittest, it is curtains.
7.3 The will of history reads "for everybody or for nobody," and since we balk at "for nobody" it has to be "for everybody." And that’s the way it is going, lickety-split and the world around.
7.4 I did not say that everybody will be happy and every event a joy. Far from it. If your chief happiness has been that of possessing at the expense of others you will be sunk. This revolution is not being effected by pulling the top down. It is being effected by pulling the bottom up. It is being effected by doing more with ever less in such a manner as to take care of all without taking away the functional capabilities and fundamental advantages of any. The surprise–constantly doing vastly more with ever fewer physical resources per function–is our legacy from the millennia-long armaments struggle to do more with less in a world where a pea-size transistor now does more than an army of yesterday and a fistful of atomic fuel takes a large ship around the earth.
7.5 It is an easy matter to foresee the trend of physically dramatic events during the next twenty-one-year generation. We will go to the moon and start communicating with humans in other parts of the universe and open up entirely unexpected new realizations of the significance of man in the universe. We will probably learn that Darwin was wrong and that man came to earth from another planet and monkeys are hybrids degenerated by overlong inbreeding of isolated humans. We will penetrate the ocean depths, enlarging our world threefold. We will float large colonies of humans around the world in tensegrity geodesic cloud-island spheres taxi-serviced by helicopters. And, because every action has its reaction, as we achieve new magnitudes, millionfolding our forward undertakings in time, so will we millionfold our knowledge backward in time. The archeological, anthropological, and ecological history will be as stimulating to mankind
7.6 źThis article by Mr. Fuller appeared in Saturday Review and was adapted by him from the last chapter of his forthcoming book, "Design Science," which embodies his lectures and conversations as Harvard’s 1961-62 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry.
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7.8 as will be the extension of knowledge through realized technology.
7.9 Within the next twenty years our theme song may well be "Anything Buck Rogers can do, we will do better," whether it be strapping on our jet-stilts knapsack and jumping Peter Pan-wise to our office window ledge (properly dressed, of course) and winging outward and homeward by automatically steered, collision-avoiding beam controls, or conversing over satellite-relayed, private-beam television with anyone, anywhere around the world or in space.
7.10 If you don’t credit this forecasting, witness the contracting time spans between man’s successive historical advances in circumnavigation of the earth. His first known circumnavigation is in a wooden sailing ship, circa 1500. His second advance is by steel steamship in the mid-nineteenth century. His third breakthrough is by aluminum airplane in the late 1930s. His fourth breakthrough is in a super alloy rocket capsule in 1957. The times required for these circumnavigations–approximately three years by sailing ship, three months by steel steamship, three days by aluminum airplane, and an hour by rocket capsule–clearly show that by 1985 almost anything you can dream of can and will have happened and that man will be living in an entirely new, responsibly conscious relationship to the universe.
7.11 I could go on to put meat and muscle on the bones of such forecasting, but since the comics and science fiction have made the coming actualities physically anticlimactic I find it much more rewarding to consider how we may be getting from here to there in the familiar terms of day-to-day economic, political, and cultural reorientations and to speculate on how they may come about. To do this I must take inventory of emerging trends that seem significant.
7.12 Trend No. 1. Medical science, through development of interchangeable human parts, both organic and inorganic, may be about to develop the continuous or deathless man. It is now concerned with rendering the integral, mostly internal, corporeal organisms of man ever more adequate to the evolving environment. The architectural scientist has become concerned with rendering the extracorporeal, external organisms of man–the world network of industrialization–ever more successfully adequate to the evolving environment. This is being accomplished by a comprehensively redesigned use of resources in such a manner that the continually decreasing per-capita resources of the earth, which now serve only 44 per cent of humanity with industrial advantage, will be made to serve 100 per cent of humanity at a higher standard of living than has ever been known anywhere by anybody. This is to be done by broad introduction of higher-performance techniques; for example, by substituting wireless for wire in communicating systems, or by scrapping all the two-ton prestige automobiles and producing out of the recovered metals twice as many one-ton cars of higher operating economy and closer parking capability. Most importantly, in response to the automation-engendered unemployment problem, this design-science revolution may be acceleratingly accomplished by paying everyone to go back to high school, college, university, and research and development laboratories, leaving physical production to ever-increasing automation.
7.13 Trend No. 2. The university student, having attained his first freedom of initiative, his optimum level of metabolic efficiency, bodily coordination, and general outlook, finds that his idealism is concurrently exposed to an awareness of powerful intellectual and technical disciplines. At the same time he is the recipient of frequent science-technology breakthrough news, such as under-the-polar-ice passages of atomic submarines and new achievements in rocketry and electronics. He also receives an over-abundance of news concerning world want and political stresses that break into ever more
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7.15 frequent crises.
7.16 Logically, the student becomes exasperated and says, "Why can’t we make the world work? All the negative nonsense is the consequence of outworn, ignorant biases of the old-timers. Let’s join forces and set things to rights." Parading in multitudes, students demand that their political leaders take steps to bring about peace and plenty. The fallacy of this lies in their mistaken, age-old assumption that the problem is one of political reform. The fact is that the politicians are faced with a vacuum and you can’t reform a vacuum. The vacuum is the apparent world condition of not enough to go around–not enough for even a majority of mankind to survive more than half of its potential life span. It is a "you or me to the death" situation that leads from impasse to ultimate showdown by arms. Thus more and more students around the world are learning of the new and surprising alternative to politics–the design science revolution, which alone can solve the problem.
7.17 The students are thrilled to realize that it is themselves they must turn to in order to make the world work, through practical use of their university science and technology resources and their laboratory-supported design science capabilities. The students know that they need no more license to invent the tools that will make the world work than the Wright brothers needed a license to invent one of the most needed more-with-less tools–the airplane. The student’s task is clear-cut. It is to increase the over-all efficiency of the world’s mechanical devices from their present 4 per cent to an over-all efficiency of 12 per cent. This is easy, since over-all efficiencies up to 80 per cent are now feasible. The students know that if they invent the right tools, the tools will be used, given the right emergency. And they know that their design science revolution is bound to work because the emergencies to foster its realization are already here. Their revolution is a bloodless revolution that brings peace in the only way it may ever become effective–by elimination of the physical wants that always underlie war.
7.18 Trend No. 3. There are now in the world several thousand powerful high-capacity, information-storage, electronic computers. The number of them approximately doubles yearly. That means a quarter-million of them by 1970, 250 million by 1980, and 8 billion by 1985–more than two per each world human. The computers, both large and small, are machines for mathematical pattern cognition and recognition storage, retrieval, and coordination; the human brain is the prototype. As with the human brain, all pattern processing consists of two main classes: differentiation and integration; i.e., specialization and generalization. Differentiation identifies, evaluates, selects, and separates the uniquely developing patterns. Integration ratiocinates comprehensively the coordination rates and magnitudes of complex interactions, developments, or transformations.
7.19 To appreciate our state-of-computer-affairs, we first must be aware that throughout the last fifteen years many philosophers have been disturbed by the claims of some cyberneticians that computers are soon to displace the human intellect. If, instead, they had confined their prediction to the effectiveness of the human brain in respect to the computer, some of their claims might in time prove valid. For a long time philosophers assumed that the computer could not ask original questions. They said that the computer can only re-ask a question man has taught it to ask.
7.20 Despite the philosophers’ wishful predictions, the computer has now demonstrated its ability to ask an original question–and it did so without being instructed. Otherwise the question could not be assessed as "original." The surprise demonstration came about approximately as follows: You can teach a computer to play games, for
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7.22 instance to play checkers. You can also teach a computer to play backgammon. You also can build a computer with enough parts to permit it to play both backgammon and checkers at the same time.
7.23 Now, both backgammon and checkers are played at different rates. Further- more, the checker moves are simple and direct. Backgammon is complex. Therefore the same computer, playing both games concurrently, completes the checker moves far more rapidly than the backgammon moves. The backgammon rate is not an even wave- length multiple of the checker rate. Therefore, as with disynchronous, high-frequency twin motors, there develops a secondary low-frequency, intermittent recurrence of co- incident cycles, or interferences. Suddenly the machine has to make both the checkers and backgammon moves at the same time. Because the computer has a given wave length interval within which to make moves, and because the latter is too short to accommodate both moves, the machine has to decide which it will play first. It has to ask itself and then decide, "Which is more important, checkers or backgammon?" If the machine has stored enough information on variable factors, including previous decisions, it may soliloquize: "Poor people play checkers and rich people play backgammon. I’d better cast my vote for the priority of backgammon because my memory storage also tells me that all the poor people are becoming rich and will emulate their conditioned-reflex image of being rich." From this moment, rightly or wrongly, the machine’s storage contains this prospero-proletarian predilection.
7.24 "Which is more important, checkers or backgammon?" is an original ques- tion that had never been asked by man of himself or of the machine. We find that the asking of original questions is a consequence of interferences, whether in the computer or the human brain.
7.25 As far as the computer’s differentiating function as judged by experts is con- cerned, it can be said that the computer is about to make man obsolete as a specialist be- cause the machine can differentiate and seek out much more accurately, swiftly, and persistently than man can. The computer can stay up all night, night after night, select- ing the greens from the blues under humanly intolerable conditions of heat, cold, smells, etc., yet never tire. That the machine is to replace man as a specialist, either in craft, muscle, or brain work, is an epochal event. The computer as superspecialist produces, multiplies, and administers "automation." Because the computer is superior to man as specialist, comprehensive world automation has always been developing inexorably and is now inexorably imminent.
7.26 The scientist-philosophers of computer integration say that because the asking of original questions is a consequence of interferences, and because interferences are products of time sequences, it follows that original questions are both functions and products of time. There must be a great number of moves and a vast number of computer components before enough time can elapse to develop new types of secondary or tertiary interferences that in turn may from time to time provoke original questions. The human brain as a computer mechanism consists of approximately a quadrillion times a quadril- lion atoms in coordinate interpatterning. It will be a very long time before man will be able to develop an extracorporeal computer with that many transistors, storage cells, and other components. The experts also point out that, dealing in integrative complexity as a function of time, the human brain has always been dealing in complexity and has also been integrating comprehensive, historical continuity of human-experience-reflexed, design evolution relayed by human genes. Therefore, the experts say, we would have to have man-made computers running for 1,000,000 years or so in order for them to develop an equivalently integrated complexity. The experts do not see any immediate, or even
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7.28 far distant, competition by the machine computer with the human brain in the functions of complex integration.
7.29 We can have an integrator calculating, designing, and automatically manu- facturing and putting together a geodesic dome in a giant jig, after which an automated "sky tug" helicopter will carry the dome away to install it and prepare it for human oc- cupancy, thus providing a telephone-system type of inventing, developing, installing, maintaining, relocating, and continually self-improving service industry, able to provide telephone-ordered "instant housing." Such a computer-controlled housing and livingry service industry is even now feasible at 1 per cent of the weight, time, and energy in- volvement per unit of volume and living equipment found in conventional high-standard suburbia or Park Avenue skyscraper technology.
7.30 In relation to the computer-tool hookups of automation, it is to be noted that all tools are externalizations of originally integral functions of human organisms. But externalized functions such as that of the cupped hand to hold water are capable, when translated into ceramic cups, of holding hotter or more acid liquids than the human hand could. This is to say that the limits of capability of the externalized functioning are ex- tended but are not unique in principle. Whereas the craft tools developed by man operated independently, the industrial tools develop interdependently. The machine lathe requires the blast furnace and vice versa. Individual craft tools are the externalized counterpart of the individual’s separate functions, while industrial tools are the organic externaliza- tion of man’s integral metabolic regeneration. The whole process of human life from conception through gestation to birth is entirely automated. After birth, despite parental ignorance of the process, the child grows from seven to seventy pounds and then as a youth often goes to one hundred and seventy pounds. Biological growth is entirely auto- mated. For at least 2,000,000 years, men have been reproducing and multiplying on a little automated space ship called earth, in an automated universe in which the entire process is so successfully predesigned that men did not even know that they were auto- mated, regenerative passengers on a space ship and were so naive as to think they had invented their own success as they lived egocentrically on a seemingly static earth.
7.31 Both the universal and the local ecological automation is so successfully de- signed as to allow man the luxury of thinking and acting "consciously" in meager and often perverse degree and even of meddling with the evolutionary mechanism without putting the mechanism’s many degrees of freedom of action into jeopardy.
7.32 With our human-computer brains, we will not now consciously relate the me- chanical computers’ significances with other important information.
7.33 Trend No. 4. At the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual 1961-62 meeting, among the thousands of papers presented, there were two of special interest to us. One dealt with all the biological species that have become extinct, the other with human tribes that have become extinct. These independent papers searched for common characteristics that might account for the extinction. In both cases it became clear that all the biological species that have become extinct and all the human tribes that have become extinct became extinct for one reason–overspecialization. Evolution in- volves constant change. When living species become so specialized that they cannot adapt to an unexpectedly large jump in evolutionary events they are "out."
7.34 Now, men in our industrial and educational system have become more and more specialized. Everyone, wanting economic security, has seemed to think that as specialist he could command the toll gate of an expressway to unique and essential
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7.36 information. He thought: "A great many people will have to go through my specialization toll gate and I’ll have a special, education-guaranteed economic security."
7.37 Trend No. 5. When we combine (a) the trend toward increasing specialization with (b) our knowledge that overspecialization leads to extinction, we realize that our unwitting human trend toward extinction was about to be realized as we developed the ability, through hyperspecialization in mathematical physics, to take the atom apart and thereafter to develop fission and fusion. The scientists, as specialization’s victims, knew nothing of how to control the military, commercial, or political evolution of their discoveries. But just as we are about to blow ourselves up, we discover that nature has invented man with a built-in safety factor, an automated self-destruction-arrester. The safety factor is the built-in propensity not only to invent and develop tools of destruction but also inadvertently to invent constructive tools that render the destructive inventions obsolete. In this case the computer was immediately adopted by the military specialist to control the performance of rocket weapons. Here comes the surprise: The computer is now making man to some degree obsolete as a specialist. Therefore, since it was overspecialization that was leading us toward self-extinction, man has inadvertently invented his own anti-self-extinction device. First diverting man from becoming extinct through overspecialization, the computer and its automation will go on to produce enough metabolic capability to provide lavishly for all humanity. It will thus eliminate the you-or-I-must-die corollary, or the Malthus-Darwin theorem of survival only-of-the-fittest.
7.38 This means that the computers will soon eliminate war as an evolutionary function by providing enough wealth to supply all mankind. To give man adequate "purchasing power" to keep industrialization in accelerated regeneration, we will pay all of humanity to go back to the schools, to the universities, to the advanced scholar laboratories, where they will generate progressively higher standards of living from fewer resources.
7.39 Trend No. 6. Displaced as a specialist, man is now being forced to become preoccupied exclusively with integrative patterning considerations. This means an epochal reorientation. All the educational systems from now on must forsake specialization and cultivate powerful generalization. Everybody will be taught to be comprehensivists. Fortunately, that will come naturally because man is born to be comprehensive. It is his most unique biological characteristic. As he cross-breeds he becomes more comprehensively adaptive. Only inbreeding brings specialized capability. The greater the degree of freedom and acceleration, the higher the probability of cross-fertilization.
7.40 Architects constitute the last species of professional comprehensivists, for they try to put things together while the vast majority, the specialists, have been concentrating on taking things apart. The trend of world students will henceforth be toward becoming architects–that is, comprehensive and cooperative design-science artists.
7.41 A brand-new type of university will probably be required. The conditioned-reflex disease of "categoryitis" with which world society and its bureaucracy are chronically infected is going to make the university’s renaissance difficult. Universities will be vulnerable to displacement by superior educational enterprises; e.g., the USA and other major world governments will probably adjust their disarming economies by giving multi-billion-dollar contracts to the former armaments prime contractors, such as Boeing, Douglas, Lockheed, and General Dynamics to enable these organizations and their scientific staffs to apply their powerful problem-solving capability to the new educational and communications problems of a one-world and space-age society. The big armaments contractors have become in effect the "super graduate schools." They have
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7.43 sequestered all the classified "advance information" and are therefore in a position to handle education, which is destined to be history’s largest and most durable industry. Today’s universities must compete or die.
7.44 Trend No. 7. In order to understand the hazards of these transitions, we must also understand another major trend. In the trends to disarmament, mankind has already disclosed its joy at the accomplishment of only a token reversal of the weaponry race. Man now hopes his politicians can go further toward disarmament, and the total world compulsion to disarm is felt with increasing force. As a consequence we will probably cut down, slowly, on armaments.
7.45 Russia, in her forty years of successive five- and three-year plans, gave priority to all of the heavy industries and then to the lighter industries essential to war. Sixteen million deaths by starvation was the price Russia paid for the priorities to get herself industrialized. She has deferred applying scientific industrialization to the direct raising of her standard of living. She now hopes to do so but is frustrated by the need to focus productivity on the continuing arms race with the U.S. Therefore Russia needs to attain disarmament, or she will not be able to continue to stall off the people’s demand for the higher standards enjoyed by the Western world. But disarmament is stalled in the U.S. because the country cannot keep its economy going through the "irrigation sys- tem" now fed at the top through annual weaponry undertakings without seemingly subscrib- ing to "socialism." In wartime emergencies, national management of economic activity is exempt from charges of socialism, but by custom and law such centralized authority is forbidden in peacetime. To avoid this embarrassment and to keep our economy healthy, wartime emergency powers are extended to meet the threat of the next war. This exten- sion is called "cold war." The U.S. knows that the world needs and wants disarmament and that its socialism-avoiding subterfuge becomes increasingly evident to the rest of the world and thus less tenable. The government and powerful Washington lobbies of the armaments contractors, supported by the labor unions, are seeking ways in which to keep the economic irrigation system fed from the top while also attaining progressive disarma- ment.
7.46 What is necessary is to keep the multi-billion-dollar annual expenditure in new technology flowing to the prime contractors so that it can flow successively through the wages-and-dividends sluiceways and irrigate all industries and business in succession. For every time the paper dollars run through the system, the inventory of tooled-up capability to handle any production is improved and more of the previously untapped uni- versal energy is piped into the system. Each time the dollars go through we get vastly richer. The old-timers call this "spending"; they need a course in semantics. They should understand what wealth really means in the industrial age. It is to the old pirate’s gold as an ocean is to a glass of water. For an instance, the major nations of the earth invested $2.5 trillion in the development of the airplane during the fifty years following the Wright brothers’ invention. Since there is only $40 billion in minted gold in all the world, which is only one-sixtieth the airplane’s price tag, the wealth that developed the airplane was obviously not the bankers’ gold of yesterday. The wealth employed by all the industrial nations of the earth today is the organized metabolic capability wealth. It consists of two basic ingredients: energy and intellection. The energy itself consists of two subingredients–energy as electrochemical matter and energy as electromagnetic radiation. The physicists’ law of conservation of energy states that "energy may be neither created nor lost." The physicists are the authority for the irrefutable fact that wealth cannot be lost; therefore it cannot be spent, which means lost. If any old-timers want to argue, send them to the physicists.
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7.48 Where do the old-timers think all the quadrillions of today’s industrial wealth came from? Certainly not from any gold bankers or feudal inheritances. The old static realities are obsolete.
7.49 Trend No. 8. Science, having been employed almost exclusively in weapons development, will find itself progressively unemployed. The weapons-producing companies and the weapons’-support industries, having high capabilities but dwindling contracts, are going to struggle ruthlessly to find other profitable enterprises. They will move overnight into the living as opposed to killing arts. We have already noted their probably move into education. Another probable move is into the arts and services usually and mistakenly spoken of as housing.
7.50 All you have to do is have a meeting with advanced industrial technology management to realize their inherent ineptitude in respect to the art and science governing the living service industry. Talk about a "house" and the industrialists immediately think about stamping out an aluminum or plastic replica of a Cotswold cottage, or they think of stamping out curtain walls or partitions: "You have to stamp out something." That is as far as their brains, conditioned by advertisements and traditions, permit them to go in the byways of categoryitis.
7.51 The scientists’ "house"–catalyzed concepts are even less imaginative and useful. The carriage, railway, and steamship industries of 1904, and their financial backers, directors, and top industrial managements, did not invent the airplane; nor did the university professors or the scientific societies. There is nothing in the present pattern of building that gives a clue to the ramifications of the upcoming world-habitat service industry.
7.52 Just as prototype inventions were the keys to the establishment of the aeronautical industry, so will prototype inventions be the key to this vast new industry. Many of the prototype inventions are already on hand. Others are developing in the U. S. and Russian man-in-space programs. What is most needed now is a clear definition of the functions of the world service industry that must be established to accommodate the forthcoming world citizen, requiring, at some times, living facilities in culture centers around the world and, at others, rest in remote places all the way from the tropics to the poles, which permit man to be intimate with nature’s every phase without being punished by the intimacy.
7.53 If the professional architects of the world are too slow to support their architectural students’ initiative in undertaking scientific redesign, then both industry and science will begin to stumble into the living field and it will become a historical fiasco. That could easily happen within the next five years.
7.54 The world architectural profession has just about five years to start the architectural students and design-science students developing the capabilities to take, hold, and develop the world’s design-science initiative. Architects are going to have to give themselves powerful mathematical abilities. Fortunately, our research discovery of the omni-rational arithmetic of the tetrahedronally co-ordinate comprehensive mathematical system, employed by nature in all her transformative inter-accommodations, has now become confirmed by many scientific events. It provides a mathematical means adequate to the historical design-science task of redesigning the world’s tools and services.
7.55 Trend No. 9. We must now consider other powerfully favorable historical factors affecting establishment of the world-around living service. Between Russia and
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7.57 the United States, $6 billion has been appropriated to develop the little scientific house in which man will dwell in space or upon the moon. But we note that though architects pro- fess to be master solvers of space problems, thus far they have not been called into any part of the U.S. space program. The professionals who have been called in are space medicine specialists, physicists, mathematicians, geologists, psychologists, chemists, engineers, biologists; but there are no architects.
7.58 I am confident, from my direct experiments, that architects can be trained quickly enough and in such a way as to be much more effective in the space program than are those scientists and businessmen who are now handling the program. The architec- tural scientists will be especially effective in defining the ecological problem and its solution, thus forestalling the fiasco implicit in the scientists’, technologists’, and industrialists’ esthetically-weighted market-analysis misconceptions.
7.59 I have familiarity with the space program in the United States and have found that the big contracts given out so far have gone only to large corporations that have dressed themselves up with large staffs of scientists in order to substantiate their lob- bying competitively with the universities. The space scientists, of the successful bidders for space contracts, are given the problem of how to develop the space dwelling. They are not design scientists–they are subjective scientists. Design science must be objec- tive.
7.60 Scientists are inherently subjective operators. They are trained to make faithful observations and to theorize about the schemes of nature into which their data may fit, but not to consider the significance of their findings as objectively employable. They are too specialized to comprehend complex integration potentials and industrial realizations. Alone among scientists, the medical man is objective. Chemical engineers but not chemists are objective. I have been amazed when I have been called in by the big corporations as a consultant to discover how little they understand of what seems to me to be proper statement of the scientific, structural, chemical, and mechanical aspects of the scientific sky-dwelling problem and its implications for man on earth. The problem is to reduce the dimensions of the ecological pattern from a vast tree-air-earth-worm- bird-bee-rain-wind relay system to a three-foot-diameter, closed-circuit system by which man is able to sustain high health for twelve months without sewer disposal or fur- ther input supply besides sun radiation.
7.61 In his 1926 introduction to Brave New World Aldous Huxley hinted at a pos- sible exception to his theme of an intellect-void, romance-vitiated, atheistic ahumanity. Manking might, I gleaned, be inspired by a few leaders with a powerful and power-giving conviction of the existence in the universe of an intellect greater than that of man and of a universally operative integrity guarding and guiding all the inadequacies of man. Man- kind, thus led, would work through many crises to attain physical success in the universe without cost to the manifold human freedoms, or any cost of individual joy in creative participation in the universal evolution. In his post-World War II second edition of Brave New World, Huxley revised the introduction, saying he tended to have a little more hope that his alternative theme might be realized. And in his succeeding Brave New World Revisited he disclosed an even greater hope that the happy alternative could occur.
7.62 It is probable that if the world’s architect-scientists do gain and maintain the design-science initiative, Huxley’s desirable alternative may be realized. If, on the other hand, the architects or students in general fail to gain that initiative within the next five years, then the weapons industry’s overwhelming invasion of the livingry field will occur and will swiftly evolve into Huxley’s awful dream.
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7.64 Why is it likely that if the weaponry industry and its scientist-slaves take over the livingry industry, life will move toward Huxley’s unhappy dream? And why is it prob- able that if the world’s architectural students take and hold the design-science initiative the world will trend toward Huxley’s happy, but to him, improbable dream? To start off with, industrial corporations are too nearsighted while scientists are usually infinitely too farsighted. Industrial corporations tend toward a plastic-flowered heaven with sexy- scented, plastic, call-girl angels. The scientists tend toward test-tube babies and the deflation of the reproductive urge on the psychiatrist’s couch. On the other hand, ar- chitectural students are realistically idealistic and have well-coordinated vision and a running start on what is needed. Industrial corporations are preoccupied with immediate profits and not with man’s total success. They are interested in making money while ar- chitectural students are primarily interested in making man a total physical, cultural, and moral success.
7.65 Architectural-science students will in due course realize that they are design- ing an entire family of complementary instruments of livingry–similar in comprehensive functioning to the whole family of musical instruments. They will be willing to allow man the privilege of playing his own instruments and of composing not only one-instrument music but of composing symphonies for the whole family of livingry instruments. The new architect will be wise enough to confine his design science to augmenting the integral organic functioning of man so well that the external organics may be coordinated to operate as unself-consciously as do healthy men’s internal organisms. The design- science artist will leave man free to articulate the promptings of his soul in such a manner that each individual may enjoy his newly won and ever-increasing degrees of exploratory and creative freedoms without trespassing on one another and thus frustrating one another.
7.66 Optimism is usually thought of as constituting a mildly unwarranted hopeful- ness in respect to the future. But there is a reverse projection of optimism in the nostalgia-generated myths that recall only the rare and sublime moments of yesterday. Forgetting the negative, reverse optimism overemphasizes, thus deliberately shuts its eyes to reality, and is therefore unable to see the values immediately present.
7.67 I am convinced that we are swiftly emerging from the abysmal conformities of yesterday’s illiterate, spit-punctuated profanity and monosyllabic verbalism, in which rags, filth, diseased bodies, prevalent stenches, devastating superstition, and local bias reigned supreme.
7.68 Beginning with World War I, science, technology, and industry began the epo- chal and ever-accelerating shift from track to trackless, from wire to wireless, from visible to invisible, and from Newton’s norm of changelessness to Einstein’s norm of constant, disynchronous, evolutionary transformation. Man entered into the vast ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. Within the electromagnetic spectrum, visible light is exquisitely minute. At the present moment in history 99.9 per cent of humanity’s impor- tant physical evolution–scientific, technical, industrial, and biological–is taking place in that major portion of the universe of which man has no direct apprehension, but with which he does have exquisite instrumental hook-up.
7.69 This brings us to the historical era of invisible architecture. In invisible ar- chitecture the harmonics are apprehensible only by our intuitions and subconscious esthetics, and operative only in the twilight zone between conscious and sub-conscious awareness. This is the area of intuitive and esthetic formulation. Just as we may instruct ourselves to wake up in three hours and thirty-seven minutes and do so with reasonable accuracy, so also does the subconscious measuring capability of man’s eye
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7.71 judge, at considerable distances, to a sixty-fourth of an inch accuracy, the diameter of the female leg.
7.72 One of the last trends of humanity that we take up is this ephemeral esthetic, its intuitive apprehending and conceiving capability, and its now looming major impor- tance in the guidance of human affairs. I will discuss this trend from the viewpoint of my own experience with geodesic domes, which are so relatively ephemeral as to weigh an average of only 3 per cent of the weight of the best alternate clear-span solutions of structural engineering.
7.73 There are about 3,000 geodesic structures in fifty countries around the world today. They have all gone to their sites in the last ten years. Many, both near and far, have been delivered economically by air. In Ghana, Nigeria, and other tropical African countries people find that geodesic domes work nicely as large umbrellas. The air circulates in through the top and outward around the wide open bottoms. Geodesics in the Arctic and Antarctic, though light enough for air delivery, are strong enough to han- dle nature’s fiercest winds, snow loads, and temperature extremes.
7.74 My kind of work deals with how to find out the ecological problems involved and how to solve them, hoping thereby to bring about the occupant’s satisfaction at the earliest possible moment. That is, I deal with the hows of mathematics and economics, the hows of industrial production and distribution, assembly, and service. I don’t even consider how any structure is going to look until after it is finished. If, when finished, the structure seems beautiful, I know it is all right. To me, "beautiful" apparently emerges as an ejaculation, spontaneously released by my total set of subconscious con- trol coordinates. "Beautiful" is probably ejaculated when my entire chromosomic neuron bank is momentarily in "happy" correspondence with my entire experience (memory) neurons bank. I speak of my brain as if it were a computer. It is.
7.75 The great evolutionary engagement of man with the non-sensorially appre- hensible yet physical universe, achieved only through instrumental hook-up as an exten- sion of man’s faculties, is utterly dependent upon the integrity of the instrumental functioning and the integrity of functioning of the adult intellect at a level of purity cor- responding to that of the four-year-old child’s, whereof Christopher Morley wrote in 1922:
7.76 The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.
7.77 Still young enough to be a part. Of Nature’s great impulsive heart, Born comrade of bird, beast and tree And unselfconscious as the bee–
7.78 And yet with lovely reason skilled Each day new paradise to build, Elate explorer of each sense, Without dismay, without pretense!
7.79 In your unstained, transparent eyes There is no conscience, no surprise:
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7.81 Life’s queer conundrums you accept, Your strange divinity still kept.
7.82 Being, that now absorbs you, all Harmonious, unit, integral, Will shred into perplexing bits,– Oh, contradiction of the wits!
7.83 And Life, that sets all things in rhyme, May make you poet, too, in time– But there were days, O tender elf, When you were Poetry itself.
7.84 By my calculations there is mathematical probability that progressive mastery by man of the physical coordinates of nature, and their progressive subordination to total abstract concepts, may indeed be trending historically to permit the integral being of the child to remain unfractionated throughout the total life span. For instance, we are unaware of our own tongues until we bite them. When in health and good form, the total myriad component functions of our physical being are entirely subordinated to subconsciously coordinated functions of the regenerative pattern of the whole individual life.
7.85 Humans dying in hospitals have often been weighed as they crossed the threshold between life and death. No weight is lost. Life is weightless, imponderable. When life has departed, the radiant heat, the brain-propagated energy waves, and the radiance of being are alike gone. The full physical inventory of the corpse remains–useless, reminiscent, but that is all. That is the way I read the data of man’s significant exploring.
7.86 Margaret Mead said recently that God is rarely mentioned at scientific or social conferences. This is not so much a phenomenon of conferences as it is a characteristic of our times. Many think of science and the age of industrialization as atheistic. Scientists frequently have been asked by less educated men whether anything they observe through their microscopes or telescopes confirms religious dogma and the Scriptures–and, if not, must they not forsake Scripture and religion as having no fundamental significance whatsoever? Surprised by the question and unconvinced that they are atheists, the scientific specialists, also avoiding philosophical speculation as treacherous ground for reasoning, have been notably ineffective in refuting their atheistic status.
7.87 Cosmology and philosophy have been differentially dissipated in the era of increasing specialization. Total thinking is now almost completely legendary or speculative. For instance, it is a popular conception that the universe must have been begun in chaos, out of which it has happened from time to time that probability, reversing its law of increase of the random element, has surprisingly accumulated increasing order. It seems that this illogical increase of order accredited by the popular science cosmology has also from time to time been aided by scientists who "wrest order out of chaos." Finally, according to the legend, probability and science together have now provided us with an extraordinarily well-organized chemical, physical, and biological world within a universe of gratifying regularities.
7.88 The scientific record refutes this a priori chaos scheme. Every great scientist who has documented the events surrounding his major discovery has documented the fact that, in comparison to his crude hypothesizing, his discovery disclosed a sublime
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7.90 regularity of nature. The regularities of nature are governed by pure mathematical principles. Thus, since principles are inherently weightless and infinite–that is endless –the universe could never have been chaotic and thus has no beginning.
7.91 In 1930 Einstein wrote of the nonanthropomorphic conception of God and of the cosmic religious sense, asserting that the great scientists such as Kepler who had been called heretics were indeed the most profoundly religious men when appraised in a cosmic, nonanthropomorphic sense. Einstein said, "What an extraordinary faith in the orderliness of universe must have inspired Kepler to spend the nights of his lifetime alone with the stars."
7.92 Scientists, having developed double names for their overlapping work (bio-chemistry, biophysics, etc.), are now finding their total field interconnected and unitary. This is a general trend of science. And so many scientists are now being educated that it may be forecast that within the next half-century not only science but much of educated society will have come naturally through its own explorations and experiences to discover the comprehensive order of the universe. Thus they will inadvertently develop a regeneratively inspiring faith in the order and integrity of the universe.
7.93 And because the complexities of this universe are only intellectually comprehensible, recognition of an intellect greater than and anticipatory to our own intellec tions is inexorably emergent in the integrating totality of scientific exploration. This means the personal, first-hand discovery by increasing numbers of humanity of nonanthropomorphic God, the great intellectual integrity of universal evolution.
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