
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - Chapter VIII
Purchase a print version of this book from our on-line store
Thus man has developed an externalized metabolic regeneration organism involving the whole of Spaceship Earth and all its resources. Any human being can physically employ that organism, whereas only one human can employ the organically integral craft tool. All 9I of the 92 chemical elements thus far found aboard our spaceship are completely involved in the world-around industrial network. The full family of chemical elements is unevenly distributed, and therefore our total planet is at all times involved in the industrial integration of the unique physical behaviors of each of all the elements. Paradoxically, at the present moment our Spaceship Earth is in the perilous condition of having the Russians sitting at one set of the co-pilots flying controls while the Americans sit at the other. France controls the starboard engines, and the Chinese control the port engines, while the United Nations controls the passenger operation. The result is an increasing number of U. F. O. hallucinations of sovereign states darting backwards and forwards and around in circles, getting nowhere, at an incredibly accelerating rate of speed. All of humanitys tool extensions are divisible into two main groups: the craft and the industrial tools. I define the craft tools as all those tools which could be invented by one man starting all alone, naked in the wilderness, using only his own experience and his own integral facilities. Under these isolated conditions he could and did invent spears, slings, bows, and arrows, etc. By industrial tools I mean all the tools that cannot be produced by one man, as for instance the S.S. Queen Mary. With this definition, we find that the spoken word, which took a minimum of two humans to develop, was the first industrial tool. It brought about the progressive integration of all individual generation-to-generation experiences and thoughts of all humanity everywhere and everywhen. The Bible says, "In the beginning was the word"; I say to you, "In the beginning of industrialization was the spoken word." With the graphic writing of the words and ideas we have the beginning of the computer, for the computer stores and retrieves information. The written word, dictionary and the book were the first information storing and retrieving systems.
The craft tools are used initially by man to make the first industrial tools. Man is using his hands today most informatively and expertly only to press the buttons that set in action the further action of the tools which reproduce other tools which may be used informatively to make other tools. In the craft economies craftsman artists make only end- or consumer-products. In the industrial economy the craftsman artists make the tools and the tools make the end- or consumer-products. In this industrial development the mechanical advantages of men are pyramided rapidly and synergetically into invisible magnitudes of ever more incisive and inclusive tooling which produces ever more with ever less resource investment per each unit of end-product, or service, performance.
As we study industrialization, we see that we cannot have mass production unless we have mass consumption. This was effected evolutionarily by the great social struggles of labor to increase wages and spread the benefits and prevent the reduction of the numbers of workers employed. The labor movement made possible mass purchasing; ergo, mass production; ergo, low prices on vastly improved products and services, which have altogether established entirely new and higher standards of humanitys living.
Our labor world and all salaried workers, including school teachers and college professors, are now, at least subconsciously if not consciously, afraid that automation will take away their jobs. They are afraid they wont be able to do what is called "earning a living," which is short for earning the right to live. This term implies that normally we are supposed to die prematurely and that it is abnormal to be able to earn a living. It is paradoxical that only the abnormal or exceptional are entitled to prosper. Yesterday the term even inferred that success was so very abnormal that only divinely ordained kings and nobles were entitled to eat fairly regularly.
It is easy to demonstrate to those who will take the time and the trouble to unbias their thoughts that automation swiftly can multiply the physical energy part of wealth much more rapidly and profusely than can mans muscle and brain-reflexed-manually-controlled production. On the other hand humans alone can foresee, integrate, and anticipate the new tasks to be done by the progressively automated wealth-producing machinery. To take advantage of the fabulous magnitudes of real wealth waiting to be employed intelligently by humans and unblock automations postponement by organized labor we must give each human who is or becomes unemployed a life fellowship in research and development or in just simple thinking. Man must be able to dare to think truthfully and to act accordingly without fear of losing his franchise to live. The use of mind fellowships will permit humans comprehensively to expand and accelerate scientific exploration and experimental prototype development. For every 100,OOO employed in research and development, or just plain thinking, one probably will make a breakthrough that will more than pay for the other 99,999 fellowships. Thus, production will no longer be impeded by humans trying to do what machines can do better. Contrariwise, omni-automated and inanimately powered production will unleash humanitys unique capability-its metaphysical capability. Historically speaking, these steps will be taken within the next decade. There is no doubt about it. But not without much social crisis and consequent educational experience and discovery concerning the nature of our unlimited wealth.
Through the universal research and development fellowships, were going to start emancipating humanity from being muscle and reflex machines. Were going to give everybody a chance to develop their most powerful mental and intuitive faculties. Given their research and development fellowship, many who have been frustrated during their younger years may feel like going fishing. Fishing provides an excellent opportunity to think clearly; to review ones life; to recall ones earlier frustrated and abandoned longings and curiosities. What we want everybody to do is to think clearly.
We soon will begin to generate wealth so rapidly that we can do very great things. I would like you to think what this may do realistically for living without spoiling the landscape, or the antiquities or the trails of humanity throughout the ages, or despoiling the integrity of romance, vision, and harmonic creativity. All the great office buildings will be emptied of earned living workers, and the automated office-processing of information will be centralized in the basements of a few buildings. This will permit all the modernly mechanized office buildings to be used as dwelling facilities.
When we approach our problems on a universal, general systems basis and progressively eliminate the irrelevancies, somewhat as we peel petals from an artichoke, at each move we leave in full visibility the next most important layer of factors with which we must deal. We gradually uncover you and me in the heart of now. But evolution requires that we comprehend each layer in order to unpeel it. We have now updated our definitions of universe by conforming them with the most recent and erudite scientific findings such as -those of Einstein and Planck. Earlier in our thinking we discovered mans function in universe to be that of the most effective metaphysical capability experimentally evidenced thus far within our locally observable phases and time zones of universe. We have also discovered that it is humanitys task to comprehend and set in order the special case facts of human experience and to win therefrom knowledge of the a priori existence of a complex of generalized, abstract principles which apparently altogether govern all physically evolving phenomena of universe.
We have learned that only and exclusively through use of his mind can man inventively employ the generalized principles further to conserve the locally available physical energy of the only universally unlimited supply. Only thus can man put to orderly advantage the various, local, and otherwise disorderly behaviors of the entropic, physical universe. Man can and may metaphysically comprehend, anticipate, shunt, and meteringly introduce the evolutionarily organized environment events in the magnitudes and frequencies that best synchronize with the patterns of his successful and metaphysical metabolic regeneration while ever increasing the degrees of humanitys space and time freedoms from yesterdays ignorance sustaining survival procedure chores and their personal time capital wasting.
Now we have comprehended and peeled off the layers of petals which disclosed not only that physical energy is conserved but also that it is ever increasingly deposited as a fossil-fuel savings account aboard our Spaceship Earth through photosynthesis and progressive, complex, topsoil fossilization buried ever deeper within Earths crust by frost, wind, flood, volcanoes, and earthquake upheavals. We have thus discovered also that we can make all of humanity successful through sciences world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years energy conservation aboard our Spaceship Earth. These energy savings have been put into our Spaceships life-regeneration-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter functions.
The fossil fuel deposits of our Spaceship Earth correspond to our automobiles storage battery which must be conserved to turn over our main engines self-starter. Thereafter, our "main engine," the life regenerating processes, must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from the powers of wind, tide, water, and the direct Sun radiation energy. The fossil-fuel savings account has been put aboard Spaceship Earth for the exclusive function of getting the new machinery built with which to support life and humanity at ever more effective standards of vital physical energy and reinspiring metaphysical sustenance to be sustained exclusively on our Sun radiations and Moon pull gravitys tidal, wind, and rainfall generated pulsating and therefore harnessable energies. The daily income energies are excessively adequate for the operation of our main industrial engines and their automated productions. The energy expended in one minute of a tropical hurricane equals the combined energy of all the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. nuclear weapons. Only by understanding this scheme may we continue for all time ahead to enjoy and explore universe as we progressively harness evermore of the celestially generated tidal and storm generated wind, water, and electrical power concentrations. We cannot afford to expend our fossil fuels faster than we are "recharging our battery," which means precisely the rate at which the fossil fuels are being continually deposited within Earths spherical crust.
We have discovered that it is highly feasible for all the human passengers aboard Spaceship Earth to enjoy the whole ship without any individual interfering with another and without any individual being advantaged at the expense of another, provided that we are not so foolish as to burn up our ship and its operating equipment by powering our prime operations exclusively on atomic reactor generated energy. The too-shortsighted and debilitating exploitation of fossil fuels and atomic energy are similar to running our automobiles only on the self-starters and batteries and as the latter become exhausted replenishing the batteries only by starting the chain reaction consumption of the atoms with which the automobiles are constituted.
We have discovered also why we were given our intellectual faculties and physical extension facilities. We have discovered that we have the inherent capability and inferentially the responsibility of making humanity comprehensively and sustainably successful. We have learned the difference between brain and mind capabilities. We have learned of the superstitions and inferiority complexes built into all humanity through all of historys yesterdays of slavish survival under conditions of abysmal illiteracy and ignorance wherein only the most ruthless, shrewd, and eventually brutish could sustain existence, and then for no more than a third of its known potential life span.
This all brings us to a realization of the enormous educational task which must be successfully accomplished right now in a hurry in order to convert mans spin-dive toward oblivion into an intellectually mastered power pullout into safe and level flight of physical and metaphysical success, whereafter he may turn his Spaceship Earths occupancy into a universe exploring advantage. If it comprehends and reacts effectively, humanity will open an entirely new chapter of the experiences and the thoughts and drives thereby stimulated.
Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or for none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that "unity is plural and at minimum two"the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complementary. Together we average as zero-that is, as eternity.
Now having attained that cosmic degree of orbital conceptioning we will use our retrorocket controls to negotiate our reentry of our Spaceship Earths atmosphere and return to our omni-befuddled present. Here we find ourselves maintaining the fiction that our crossbreeding World Man consists fundamentally of innately different nations and races which are the antithesis of that crossbreeding. Nations are products of many generations of local in-breeding in a myriad of remote human enclaves. With grandfather chiefs often marrying incestuously the gene concentrations brought about hybrid nationally-unique physiological characteristics which in the extreme northern hibernations bleached out the human skin and in the equatorial casting off of all clothing inbred darkly tanned pigmentation. All are the consequence only of unique local environment conditions and super inbreeding.
The crossbreeding world people on the North American continent consist of two separate input sets. The first era input set consists of those who came with the prevailing winds and ocean currents eastward to the North, South, and Central Americas by raft and by boat from across the Pacific, primarily during an age which started at least thirty thousand years ago, possibly millions of years ago, and terminated three hundred years ago. The eastbound trans-Pacific migration peopled the west coasts of both South and North America and migrated inland towards the two continents middle ground in Central America and Mexico. In Mexico today will be found every type of human characteristic and every known physiognomy, each of which occur in such a variety of skin shades from black to white that they do not permit the ignorance-invented "race" distinctions predicated only superficially on extreme limits of skin color. The second or westbound input era set of crossbreeding world man now peopling the Americas consists of the gradual and slower migration around the world from the Pacific Ocean westward into the wind, "following the sun," and travelling both by sea through Malaysia, across the Indian Ocean up the Persian Gulf into Mesopotamia and overland into the Mediterranean, up the Nile from East Africa into the South and North Atlantic to America-or over the Chinese, Mongolian, Siberian, and European hinterlands to the Atlantic and to the Americas.
Now both east and westbound era sets are crossbreeding with one another in ever-accelerating degree on Americas continental middleground. This omni reintegration of world man from all the diverse hybrids is producing a crossbred people on the Pacific Coast of North America. Here with its aerospace and oceans penetrating capabilities, a world type of humanity is taking the springboard into all of the hitherto hostile environments of universe into the ocean depths and into the sky and all around the Earth.
Returning you again to our omni-befuddled present, we realize that reorganization of humanitys economic accounting system and its implementation of the total commonwealth capability by total world society, aided by the computers vast memory and high speed recall comes first of all of the first-things-first that we must attend to to make our space vehicle Earth a successful man operation. We may now raise our sights, in fact must raise our sights, to take the initiative in planning the world-around industrial retooling revolution. We must undertake to increase the performance per pound of the worlds resources until they provide all of humanity a high standard of living. We can no longer wait to see whose biased political system should prevail over the world.
You may not feel very confident about how you are going to earn your right to live under such world-around patron-less conditions. But I say to you the sooner you do the better chance we have of pulling out of humanitys otherwise fatal nose dive into oblivion. As the world political economic emergencies increase, remember that we have discovered a way to make the total world work. It must be initiated and in strong momentum before we pass the point of no return. You may gain great confidence from the fact that your fellow men, some of them your great labor leaders, are already aware and eager to educate their own rank and file on the fallacy of opposition to automation.
I have visited more than three hundred universities and colleges around the world as an invited and appointed professor and have found an increasing number of students who understand all that we have been reviewing. They are comprehending increasingly that elimination of war can only be realized through a design and invention revolution. When it is realized by society that wealth is as much everybodys as is the air and sunlight, it no longer will be rated as a personal handout for anyone to accept a high standard of living in the form of an annual research and development fellowship.
I have owned successively, since boyhood, fifty-four automobiles. I will never own another. I have not given up driving. I began to leave my cars at airports-never or only infrequently getting back to them. My new pattern requires renting new cars at the airports as needed. I am progressively ceasing to own things, not on a political-schism basis, as for instance Henry Georges ideology, but simply on a practical basis. Possession is becoming progressively burdensome and wasteful and therefore obsolete.
Why accumulate mementos of far away places when you are much more frequently in those places than at your yesterdays home, nation, state, city, and street identified residences, as required for passport, taxing, and voting functions? Why not completely restore the great cities and buildings of antiquity and send back to them all their fragmented treasures now deployed in the worlds museums? Thus, may whole eras be reinhabited and experienced by an ever increasingly interested, well-informed, and inspired humanity. Thus, may all the world regain or retain its regenerative metaphysical mysteries.
I travel between Southern and Northern hemispheres and around the world so frequently that I no longer have any so-called normal winter and summer, nor normal night and day, for I fly in and out of the shaded or sun-flooded areas of the spinning, orbiting Earth with ever-increased frequency. I wear three watches to tell me what time it is at my "home" office, so that I can call them by long distance telephone. One is set for the time of day in the place to which I am next going, and one is set temporarily for the locality in which I happen to be. I now see the Earth realistically as a sphere and think of it as a spaceship. It is big, but it is comprehensible. I no longer think in terms of "weeks" except as I stumble over their antiquated stop-and-go habits. Nature has no "weeks." Quite clearly the peak traffic patterns exploited by businessmen who are eager to make the most profit in order to prove their right to live causes everybody to go in and out of the airport during two short moments in the twenty-four hours with all the main facilities shut down two-thirds of the time. All our beds around the world are empty for two-thirds of the time. Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time.
The population explosion is a myth. As we industrialize, down goes the annual birth rate. If we survive, by 1985, the whole world will be industrialized, and, as with the United States, and as with all Europe and Russia and Japan today, the birth rate will be dwindling and the bulge in population will be recognized as accounted for exclusively by those who are living longer.
When world realization of its unlimited wealth has been established there as yet will be room for the whole of humanity to stand indoors in greater New York City, with more room for each human than at an average cocktail party.
We will oscillate progressively between social concentrations in cultural centers and in multi-deployment in greater areas of our Spaceship Earths as yet very ample accommodations. The same humans will increasingly converge for metaphysical intercourse and deploy for physical experiences.
Each of our four billion humans shares of the Spaceship Earths resources as yet today amount to two-hundred billion tons.
It is also to be remembered that despite the fact that you are accustomed to thinking only in dots and lines and a little bit in areas does not defeat the fact that we live in omnidirectional space-time and that a four dimensional universe provides ample individual freedoms for any contingencies.
You may very appropriately want to ask me how we are going to resolve the ever-acceleratingly dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and ideological dogmas. I answer, it will be resolved by the computer. Man has ever-increasing confidence in the computer; witness his unconcerned landings as airtransport passengers coming in for a landing in the combined invisibility of fog and night. While no politician or political system can ever afford to yield understandably and enthusiastically to their adversaries and opposers, all politicians can and will yield enthusiastically to the computers safe flight-controlling capabilities in bringing all of humanity in for a happy landing.
So, planners, architects, and engineers take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and dont hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe.






