Buckminster Fuller

from Critical Path (1981) St Martin's Press, NY

• INTRODUCTION
• WORLD GAME
• CRITICAL PATH PART 1

Twilight of the World's Power Structures

HUMANITY IS MOVING EVER DEEPER into crisis-a crisis without precedent.

First, it is a crisis brought about by cosmic evolution irrevocably intent upon completely transforming omni- disintegrated 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.

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 expenenced 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.

Humanity's cosmic-energy income account consists entirely of our gravity- and star (99 percent sun) - distributed cosmic dividends of waterpower, tidal power, wavepower, windpower, 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. 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."

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.

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."

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 firepower 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.

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.

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 (this is only a magnitude figure. It obviously is not exact.) things that had to be done before blast-off of the first Earth- to- Moon ferrying-over-and-back.

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 nonobvious, 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 omnimeaningful.

Now, in 1980, a large number of all humans ten years of age and under, all of whom were bom 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 preApollo 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-yearold 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.

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, omniharmonious, economically successful, one-world family.

As of 1980 the successful solution of the myriad of social-economicpsychological 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 omnisuccess 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.

It will take all the evenings of one week to read the Critical Path 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The fifteenth-century Europeans' adoption of Arabic numerals and their computation-facilitating "positioning-of-numbers" altogether made possible Columbus's navigational calculations and Copenicus'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-Trafalgar-book 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.

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

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."

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 visionless. 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."

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.

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 agosince World War II.

A one-quarter-ton communication satellite is now outperforming 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.

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 life-style (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.

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.

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. 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.

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."

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

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.

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.

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, dwellingmachine-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 satisfacto¬ rily 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.

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.

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 adequatefor-everyone-and-everything, time-energy accounting comprehensively employed by the multibillion-galaxied, eternally regenerative Universe itself. An exclusively-to-be-accomplished, world-around-integrated, computerfacilitated, cosmically compatible accounti - ng 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.

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 inter- exchanging disparately sized, nonequatable items of real wealth.

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 shoemaking.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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 interreciprocating 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.

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 Synergetics, vols. 1 and 2 - Macmillan, 1975, 1979.) 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.

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?"

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."

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 will learn that I am right."

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.

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.

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.

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. 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. When the 1500-mile electrical-delivery reach unpredictably occurred and potential grid integratings across the time zones loomed, the govemment-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 govemment's Rural- Electrification- established- and- financed grid.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

A half-century ago I discovered with my nonvisibly 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.

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."

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.

In this cosmically uniform, common energy-value system for all humanity, costing will be expressed in kilowatt-hours, watt-hours, and wattseconds 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 replace 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.

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.

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-in¬ spectors of inspectors, reunderwriters of insurance reinsurers, Obnoxico promoters, spies and counterspies, military personnel, gunmakers, etc.

The computer will also have verified both of the important findings of the brilliant Denver, Colorado, oil geologist, Frangois 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.

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.

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.

History's political and economic power structures have always fearfully abhorred "idle people" as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

Critical Path 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.

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.

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.

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

If you read the entire Critical Path book carefully, including its sometimes 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.

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.

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?

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."

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." 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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Dear Michael,

Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning "thinkers and doers. "

The 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.

Try 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.

Whenever 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.

You 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.

Sincerely yours,

Buckminster Fuller

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 noncorruptible.

Cosmic evolution is omniscient God comprehensively articulate.

World Game

THINK YOU MAY FIND the physical design science revolution and its 11 software" outlined in my World Game thesis to be the most thorough, effective, and realistically feasible strategy for accomplishing sustainable physical and metaphysical success for all humanity, all to be realized within the shortest possible time.

In my book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (E. P. Dutton, 1963) you will find my identification of the phenomenon wealth. Wealth consists of physical energy (as matter or radiation) combined with metaphysical know-what and know-how. The scientists make it clear that no physical energy of Universe gets lost - ergo, the physical constituent of wealth is cosmically irreducible. Experience teaches us that every time we employ our metaphysical know-what and know-how wealth, we always learn more. Experience can only increase - ergo, the metaphysical component of wealth can only increase, and totally integrated wealth itself can only increase.

From the comprehensively informed World Game viewpoint, those who have learned how to make money with money - which money can never be anything but a medium of wealth exchanging - have now completely severed money from its constant functional identity with real wealth. With their game of making money with money the money-makers and their economists continue to exploit the general political and religious world's assumptions that a fundamental inadequacy of human life support exists around our planet. (198)

These money interests are wrong. Because of (A) the constant increase in strength per pound of new metallic alloys, (B) the constant increase in horsepower per each pound and cubic inch of aircraft engines, and (C) the ever-increasing performance per pounds and cubic inches of new chemistries and electronics, in general we have the capability, which can be fully realized within ten years, of producing and sustaining a higher standard of living for all humanity than that ever heretofore experienced or dreamt of by any. (198, 199)

This is not an opinion or a hope-it is an engineeringly demonstrable fact. This can be done using only the already proven technology and with the already mined, refined, and in-recirculating physical resources.

This will be an inherently sustainable physical success for all humanity and all its generations to come. It can be accomplished not only within ten years but with the phasing out forever of all use of fossil fuels and atomic energy. Our technological strategy makes it incontrovertible that we can live luxuriously entirely on our daily Sun-radiation-and- gravity-produced income energy. The quantity of physical, cosmic energy wealth as radiation arriving aboard planet Earth each minute is greater than all the energy used annually by all humanity. World Game makes it eminently clear that we have four billion billionaires aboard our planet, as accounted by real wealth, which fact is obscured from public knowledge by the exclusively conceived and operated money game and its monopolized credit system accounting. (199)

Wealth is, then, the already organized human capability and know-how to employ the fixed, inanimate, planetary assets and omni-cosmically operative and only celestially emanating natural energy income in such a manner as to predictably cope with so many forward days of so many human lives by providing for their (1) protection, (2) comfort, and (3) nurturing, and for (4) the accommodation of the ongoing development by humans of their as-yet-untapped store of intellectual and aesthetic faculties, while (5) continually eliminating restraints and (6) increasing the range and depth of their information-accumulating experience. (199)

The success of all humanity can be accomplished only by a terrestrially comprehensive, technologically competent, design revolution. This revolution must develop artifacts whose energy-use efficiency not only occasions the artifacts' spontaneous adoption by humanity, but therewith also occasions the inadvertent, unregretted abandonment and permanent obsolescence of socially and economically undesirable viewpoints, customs, and practices. (199)

This design revolution must employ world-around, satellite-interlinked, data-banks-and-computer- accomplished conversion of present-day, exclusively geocentric, Spaceship Earth wealth accounting by synchronizing our planetary economic affairs with the cosmic, interstellar, intergalactic, cornplex family of physical, time-energy behavior laws, demonstrated by astrophysics to be synergetically in economic governance not only throughout our Milky Way's 100 billion stars, but also throughout the two billion ditional such galaxies now discovered and observed by astrophysics within our phototelescopic range. Little planet Earth of our small star the Sun is not exempt from the inexorable, synergetic integration of the complex of time-energy, electromagnetic, chemical structuring and destructuring's inventory of the intertransformative laws that govern the generalized, regenerative economic-investment system of the physical and metaphysical assets of what physics now finds to be an eternally regenerative, 100-percentefficient scenario Universe. (199, 200)

Simultaneous "shooting the works" of the biggest atomic explosions mutually deliverable by the most powerful long-range weapons systems of the most powerful political systems on planet Earth - designed to reinforce their exclusively politico-economic accounting concepts - can produce less than a visible twinkle in the galactic theater. Obviously Universe is not saying, "We cannot afford another galaxy - let alone another star - let alone another terrestrial crew of cosmically invisible human information-harvesting and -processing functionaries, whose problem-solving capabilities are being strangled by ignorant fears and selfishness aboard tiny planet Earth." (200)

Scientifically faithful, synergetically integrated, time-energy, electrochemical process accounting shows that it costs energetic Universe more than a million dollars to produce each gallon of petroleum when the amount of energy as heat and pressure used for the length of time necessary to produce that gallon of petroleum is charged for at the New York Con Edison Cornpany's retail kilowatt-hour rates for that much electricity. (200)

About 90 percent of all U.S.A. employment is engaged in tasks producing no life-support wealth. These non-life-support-producing employees are spending three, four, and more gallons of gasoline daily to go to their non- wealth- producing jobs - ergo, we are completely wasting $3 trillion of cosmic wealth per day in the U.S.A. (200)

In real, energy-time, know-how accounting of wealth the planet Earth's four billion billionaires have not yet been notified of their good fortune. Their heritage probating is being postponed by the lawyers for the now inherently obsolete power structures of all kinds-religious, political, financial, professional, and academic-all of which exploitative systems are organized only to take biased advantage of all scarcities, physical and metaphysical. (200)

Evolution has now accelerated into revolution, which, if it goes bloody, will render all humanity extinct, but if it goes via the design revolution, all humanity will win. This is a new kind of revolution; it is one that, instead of revengefully pulling down the top fortunate few, will elevate all the heretofore unfortunates and the fortunates alike to new and sustainable heights of realized life far superior to those previously tenuously attained by the most privileged few. (200)

World Game comprehensively details that which individual humans must do to realize total success for all and do so within the critical time limit, before humanity passes the point of no return en route to self-extinction. (201)

Quickly reviewing the earliest large-scale wealth trading by humans, payments were made in "kind" - that is, with livestock that could be driven from here to there. Most valuable were cattle. When "money," or heads of cattle (known as capital, capita meaning "head" in Latin), was loaned to enterprisers, the latter's cattle were held by the lender as collateral until the enterprise venture was completed. The interim birth and growth of calves into cattle became the "interest" on the loan to be paid by the borrower to the lender of the venture's working capital. Much later, metal money replaced the cattle. The concept of interest due to the loaner persisted, but since metal does not breed more metal, the interest paid reduces the realwealth value of the collateral when returned to the borrower. (201)

As the scale of long-distance trading exceeded the distances to which the cattle could be driven, the trading shifted primarily into water-bome ships. Ships carry far greater loads than can humans or beasts of burden. In the earliest days of international trading by ships cattle were used as "money.”, This became increasingly impractical, and the Phoenicians invented iron money in the form of miniature bull horns. With metal as money there swiftly developed a world-around preference for gold, due to its scarcity and easily recognized weight per volume as well as its nontarnishability. World-trading ships carrying gold soon became prey to hijacking pirates. As mentioned in our "Legally Piggily" chapter, when the British Empire came into world-around and century-enduring supremacy in 1805, its administrators made trade treaties with countries from every region of the world. Thereafter both sides kept their trading on books of import-export accounts that were balanced annually, and the debtor nation paid the other by shifting their gold deposited in a London bank to the other's London bank, thus keeping the gold off the ships - ergo, out of reach of small-time pirates. (201)

This is how what is known as the international "balance of trade" originated with the powerful industrializing countries of Europe; although rich in technical experience and inventive "know-how," they lacked an adequate supply of fundamental metallic and other resources with which to realize the industrial potentials for their inventions. They were motivated to establish military supremacy over nonindustrialized countries in Africa, South America, and the Far East, within which countries the European scientists found the metal ores essential to their industries. (201)

Present-day Ghana provides a good example of the foregoing. Ghana is rich in bauxite-the ore from which aluminum is extracted by electrolytic refinement. Ghana also has the Volta River and its basin.The Ghanaians, however, did not know of the convertibility of bauxite into aluminum. Americans with vast capital came into Ghana, arranged to have all the inhabitants of the Volta River basin banished from that basin, then built one of the world's largest hydroelectric dams there. They used the electricity thus generated to convert the Ghanaian bauxite (which was just so much dirt to the Ghanaians) into aluminum ingots. These ingots were, and as yet are, shipped to America and Europe, where the aluminum is transformed into airplanes, cooking utensils, etc., and sold back to the Ghanaians and others around the world at such a markup in price that the Ghanaians' balance of import-export trading finds them ever deeper in debt to those countries that "developed" their natural resources. The societies in the manipulating countries call these source people "the underdeveloped countries" or "the Third World." (201, 202)

There can be no planetary equity until all the sovereign nations are abolished and we have but one accounting system - that of the one family of humans aboard Spaceship Earth. (202)

Ample food and growing capacity exist on our planet to feed well every world human. But the sovereign nations and their international-trade-balancing system, and the individual boarders of foods and other goods within the separate nations, prevent the distribution of the foods. (See the World Game Laboratory publication, Ho-Ping.- Food for Everyone, by Medard Gabel, Doubleday, 1979.) (202)

World Gaming discloses that humanity will perish on this planet if the sovereignty of nations is not abandoned and if the World Game's world-around computerized time-energy accounting is not forthwith inaugurated. The first step in bringing about the desovereignization will be the closing of the gaps in the world electric power grid. The world-unifying electric power accounting will be the beginning of the omnienergy accounting for world economic management. (202)

World Game is a continuing scientific research and physical-prototyping development. It is devoted to progressive discovery of how most efficiently and expeditiously to employ (1) the total world-around resources, (2) total accumulated knowledge, and (3) the total already-produced technological tooling of Spaceship Earth, all three to the ever-advancing equal advantage of all its present and future passengers. (202)

World Game is the antithesis of World War Gaming as played by the joint chiefs of staff of the world's most powerful sovereign nations' respective military, air, and naval establishments. Predicated upon the British Empire's post-Magellan, historically first, spherical, world-around empire and its first "inventory of vital statistics of the world," as assembled in 1805 by the East India Company College's professor of political economics, Thomas Malthus, and his findings therefrom which we have already described. (202, 203)

World War Gaming, in contradistinction to World Gaming, assumes Thomas Malthus's theory that there exists a lethal inadequacy of life support on our planet. World War Gaming also assumes Darwin's "survival only of the fittest" to be ruling evolution. As already mentioned in Chapter 3, this is why the United States and the U.S.S.R. have jointly spent over $200 billion annually for the last thirty years ($6 trillion total) to buy science's most effective means of destroying their respective "enemies." World War Gaming is the consequence. World War Gaming employs the ever-evolutingly- advancing, most comprehensive and incisive, scientifically and technologically feasible capabilities to develop and mass-produce weaponry systems that will ever more swiftly devastate all enemy life-support artifacts and kill ever more enemy people at ever greater ranges in ever shorter periods of time. (203)

In contradistinction to the inherently vast wastage of World War Gaming's objectives, World Gaming takes advantage of ephemeralization-technology's ever-higher-strength-per-weight metallic alloys and chemistries and ever-more-comprehensively-incisive-and-inclusive electronic circuitry performances per volumes and weights of apparatus used - and employs ever- progressively-less weight and volume of materials, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per each technical function accomplished and employs those ever improving functions to produce ever more advanced livingry artifacts instead of the killingry weapons of World War gaming. (203)

World Game assumes evolutionary stages of advancement of its successive systems of production, distribution, maintenance, design improvement, world-around integrating, precision tool-automating, and mass-producing of its ever-advancing livingry service. All these successive prototype stages of development are based on my fifty-two-year- maintained omnihistory inventory of world resources (both physical and metaphysical) and my inventory of technical trendings and progressively evoluting human needs-both group and individual. (203)

World Game's now clearly demonstrated capability to produce the higher-than-ever-before-experienced living standard means an ever-healthier, ever-less-environmentally-restrained, ever-better-informed and -comprehensively - educated, ever-more-thoughtfully, -spontaneously, and -cooperatively-productive total humanity operating as an ever-more-mutually- intertrusting and -interconsiderate world family, living in an ever-more-generous and less wasteful way, at an ever-more-foresighted and -comprehensively-anticipatory level; engaged in ever-more-constructive initiative- taking and cooperative inter-support of one another's initiatives and explorations; an ever-more-truly omni-loving, classless, raceless, human family of Earth's planetarians - all engaged competently in local Universe information-harvesting and in local Universe problem-solving, in successful support of the 100-percent integrity of eternally regenerative Universe, that being the function in Universe that World Game assumes occasioned the inclusion of humans and their generalized-principles-discovering-minds in the design of Universe. (203, 204)

Technical artifacts, invented and produced by humans, employing generalized scientific principles of Universe - such as the principles of leverage, optics, magnetics, mass attraction, etc.- to cope successfully with life challenges varying among lethal difficult, tolerable, or benign environmental conditions, constitute any and all differences existing between the life activities of originally naked humans in a few mid-ocean tropical "Gardens of Eden" on planet Earth three million years ago and the life-styles of humans today in skyscraper cities or in space suits exiting from their Moon-landed, space-rocketed capsule to bring back to Earth sample rocks from the Moon environment, all the while being intimately satellite-relay-televised in color to one billion people on a planet 320,000 miles away from the Moon - landed astronauts, the one billion viewers being situated in their environment-control homes around planet Earth, as those viewing Earthian billions and the Moon-landing astronauts alike are being vitally sustained by foods grown elsewhere than where they live, which foods are preserved and shipped in environment-controlling cans and packages or in artifact-produced frozen or dehydrated conditions. (204)

World Game's design science employs all the known generalized principles and technical inventions and invents others where artifacts adequate for solving the newly emerging and foreseeably arising problems do not as yet exist. World Gaming, incorporating ever-more performance per function and higher energy efficiencies with ever-less pounds and volumes of resources, continually redesigns the artifacts and technical systems employing those ever-improving materials. (204)

World Gaming recognizes that there are no unnatural materials. If nature permits their chemical-element associabilities, the materials and their functionings are natural. If nature does not permit or bring about their associability, they cannot exist. The substances permitted by nature may be unfamiliar to humans, but they are never unnatural - i.e., "synthetic." World Gaming notes that humans' fear of the unfamiliar often prevents realization of humanity's imminent acquisition of improved living conditions for everyone. (204)

World Gaming takes advantage of the ever-changing world-resource patterns, such as that of steel and other metals scrapped from obsolete buildings and machinery as the latter's designs are made obsolete by the latest military-and-naval-produced hardware. Scrap of the discontinued hardware constitutes new high-grade ore mines existing entirely above ground. As an example: there are no tin mines in the United States. All tin came originally either from England, Malaysia, Bolivia, or Tanganyika. Tin was first used for making bronze, then pewter utensils, then for tinning bathtubs and cans, next for babbitting of machinery bearings, soldering. Outperformed by newer, more effective technologies all of these early tin uses became obsolete, and that tin was recovered. Since 1940 U.S. aeronautical production tooling has involved so much tin in its soft tooling phases that the inventory of ever-remelted tin of the U.S. aircraft industry and its swift-design-change-accomodating "soft-kirksite" toolings is now (1980) greater than that remaining in the world mines - ergo, the U.S. requires no further purchases of foreign tin. Having originally no tin mines, the U.S. has an aboveground source of tin that is now the world's largest tin "mine." World resource maps showing only the tin-in-the-ground mines are completely misinforming. World war gaming and those economic advisors of leading governments use only the in-the-ground-mine data. (204, 205)

As noted earlier, there are 100 dots on the Dymaxion Sky-Ocean Map, which is always used as the "playing field" in playing World Game. Each dot represents forty-four million people, that being 1 percent of the 4.4 billion humans now (1980) aboard Spaceship Earth. (205)

Each dot is located at the geometrical center for the forty-four million people it represents. As the dots show, approximately 90 percent of humanity live north of the equator. The 10 percent who live south of the Equator live very close to it. Humanity is a "northern hemisphere" creature and is now about to integrate over the North Pole into a one-town world. We have entered a north-south, air-and-space-vehicle, world traffic pattern and are swiftly abandoning yesterday's east-west ship and railway pattern. As the doing-more-work-with-less-pounds-of-material invisible revolution keeps advancing, we have ever-more-powerful and greater-weight-and-capacity air vehicles to carry the ever-more- efficient and -lighter machinery and structures, which classes of goods were once so heavy as formerly to be shippable only by sea or rail. (205)

As mentioned earlier, all the great rivers of the Earth are clearly shown on the world map. The source of these rivers' water supply to 54 percent of humanity comes from a vast frozen reservoir atop the Himalayas-only a small fraction of this potential waterpower has as yet been dammed for hydroelectric generation and irrigation system development. With such hydro development the 54 percent of humanity in China, Southeast Asia, and India will all become physically prosperous in high degree. Likewise, the great, as-yet-undeveloped hydroelectric and irrigation systems of the other continents are clearly demonstrable as holding high standards of living to be realized for all humanity. (205, 206)

It is engineeringly demonstrable that there is no known way to deliver energy safely from one part of the world to another in larger quantities and in swifter manner than by high-voltage-conducted "electricity." For the first half of the twentieth century the limit-distance of technically practical deliverability of electricity was 350 miles. As a consequence of the post-World War II space program's employment and advancement of the invisible metallurgical, chemical, and electronics more-with-lessing technology, twenty-five years ago it became technically feasible and expedient to employ ultra-high-voltage and superconductivity, which can deliver electrical energy within a radial range of 1500 miles from the system's dynamo generators. (206)

To the World Game seminar of 1969 1 presented my integrated, world-around, high-voltage electrical energy network concept. Employing the new 1500-mile transmission reach, this network made it technically feasible to span the Bering Straits to integrate the Alaskan U.S.A. and Canadian networks with Russia's grid, which had recently been extended eastward into northern Siberia and Kamchatka to harness with hydroelectric dams the several powerful northwardly flowing rivers of northeasternmost U.S.S.R. This proposed network would interlink the daylight half of the world with the nighttime half. (206)

Electrical-energy integration of the night and day regions of the Earth will bring all the capacity into use at all times, thus overnight doubling the generating capacity of humanity because it will integrate all the most extreme night and day peaks and valleys. From the Bering Straits, Europe and Africa will be integrated westwardly through the U.S.S.R., and China, Southeast Asia; India will become network-integrated southwardly through the U.S.S.R. Central and South America will be integrated southwardly through Canada, the U.S.A., and Mexico. (206)

Graphs of each of the world's 150 nations showing their twentieth-century histories of inanimate energy production per capita of their respective populations together with graphs of those countries' birthrates show without exception that the birthrates decrease at exactly the same rate that the per capita consumption of inanimate electrical energy increases. The world's population will stop increasing when and if the integrated world electrical energy grid is realized. This grid is the World Game's highest priority objective. (206)

There is no single power source around Earth so great as that of the wind. But winds do not blow in synchronization with the time patterning of human needs. Generating electricity when the wind blows and feeding it into batteries and withdrawing the charge when needed involves a 75-percent in-and-out loss of the electrical energy. Since 1975, when it was an efficient but new practice, all fifty U.S.A. states have been required by federal regulation to allow individual windmill owners to feed their windpower-generated electric current directly into the local utility power lines. The individuals get credited for their input on their monthly electricity bills. This practice was developed by Windworks of Wisconsin, which in turn was founded by a mid-1960s World Game prototyping operation. It has been found that within a 100-mile radius a wind is always blowing. Windmills installed around the world converting their direct current into alternating current and feeding the electric energy into the world network can harvest the planet Earth's prime daily energy income source - the wind - and adequately supply all the world's energy needs. (206, 208)

With the world's prime resources and its people and its potential integratabilities evidenced by World Game's world map, obvious design science inventions are called for, such as a "backbone" irrigation canal from the Himalayas leading south along the central highlands of the Indian continent, wherewith all the frequently devastating droughts would be eliminated for India's one-eighth of all humanity. (208)

With such comprehensive viewability as is provided by World Game and its Sky-Ocean World Map, it is quickly realized that (with a few rare exceptions) humanity need do very little further mining. The metals already scrapped from obsolete machinery and structures, which recirculate on a sum-total-of-all-metals-average every twenty-two years, are now able to do so much more work with ever less weight per each given function with each recirculation as to make the present scrap resources of almost all metals adequate to take care of all humanity's forward needs.(208)

While World Game discovers and identifies the world income energy sources, (See World Game Laboratory's Energy, Earth and Everyone by Medard Gabel, Doubleday, rev. ed., 1980.) it is also concerned with using the energy income in the most efficient technologies. In producing liquid-fuel-energy-powered engines, World Game's design science must pay attention to the fact that reciprocating engines such as are installed in all our automobiles are only 15-percent efficient, turbines are 30-percent efficient, jet propulsion engines are 65percent efficient, and fuel cells are 80-percent efficient. Due to inefficiently designed technical equipment and building technology, the overall mechanical efficiency of the United States economy is in 1980 only 5 percent. This means that for every one hundred units of energy consumed, ninety-five units go unused-"down the drain." (208)

Using only proven and now-available technology, it is feasible to increase the overall efficiency to 15 percent. This alone would reduce our overall energy consumption by two-thirds. (209)

There are two kinds of objective engineering designing: objects that consist of a plurality of intercomplementarily moving parts (machinery) and those that do not (structures). Mechanical efficiency denotes the percent of work effectiveness accomplished by the machine per units of energy consumed. Structural efficiency relates to the functions, strength, and durability accomplished per each unit of weight of material involved. (209)

Humanly occupied environment-controlling structures have many energy-wasting features, all of which are highly correctable. In designing the environment-controlling structural enclosures, World Game's design science heeds the following facts:

(A) Spherical structures enclose the greatest volume with least surface.

(B) Geodesic spherical structures, which are inherently omnitriangularly framed entirely of great-circle chords, give the strongest structure per weight of materials employed.

(C) Amongst the geodesic great-circle spherical structures, those based on the discontinuous compression, continuous tension-"tensegrity"- icosahedra give the most environmental enclosure per pound and volume of material employed.

(D) Every time the linear dimension of a symmetrical structure is doubled (i.e. I - 2) the surface area of the enclosure increases at a two to the second-power rate (i.e., 2'), while the environment-controlling structure's volume increases at a two to the third-power rate (i.e., 21).Wherefore, every time a geodesic dome's diameter is doubled, it has eight times as many contained molecules of atmosphere but only four times as much enclosing shell - ergo, each progressive doubling of dome diameters halves the amount of enclosing surface through which each molecule of interior atmosphere may either gain or lose energy as heat. (See "Old Man River's City" project, pp. 315-23.) Whole cities are most efficiently enclosed under one large dome.

(E) Every time we enclose a geodesic dome within a greater-diametered geodesic dome whose radially concentric interspacing is greater than the depth of the frost penetration of that area, while at the same time avoiding use of any metal interconnections between the inner and outer domes' structuring, the heat losses and gains of the innermost domes are halved in respect to those of non-domed-over domes of the same dimensions.

(F) If in producing the geodesic domes-within-domes we make them transparent or translucent on their sunny side and opaque and inwardly re-entrap progressively greater amounts of Sun energy as heat for longer and greater periods of time as the diameters are increased. (209, 210)

(G) If growing vegetation - i.e., trees, vegetables, corn, sugar, ground cover, etc. - is planted within the dome, the photosynthetic conversion of Sun radiation into hydrocarbon molecules will chemically and simultaneously (1) convert the monoxide gases given off by human occupation into human-supporting (air) atmosphere, thus eliminating all necessity for windows or air conditioning apparatus, and (2) harvest hydrocarbon molecule-trapped energy as food or as fuel-alcohol energy.

(H) If the wind drag of buildings is employed to turbine-convert wind-power into tank-stored compressed air, the latter may be stored within the space between the inner and outer domes’ skins as low-pressure atmosphere in quantities adequate to pneumatically and evenly distribute any concentrated outer cover loadings throughout all the tensional components of teh geodesic-tenesegrity structures.

(I) As the Sun’s radiation is outwardly and diffusingly reflected by the dome structure's convex outer surface, vertical thermal-column movements of the Sun-heated outside atmosphere develop, which spirally rising columns of heated atmosphere will draw air out from under the dome's large lower-edge summertime openings, which voluminous outward drafting in turn pulls air into the dome through the small crosssectioned ventilators at the dome's apex. This pressure differential between the small air entry and large exhaust openings produces the Bernoulli chilling effect, which in hot weather will swiftly cool the dome's interior atmosphere. World Game has proven this in geodesic domes at the African equator. (210, 211)

(J) It is clearly demonstrable that the conversion of windpower by dome-within-dome, drag-operated air turbines will power the compressing and tank storage of air and will thus produce ample power to operate a pneumatic-tool system for all mechanical operating needs within the dome. Pneumatic tools avoid the human- electrocution perils of electrically operated domestic technology. (211, 212)

(K) Sum-totally it is now demonstrable that properly designed domes within domes become energy-harvesting machines that provide more energy than is needed for the high-standard life support of their human occupants, wherefore such dwelling machines may become exporters of energy in variously stored and controlled forms, such as alcohol. (212)

(L) It has been satisfactorily demonstrated that the reflective, concave inner surface of the geodesic, dome-within-dome, environment-controlling shells will act as parabolic, Sun-radiation concentrators, focusing the Sun radiation income into heating of a circularly arced, liquid-containing pipe, whereby the Sun's heat may be stored liquidly in vacuumenclosed subterranean tanks for subsequent use in a variety of ways. The by-product heat from the air compressing is used to heat water stored in the same reservoir. (212)

(M) World Game's design science treats the tensegrity-structured, dome-within-dome geodesic environment controls as comprehensive energy-harvesting, -storing, and -exchanging devices. Typically, the vegetation most efficiently employed includes the growth of corn and the "winged bean" in the sunlight area and mushrooms in t he hot, dark areas.

(N) Radiotelephones and income-energy generators render the dwelling machine semiautonomous.

(0) Two sanitary devices as described earlier render the environment controls independent of water-supply lines and sewage-carry-away systems: (1) the fog gun for cleaning the human skin and all other surfaces with a high-pressure air gun into whose airstream small amounts of atomized water are fed; (2) the carton packaging and mechanized, convey-away system of human wastes to be delivered to elsewhere-located fertilizer or gasgenerating works or to anaerobic methane gas and dry fertilizergenerating equipment of the dwelling machines themselves. These two devices eliminate all wet plumbing, which has been responsible for breeding most of all the infectious bacteria heretofore entering human abodes, while also eliminating the infectious splashback feature of water-filled bowls and their water-flushed toilets. (212)

World Game finds that wealth measures the degree to which humans have used their minds to discover scientific principles and have used those principles to invent artifacts and environment-controlling and -implementing, complex- artifact systems which, as powered only by daily energy income, can be demonstrably shown to be able to take care of given numbers of people for given numbers of forward days. "Taking care" of humans means to provide them with "pleasingly," healthily, satisfactorily stabilized environmental conditions under all of nature's known potential variables while adequately feeding them, giving them medical care, increasing their degrees of freedom, and increasing their technological options (see Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth). (212, 213)

As already mentioned, World Game finds that the world's wealth and its medium of interchanges - i.e., the world's monetary accounting systems - have been divorced from one another. Those bankers and insurance-company managements that have learned how they may legally employ to their own exclusive advantage the vast magnitudes of savings of real wealth deposited with them by those who have produced the wealth and who are quite unaware that those deposits are taken out of the bank and loaned out at swiftly increasing interest rates to others in such quantities as to underwrite the magnitude of purchasing, production, and sale of products that can be produced only by the involvements of such vast magnitudes of realwealth tokens, and may therefore overpower all wealth capabilities of any of the individual depositors of the savings-account deposits of the realwealth products. (213)

World Gaming requires progressive inventorying of condensed recalls of already introduced major concepts and their integration with one another, plus additional new concepts to produce newer and greater synergetic realization. (213)

In the reality of physical-resource and knowledge potential we have four billion billionaires on our planet, the probating and delivery of whose legacy, as amassed by the more-with-lessing contributions and loving sacrifices of all humans in all history, has been postponed by the game of making money with money by those who as yet misinformedly operate on the 1810 Malthusian assumption that "humanity is multiplying its population at a geometric rate while increasing its life-support foods, etc., only at an arithmetic rate" - ergo, the money-makers assume that there is nowhere nearly enough life support for all. Malthus said the majority of humans are designed to suffer and die far short of their potential life-span. Darwin's "survival only of the fittest" dictum has combined with that of Malthus to persuade the "haves" to be intelligently selfish and to legally fortify their "haveness" position against the "have-nots." (213)

With legal planning of their lawyer-advised banking leaders, the "haves" have now succeeded in cornering all the world's monetary gold as well as the preponderance of the world's petroleum sources - along with their refineries and world-around petro-delivery systems together also with acquisitions of all the atomic power-generating plants, originally paid for by the U.S. taxpayers - and thereafter in severing the monetary system from the wealth system while marking up the negotiable equity value of gold and petroleum tenfold. They also have contrived their own game of international monetary banking of international balances of trade and credit accounting, greatly aided by the priorly established existence of 150 "sovereign" nations around planet Earth. (214)

The division of world political power into 150 sovereign nations is a consequence of thousands of years of successive and individually independent contriving of history's most powerful leaders. The number-one strategy of the successful leaders of history's successively established supreme socioeconomic control systems has always been to induce the spontaneous self-divisioning of those designed to be conquered and to keep them spontaneously self-dividing and their divisions lethally interarrayed against one another in order to keep them conquered. The longer the self-divisionings can be self-perpetuating, the more spontaneously are the divisions accepted institutionally by the successive generations as being "natural" divisions, seemingly as inherently and individually existent as are different hills, valleys, rivers, and biological species. The prime vulnerabilities of humanity, which make it subject to spontaneous self-dividing, are those of different speech patterns, skin color, religions, social customs, class or caste systems, political preferences, and all varieties of individually unique "troubles," suffering, and discontent. (214)

The historical consequence of this aeons-ago-commenced employment of this grand strategy of "divide to conquer and keep divided to keep conquered" accounts for the "natural" acceptance today by world peoples of the seemingly "God-given" existence of 150 sovereign nations of the world and their respective geographical division of all the world's dry land (as well as for all the specialized categories of human activities). This prime strategy of supreme-power wielders accounts for all the many local political divisions within the sovereign nations as well as for all the religions and for the officially encouraged maintenance of the many languages and proud maintenance of local dialects. Above all that number-one strategy accounts for the emotionally enflamed maintenance of the concepts of different races and classes of human beings and their division into highly specialized categories as "culturally" maintained by the various systems and power structures over all the highly educated individuals and those intellectuals who, if not focused professionally on highly specialized subjects, might otherwise-as comprehensivists-seem potentially dangerous to the rulers. (214, 215)

It is highly relevant to the foregoing that in 1959 science had incontrovertibly demonstrated that all the known anthropological and biological case histories comprehensively and scientifically explored show that the extinctions of all human tribes and of all biological species have always been brought about by overspecializations resultant upon either willful or environment-induced inbreeding. If, for instance, we inbreed - by mating two fast-running horses - there is the mathematical probability of concentrating the fast-running genes but also of breeding in this special capability only by inadvertently breeding out the general adaptability to cope with the infrequent high-energy-concentrating events. For example, exquisitely designed birds' wings are a hindrance in walking, and the long bills of wading birds, which are perfect for marshland foraging, are relatively useless in other less specialized feeding. Generalized adaptability is needed to cope with large changes in the environment. Here lies the present chief peril of the human passengers on Spaceship Earth. (215)

World Game makes it clear that the world electrical systems' energy-network integration and its comprehensive powering of automated, special case machinery would most effectively counter the peril of overspecialization of the humans and would introduce the omni-Universe-operative, time-energy, kilowatt-hours-per-year, commonwealth accounting system. This cosmic accounting will computer-establish the up-to-the-moment-realized cosmic-energy- income-harnessing thus far accomplished; and the technical-efficiency levels attained in the various energy-employing technologies operative around the world; and the resultant per capita individually employable world commonwealth facilities; and the per capita "consumable," "employable," and "enjoyable" "credits" in respect to any specific consumables, commodities, services, conveniences, or tools as manifest on the satellite-relay-integrated world computers and as individually called for and read out on each individual's electronic computer "credit card." The individually available information will govern the individual's design science choices of the highest relative-efficiency systems to be employed. It will also tell people whether they can do this or that, and if so, how they can go most swiftlyfor instance, from New York to Australia - and will "book" a travel reservation and will prepay the bill for the travel accommodation. All such information is continually computer-integrated to produce the commonwealth evaluations and their read-out-ability on world-individual's pocket-computer "credit card." These will always register the world individual's share of the ever-increasingly-employable technological savings reserves and their respective technologically operative capabilities. With humanity employing such a world-around, satellite-relayed, and world-integrated computer accounting system, the world can, overnight, physically realize the "Omnibillionaire Commonwealth" of its humans. (215, 216)

Because (1) the interalloying of metals produces the invisible revolution of ever-higher-strength and -durability performance per pound of material employed, and because (2) the ever-higher performances produce new conditions of technological challenge, new alloys and new atomic circuits are progressively discovered and developed to provide ever- more- satisfactorily- advanced performances, and because (3) the structures and energy-operated machines using the ever-improving metal-alloy capabilities progressively make obsolete the older machines and structures, the latter become progressively scrapped and melted. It is World Game's concern to see that the progressively recovered metals are alloyed anew in ever-higher-performance atomic arrangements and are ever more promptly re-employed in new machinery and structures of ever-higher performance with ever-less weights and volumetric bulks. This progression is known in World Gaming as "Ever-Progressively-Accelerating Ephemeralization." (216)

Wherefore: with every accelerated scrapping, recovery, and recirculation the same basic metals and the alloys of those metals progressively serve the needs of ever more people at ever-higher standards of performance. Thus we discover that the world's already-mined and -used, ever-recirculating metals become the technologically regenerative, universal "bloodstream" for realizing the ever-improving know-how of human advancement of its ever-increasing ability to cope with vital challenges. The metals, and chemistries in general, have thus become the recirculatable medium upon which is loaded the new, advanced design science inventions resultant upon progressively advancing experiences and knowledge of humanity regarding how to cope more effectively with life's evolutionarily successive challenges. (216)

Within the twentieth century this invisible revolution of "continually learning how to do more with the same" or “more with less" resources (metallurgically, electronically, chemically, mechanically, structurally, aerodynamically, and hydrodynamically) has in only three quarters of the twentieth century brought 60 percent of humanity into enjoying a vastly more effective, healthier, and more realistically informative means of coping with life's challenges than was experienced by the most powerful monarch or financial or political potentate of 1900; furthermore, during this eighty years of time the world population has doubled, wherefore the gain has been 120fold. During this same twentieth century's first eight decades life expectancy has been doubled for the 60 percent thus advantaged, and the range of their everyday travelability has twenty-folded. During those same eighty years that 60 percent of humanity has gone from 90-percent illiterate to 95-per-cent literate. They are no longer locally rooted peoples. They are on their way to becoming omni- world- around living humans preoccupied with local Universe's evolutionary affairs. In 1948 the average U.S. family moved "out of town" every five years. In 1978 they moved every three years. (216, 217)

In 1970 the percent of those unprecedentedly advantaged passed the 50-percent mark. Since 1970, and for the first time in history, the majority of humanity has become widely traveling "haves," in contrast to the previous multimillions of years of 99 percent of all humans being locally rooted "have-nots." The number of U.S.A. millionaires quintupled in eight years - from 110,000 in 1971 to 550,000 in 1979. (217)

The plotted curve of the rate of gain for increasing proportions of all humanity being thus swiftly advantaged by the doing more for more people with less and less matter and energy per function - all accomplished with computers, satellites, alloys, etc. - indicates that 100 percent of all humanity will be thus advantaged before 2000 A.D. In less than twenty years (less than one generation) all humanity is scheduled by evolution (not by any world planning body) to become physically more successful and,metaphysically more interestingly occupied than have any humans ever been in all known history-provided that humanity does not commit ignorance-, fear-, and -panic-induced total-species suicide. (217)

Why might they panic? All the present bureaucracies of political governments, great religious organizations, and all big businesses find that physical success for all humanity would be devastating to the perpetuation of their ongoing activities. This is because all of them are founded on the premise of ameliorating individual cases while generally exploiting on behalf of their respective political, religious, or business organizations the condition of nowhere- nearly- enough-life-support-for-all and its resultant great human suffering and discontent. (217)

Reason number two for fear-wrought panic is because all of the 150 nations of our planet are about to be desovereignized by evolution; that is, they are about to become operatively obsolete - about to be given up altogether. There are millions in the U.S.A., for instance, who on discovery that their government was about to become bankrupt and defunct would become activist "patriots," and might get out their guns and start a Nazi movement, seeking dictatorially to reinstate the "good old days." If people in many of the 150 nations succeeded in re-establishing their sovereignties and all the customs-barrier, balance-of-trade shacklings, it would soon be discovered that the 150 nations represent 150 "blood clots" imperiling the free interflowing of the evolution-producing metals and products recirculation as well as of the popular technical know-how disseminating. (217)

We have today, in fact, 150 supreme admirals and only one ship - Spaceship Earth. We have the 150 admirals in their 150 staterooms each trying to run their respective stateroom as if it were a separate ship. We have the starboard side admirals' league trying to sink the port side admirals' league. If either is successful in careening the ship to drown the "enemy" side, the whole ship will be lost. (217, 218)

Long ago the world's great religions learned how to become transnational or more effectively supranational. Next the world's great ideologies learned how to become supranational. Most recently the world's largest financial- enterprise corporations have become completely supranational in their operation. Big religion, ideologies, and businesses alike found it intolerable to operate only within 150 walled-in pens. Freeing themselves by graduating into supranational status, they have left all the people in the 150 pens to struggle with all the disadvantages of 150 mutually opposed economic policies. The European Economic Community is a local attempt to cope with this world problem. (218)

The United States of America is not a nation. Nations are large tribes of humans that have been geographically isolated for millennia and have progressively inbred the physical types surviving under those unique geographical conditions. As mentioned, the U.S.S.R. had 146 naturally evolved nations" to integrate, the physiognomies of each U.S.S.R. nation looking quite different from the others'. The United States of America is a crossbreeding integration of humans from all the nations of the planet Earth; though often speaking of itself as the United States of America, it is not America. Its population is only one-half that of North and South America. The North Americans, consisting of Canadians, the U.S. citizens, and Mexicans, are evolutionarily cross-breeding into a single hybrid family of world humans. (218)

As a sequel to the foregoing scientific data (see Chapter 1, pp. 9-1 1), which proves the invalidity of humanity's assumption of a plurality of different races and classes of humans to exist on our planet, the computer will be able to help in discovering the swiftest course for humanity to pursue in order to free itself of such self-deception. The computer can also disclose the economic savings of humanity to be accomplished by elimination of race, class, and creed differentials. The computers can and will show the increases in commonwealth to be realized by such elimination of false premises in social judgments. (218)

World Gaming produces truthful, ergo corresponding, insights that are popularly communicable by world-around, satellite-relayed television, the practical workings of which, and their demonstrably favorable results for all, may readily induce agreeing vision and courage on the part of all individuals of spontaneously and progressively intercooperative humanity. (218)

It is the invisibility of the alloys and chemistries and of the electronic circuitry of the design science revolution which finds that revolution to be as yet uncomprehended and ignorantly opposed by humanity's reliance only on yesterday's politically visible means of problem-solving. It is both the invisibility and misinformedness that occasions the lack of spontaneous popular support of the invisible design science revolution by the most powerful political and money-making systems. Big government can see no way to collect taxes to run its bureaucracy if people are served directly and individually by daily cosmic-energy-wealth income. Money-makers cannot find a way of putting meters between people and the wind, Sun, waves, etc. Neither big government nor big business pays any serious attention to the fact that we can live on our energy income, rather than on nature's energy savings account (fossil fuels), or by burning our Spaceship Earth's physical hull, which consists entirely of atomic energy in the form of matter. (218, 219)

In 1969 I initiated, and students developed, what have since become annual World Game seminars, attended by university faculties, students, scientists, engineers, and government officials - for its first three years at Southern Illinois University, next at the University of Southern California, and thereafter for four years at the University of Pennsylvania, and for one year at the University of Massachusetts. In 1979 the seminar was conducted partially at New York University and partially at the University of Pennsylvania; in 1980, at the University of Pennsylvania. (219)

Seven years ago the World Game's annual research activity culminated in a book written by Medard Gabel, Energy, Earth, and Everyone (Doubleday, rev. ed., 1980), which demonstrated beyond any argument that humanity can carry on handsomely and adequately when advantaged only by its daily energy income from the Sun-gravity system. World Game also published a second book by Medard Gabel, Ho-Ping.- Food for Everyone (Doubleday, 1979) - this time on world food resources, which shows that we can take ample care of all human food needs. The 1979 World Game was participated in by many experts on world food matters. (219)

World Game will become increasingly effective in its prognoses and programming when the world-around, satellite-interrelayed computer system and its omni-Universe-operative (time-energy) accounting system are established. This system will identify the kilowatt-hour-expressed world inventory of foods, raw and recirculating resources, and all the world's unique mechanical and structural capabilities and their operating capacities as well as the respective kilowatt-hours of available energy-income-derived operating power with which to put their facilities to work. All the foregoing information will become available in respect to all the world-around technology's environment-controlling, life-sustaining, travel- and communication-accommodating structures and machines. (219)

All the sulphur coming annually out of all the chimneys around the world exactly equals the amount of new sulphur being mined and distributed annually to keep world industry going. The people who let the sulphur go into the air are not in the sulphur business. (219, 220)

World government will require all industries to install the already-successfully-proven technology and therewith precipitate and recover all their profitwise-unwanted chemical by-products. Underwriting all those costs of installation and operation, world government will give tax credits to all those industries complying with the order, so that those industries can compete with those in the industry who do not have such pollution problems. World government will then stockpile all the chemical substances recovered from all previous liquid, gaseous, or solid dumpings, fumings, or runnings- off-known ignorantly as "pollution." The value of the recovered resources will more than offset the tax rebates given by the government in order to enforce precipitation. All the chemical substances in all their states are essential to the maintenance of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. Nature has no "pollution." This is a word coined in human ignorance regarding the presence of the right chemicals being released in the wrong places by those who profit only through selfish preoccupation and nonconsideration of others. The hour-to-hour changes in the inventory of world¬ government stockpiling of all recirculatable substances will be constantly fed into the world-integrated computer together with locations and summaries of the total inventories available for new tasks. World government will replace altogether all the scrapmongers who, to increase prices, hold their products off the market until they become scarce. (220)

World Game records make it clear that the big money-makers of early U.S.A. history, those who funded the Harvard Business School, the Wharton School of Finance, etc., may have made their money in ways that were legal but ruthlessly scheming. The students at today's business schools are not given courses on how to cheat your mother-in-law or how to sell your friends short. Because the business schools make it plausible that fortunes may be won in a legal manner, we have present-day business executives trying to find legal ways of getting the public's money. (220)

World Gaming makes it eminently clear that the simplest way for top executives of the supercorporations to make profits and keep their own salaries rising is to make their corporation the first in its field to raise prices despite any government, public, or labor opposition. The second way is to cut down on personnel at the retailing level and to force customers to wait in lines. No single human waiting line seems too formidable by itself, but if we consider all those standing in all the lines at all the different airlines at all the world's airports-as the computer does-and all the people wanting to secure an airline ticket waiting for half an hour on the telephone after hearing the ticket clerk's "Please hold," and all the people waiting for twenty minutes to place their orders in all the restaurants around the world, we discover the billions of human hours sacrificed daily by people whose time is of high value. Those in lines are being legally robbed of billions of their life-hour dollars, which go to the corporate profit account as savings in labor costs. (220, 221)

All the banks and airlines are now placing in their foyers chrome metal standards suspending velvet ropes within which the queue of customers may be neatly snaked. Airplanes have been squeezing paying passengers closer and closer together in wider planes until as many as eleven people sit abreast today. (221)

The World Game-maintained inventory of socially abundant resources breaks down into eight main categories:

1. Reliably operative and subconsciously sustaining, effectively available twenty-four hours a day, anywhere in the Universe: gravity, love.

2. Available only within ten miles of the surface of the Earth in sufficient quantity to conduct sound: i.e., the complex of atmospheric gases whose Sun-induced expansion on the sunny side and shadow-side-of-the-world-induced contraction together produce the world's winds, which in turn produce all the world's waves.

3. Available in sufficient quantity to sustain human life only within two miles above planet Earth's spherical surface: oxygen.

4. Available aboard our planet only during the day: sunlight.

5. Not everywhere or everywhen available: water, food, clothing, shelter, vision, initiative, friendliness.

6. Only partially available for individual human consumption, being also required for industrial production: e.g., water.

7. Not publicly available because used entirely by industry: e.g., helium.

8. Not available to industry because used entirely by scientific laboratories: e.g., moon rocks.

World Game's integrated world computer system will have the task of differentiating out the abundant resources and facilities from the scarce, and differentiating the scarce into degrees of scarcity as well as into the day-today fluctuations of the borderline cases. The computer will keep constant track of where the resources are geographically located or where they are traveling. That which is in constant abundance is 100-percent socializable. That which is scarce must be reserved for tasks that serve all society in general. The element oxygen in the atmosphere is in abundance at sea level and need not be distributed by artifacts. Oxygen at I 1,000 feet and more above sea level is critically scarce and must be compressed into tanks and distributed for breathing through masks and tubes. (221)

The gas helium is very scarce on planet Earth. It has very important, unique characteristics. Number one, it is not flammable, as is hydrogen, though it weighs almost as little as hydrogen. Helium, though the socially theoretical property of everyone, becomes useless to anyone if compressed into four billion separate bottles, each of which is distributed to each of our at-present four billion Earthians. There are a number of technical tasks that helium can perform to the advantage of all humanity, all of which can be programmed into the computer. (222)

The relative abundance of the ninety-two regenerative chemical elements in the thus-far-known Universe is about the same as the inventory of their relative abundance on Earth. The relative abundance of the chemical elements is also approximately the same as that of their occurrence in the organisms of the human bodies. All this data and all the tasks that can be performed by each element to the greatest advantage of all humanity will be programmed into the world-integrated computers to make it evident to all humanity which eco-technological strategy at any given time will produce the highest advantage for all, against which information it can be determined what alternative advantages might attend implementing and supplying the essentials for realization of newly proposed invention initiatives of various humans. (222)

It was World Game that asked, as described before, one of the world's greatest oil geologists, Francois de Chaden6des, if he could write an accurate scenario of nature producing petroleum on planet Earth through the photosynthetic transformation-into-hydrocarbon of Sun radiation by the vegetation and algae and the succession of events following their transformation as the vegetation is consumed by other biologicals, or is transformed into various residues, all of which are blown by winds or washed by streams and gradually accumulate in various geographical locations and become progressively buried within the planet's outer crust. Thereafter there were various heats and pressures (caused by ice ages, etc.), earthquakes, or deep burial below water or soil until those chemical heats and pressure conditions occurred which are essential to the production of petroleum. De Chaden6des said he could, and after a year he presented us with the scenario with all of its time increments and pressure conditions spelled out. We then asked him to figure how much it would cost nature per each gallon of petroleum for that much pressure and heat for that much time, were it calculated at the retail rate for that much energy for that length of time as charged us by the public utilities. The cost came to well over a million dollars per gallon. (222)

Since World Game's accounting system is that of the Universe's own time-energy intertransforming requirements, we must accept as cosmically unquestionable this costing of petroleum, coal, and gas resources, which nature has been syntropically importing and accumulating on planet Earth in order, ten billion years hence, to turn the Earth into an energy-exporting (entropic) star. (222, 223)

For this reason World Game considers all fossil fuels to be nature's own savings account, deposited in our "Earth bank" and not to be stolen by exploiters. Everyone knows that we should live on our (energy) income and not our savings account. Nor should we burn our capital-account production equipment in order to produce meter-marketable energy, for there will soon be no further production capability. Atomic energy by fission or fusion constitutes burning our terrestrial production equipment. (223)

As mentioned, World Game finds that 60 percent of all the jobs in the U.S.A. are not producing any real wealth - i.e., real life support. They are in fear-underwriting industries or are checking-on-other-checkers, etc. The majority of the jobs occasion the individuals using three to four gallons per day in their automobiles to go to and from work - at true cosmic costing this means four million dollars per worker per day. Obviously the computer finds that it would save the planet Earth's energy account $500 trillion a day to give all the non-wealth-producing workers their full pay to stay at home. (223)

In the same way the World Game's world-around-integrated computers will show that it will save-pay handsomely to pay all professors and teachers in full to stay at home or in their laboratories and relinquish all teaching to video cassettes, whose selectable programs are to be called out bylthe individual students of all ages around the world to be shown on their home television sets. The old educational facilities and a small fraction of individual teachers who love most to teach will use the old educational facilities within which to produce the cassette programs. (223)

The computer will prove to society that it will pay to introduce automation wherever feasible and to allow the machines to work twenty-four-hour days while paying yesterday's workers in full to stay home. Only those who love each particular technology will keep the world-around video education in operation. Those who pass the exams to qualify for such working will not be paid for it. They will act as does any amateur athlete-doing what they do for the love of it. This competing to qualify for all the production and service jobs will govern all work. The work will not be paid for. Everything the individual needs is already paid for. Rudyard Kipling's "L'Envois" tells the story. (223)

When Earth's last picture is painted,
And the tubes are all twisted and dried, 
The oldest of colors have faded
And the youngest of critics have died,
We shall rest 
And well shall we need to
Lie down for an eon or two
'Til the master of all good workmen 
Shall put us to work anew. 
Then only the master shall praise us, 
And only the master shall blame, 
No one will work for money, 
And no one will work for fame.

But all for the love of the working And each in his separate star Shall draw the thing as he sees it For the God of things as they are.

World Game shows that we can discontinue newspapers and save the trees for fuel-alcohol production. World Game finds that all news can be disseminated by television and that computers can keep track of all the information that fills the advertising and want-advertisement pages, and any individual looking for any kind of opportunity can get the matching information from the computer in seconds. Individuals can go shopping by cable television. (224)

Local Universe is the term used by World Game to identify the macrocosmic limits of human observation. These macro-limits are identified as the radius of the present maximum phototelescopic-and-radar-reached information (in 1980 the spherical sweepout of an approximately eleven-and-one-half-billion-light-year radius) around planet Earth in all directions. (224)

World Game takes the inventory of relative abundance of all the chemical elements present within that radius as spectroscopically analyzed by the light received in all directions around us from all the stars of all the galaxies within that eleven-and-one-half-billion-light-year radial distance. (224)

World Game takes the relative abundance of all the chemical elements thus far found on planet Earth. The local Universe inventories and the Earthian inventory of the relative abundance are somewhat similar, as is the relative abundance of the chemical elements present or acceptably present in human beings' bodies. The Earthian inventory includes all the isotopes of all the chemical elements and the relative abundance of the latter. In respect to the Earthian abundance, some of the elements are so relatively plenitudinous as to make them available for various universal technological uses; they are therefore socializable, but only when employed with other elements in instruments, machinery, structures, medicines, and nutriment. (224)

World Game notes that gold is the most electrically conductive of all elements. It is also the most highly reflective of all metals, and therefore has many functional uses. New computer circuiting and such functions as the new laser energy beaming with rubies will occupy the majority of the rare metals and jewels. (225)

Rubies function in producing laser beams, etc. Diamonds, being the hardest of all elements, have many cutting and other technical functions. All the rare stones and metals will have industry's unique industrial tasks to perform. The question then arises as to who will determine which technological initiatives should have prior access to the inherently scarce, high-advantage functionings of the scarce and rare inventories of chemical elements. (225)

World Game finds that the computers fed with all the relevant energy-efficiency facts will be able to demonstrate which uses will produce the greatest long-term benefit for all humanity. (225)

World Game foresees that the greatest problems for humanity to solve in the future will be how to accommodate the initiatives of millions of humans who, freed from muscle- and nerve-reflexing jobs, find their inventory of past experiences and their minds integrating synergetically to envision evergreater advantages to be realized for humanity. We will realize this age of regenerative inventing which is rendering humans very effective in their cosmic functioning as local Universe information-gatherers and local Universe problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. (225)

I consider it essential to pay all my bills in the swiftest possible manner. In whatever system I find myself I commit myself to "play the game," for I am not a political revolutionary; I am a design science revolutionary. (225)

Responding to criticism by individuals who said that the reason Buckminster Fuller was not trying to "earn his living" was because he was incapable of doing so, I told one of my audiences in 1947 about Obnoxico, a theoretical enterprise I had invented through which I could make vast amounts of dollars in one year on an entirely legal basis - but one as typically undesirable to me as is all money-making. (225)

I said, "You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive." (225)

I do not consider it to be money-making when I insist upon being refunded for the development and overhead cost of the services I perform annually for others, which performance I undertake only in response to the requests of others. (225)

The private-enterprise corporation called Obnoxico was schematically designed only to serve as an object lesson. Obnoxico was designed to exploit the most sentimental weaknesses of humanity. In my theoretical Obnoxico's catalog the number-one item suggested that on the last day that your baby wears diapers you very carefully remove them, repin them empty, and stuff them full of tissue paper in just the shape in which they were when last occupied by your baby. You pack this assembly carefully into a strong corrugated-paperboard container and send it to Obnoxico, which will base- metallize the diapers, then gold- or silver-plate them and send them back to you to be filled with ferns and hung in the back window of your car. The easily forecastable profits from this one item ran into millions of dollars per year. (225, 226)

Eagerly my friends of 1947 on being told of Obnoxico joined in the fun and began inventing items for its catalog. Next they began sending me Obnoxico items then beginning to come on the market in 1950 for the first time and as advertised in magazines: plastic pebbles for your garden walk and the now-prevalent, but then-new, plastic flowers. (226)

I then showed how the contributors of the original items sent to me in fun - to keep the joke going - could be persuaded to accept shares in Obnoxico in exchange for their contributions. Then the Faustian aspect of the enterprise revealed itself, for it was clearly foreseeable that the stockholders would swiftly become so rich that they would tend to take the whole matter seriously. Overnight they would lose their sense of humor as their greed was stimulated and they became ruthlessly deliberate exploiters of humanity. (226)

Somehow or other the theoretical Obnoxico concept has now twenty-five years later become a burgeoning reality. Private enterprise is now building airports with ever-longer walkways and hotels with ever-increasing numbers of levels of ground-floor and basement arcades to accommodate the evermore-swiftly multiplying Obnoxico stores. (226)

Human beings traveling away from home with cash in their pockets, thinking fondly of those left behind or soon-to-be-joined loved ones, are hooked by the realistic statuettes of four-year-old girls and boys with upturned faces saying in a cartoon "balloon," "What did you bring me, Daddy?" (226)

As the banking system pleads for more savings-account deposits (so that they can loan your money out to others at interest plus costs) the Obnoxico industry bleeds off an ever-greater percentage of all the potential savings as they are sentimentally or jokingly spent for acrylic toilet seats with dollar bills cast in the transparent plastic material, two teddy bears hugging an alligator, etc. (226)

World Game is Anti-Obnoxico and commits itself to making Obnoxico and allied activities obsolete rather than attacking it directly. (226)