CHAPTER 7

Critical Path: Part one

IN SCIENTIFIC PROGNOSTICATION we have a condition analogous to a fact of archery-the farther back you are able to draw your longbow, the farther ahead you can shoot. For this reason we opened this book with our "Speculative Prehistory," taking us back five million years through four ice ages, and at least three and one-half million years of scientifically proven presence of humans on Earth. We are confident of the validity of our speculative prehistory because it is predicated on naked humans' physical limits of existence and on environmentally permitted and induced human behavior and on human artifact-altered environments and their progressive circumstance-delimiting and capability-increasing effects. It is also synergetically comprehensive. (229)

In reviewing the full range of humans' presence on Earth we discover two main evolutionary trendings.

Class-two evolutionary trendings are all those events that seem to be resultant upon human initiative-taking or political reforms that adjust to the changes wrought by the progressive introduction of environment-altering artifacts. All the class-two evolutionary events tend to flatter human ego and persuade humanity to deceive itself by taking credit for favorable changes in circumstances while blaming other humans or "acts of God" for unfavorable changes. It therefore assumes that humanity is running the Universe wherefore, if its power-structure leaders decide that it is valid to cash in all of nature's available riches to further enrich the present rich or to protect them militarily from attacks by their assumed enemies - all at the cost of terminating human presence on planet Earth - that is the power-structure leaders' divine privilege. (229)

All the class-one evolutionary trending is utterly transcendental to any human vision, planning, manipulation, and corruption. Class-one evolution accounts for humans' presence on Earth. It accounts for their having always been born naked, helpless for months, and inexperienced - ergo, ignorant, hungry, thirsty, curious, and therefore fated to learn how to survive only through trial-and-error-won, progressive accumulation of experience. Class-one evolution accounted for humanity's all-unexpected invention of verbal (aural, sound) communication, and thereby the integration of the experience- won information of the many, whereby the integrated information of the many increased the capability of humanity at large to cope with the exigencies of life. It is class-one evolution that led, after the progressive integration of the total experience-won information, to the unpredicted invention of writing or visual communication, by means of which the dead could speak to the living and within which total written information history human mind from time to time discovered repetitive patterns, which in turn sometimes led to the discovery of generalized scientific principles. (229, 230)

Class-one evolution had human fathers and mothers for multimillions of years serving as the memory-bank authority that showed children what they could safely eat and how to communicate. The parents told the children what they could or could not do to get along with the "system" into which they were born. The parents told the children what they should or should not believe. To history's children the parents were "the authority." The myriad esoteric, illiterate ways in which the parents communicated to their children were parroted by the children. Thus were esoteric dialects proliferated until their many progressive deviations multiplied the many initially different world languages. (230)

It was class-one evolution that in the mid-1920s disclosed to the world's children and their parents that the voice coming over the radio had more up-to-the-minute information regarding many more subjects than had the parents. The parents did not tell the children that the radio people had more authoritative information - it was self-evident to the children, who witnessed their parents running next door to the neighbors to tell them what the radio people had just told them. The people who were selected as broadcasters by the radio stations were selected for the commonality of their diction in contradistinction to the millions of esoteric jargons with which the parents had communicated. The radio people were also picked for the size and richness of their vocabularies and the facility with which they drew upon such conventionalized vocabularies. (230)

Because it was self-evident to the children that the radio people were greater authorities than their parents, the children now emulated the diction and vocabularies of the radio people. Not to be belittled in their children's estimation, the parents learned the commonly accepted radio people's pronunciation of an ever-enlarging conventional vocabulary. Within half a century (two human generations) this completely altered and improved the world's languages. (230, 231)

The speed of sound is approximately 700 miles per hour. The speed of electromagnetic radiation is 700 million miles per hour. Sound can travel only in conducting mediums - for instance, in the Earth's atmosphere. Electromagnetic radiation can travel on indefinitely through Universe. The amount of information humans can acquire visually is a millionfold greater in range, speed, and meaning than is the information they acquire aurally. (231)

The university and college students who became the first to make the world news as dissidents in 1965 and 1966 were born in the years TV came into the American home. The Class of '66ers were the first human beings to be reared by the "third parent," whose TV voice and TV presence were often heard and felt by the children much more than those of the two blood parents. TV daily briefed them visually ergo, vividly-on the worldaround news, regarding the world's continual aches, pains, disasters, Olympic triumphs, etc. (231)

The young were saying, "I know that Dad and Mom love me to pieces, and I love them to pieces, but they don't know what it's all about. They come home from the office or golf links or hairdressers and sit down to beer and small talk or 'sitcoms.' They have nothing to do with our going into Vietnam. They have nothing to do with our going to the Moon. They have nothing to do with anything except earning a living - and spending it on TV-advertised goods. The whole world is in great trouble. My compassion is for all the people anywhere who are in trouble. Since the older people don't seem to know what is going on and are too preoccupied with irrelevancies, I and my contemporaries must do our own thinking and find out what needs to be done to make the world work." (231)

As we wrote in the opening lines of our "Self-Disciplines," Chapter 4, up to the time of the radio the older people were always saying to the young, "Never mind what you think. Listen. We are trying to teach you." With the TV making it clear to the young that the parents did not know much about anything and were not "the authority," the young, responding to intuition, said to themselves, "I am going to have to do my own thinking and take my own actions." Nonetheless, they were utterly unskilled in world affairs, highly idealistic, and easily exploitable. (231)

The abrupt, spontaneous historical events on the Berkeley campus of the University of California and elsewhere occasioned youth's discarding forever the authority of their elders. The Class of 1966 shocked the world by saying that it felt no special loyalty to its families, its university, its state, or its nation. The youth of the Class of 1966 were thought by the oldsters to be shockingly immoral and lacking in idealism. Not so! They were as idealistic and full of compassion as any child has ever been, but their loyalty was to all humanity. They were no longer the victims of local class or race bias. Their idealism was at first skillfully exploited by the psycho-guerrilla warfaring of the communist-capitalist secret operations. Soon the young realized that they were using their heads for punching bags and cudgel targets instead of for thinking. Many of their numbers began to listen to my lectures about solving problems by appropriate technology instead of by physical struggling or political revolution. Informed by me, they began to say mankind can do anything it wants. "Why don't our officials and families stop talking about their local biases and wasting wealth on warring - all because they assume that 'war is necessary' simply because there does not seem to be enough to take care of even one-half of humanity's needs." (231, 232)

The young ones asked, "Why not up the performances per units of invested resources and thus make enough to go around?" Their elders repeated, "Never mind what you think," so the young ones stopped asking. (232)

Occurring after millions of years of the absolute unquestioned caring for the young by the authority of the elders, this metaphysical cutoff - like its physical counterpart, the cutting of the umbilical cord after the child is born and has access to its own oxygen - occurred when humanity had acquired enough relevantly critical information to be able to proceed on its own initiatives divested of the many misinterpretations by the elders as to the total significance of the total information. This cut-off experience is typical of all class-one evolution, which is always transcendental to all class-two evolution - to human planning, contriving, manipulation, or corruption. (232)

Also typical of class-one evolution are the two trends we have mentioned so many times in the previous chapters - the invisible chemical, metallurgical, and electronic production of ever-more-efficient and satisfyingly effective performance with the investment of ever-less weight and volume of materials per unit function formed or performed - i.e., ephemeralization accomplished within ever-less increments of time - i.e., acceleration. (232)

These coordinate class-one evolutionary trendings, which have been manifest for three quarters of a century, are as yet unrecognized by any world economists, heads of state, or business leaders. Though there is a popular intuition that acceleration may be in evidence, it is not officially heeded. Individuals amongst political and business leaders are often aware of changing conditions, such as that which makes suddenly available a pocket calculator or a quartz watch. They do not comprehend that these individual "goodies" are parts of overall ephemeralization and acceleration trending that, within only three quarters of a century, has converted those enjoying an adequate and pleasing standard of living from less than 1 percent of all humanity in 1900 to 60 percent of all humanity in 1980, the latter enjoying an even higher standard of living than had been enjoyed before 1900 by any of the world's kings or financial potentates of all history. Class-one evolution alone accounts for the doubling within this century of the life "expectancy" of that 60 percent of all humanity which, by 1980, has had its standard of living so spectacularly advanced. (232, 233)

All technical evolution has a fundamental behavior pattern. First there is scientific discovery of a generalized principle, which occurs as a subjective realization by an experimentally probing individual. Next comes objective employment of that principle in a special case invention. Next the invention is reduced to practice. This gives humanity an increased technical advantage over the physical environment. If successful as a tool of society, the invention is used in bigger, swifter, and everyday ways. For instance, it goes progressively from a little steel steamship to ever-bigger fleets of constantly swifter, higher-powered ocean giants. (233)

There comes a time, however, when we discover other ways of doing the same task more economically - as, for instance, when we discover that a 200-ton transoceanic jet airplane - considered on an annual round-trip frequency basis - can outperform the passenger-carrying capability of the 85,000-ton Queen Mary. (233)

All the technical curves rise in tonnage and volumetric size to reach a "giant" peak, after which progressive miniaturization sets in. After that, a new and more economical art takes over and then goes through the same cycle of doing progressively more with less, first by getting bigger and taking advantage, for instance, of the fact that doubling the length of a ship increases its wetted surface fourfold but increases its payload volume eightfold. Inasmuch as the cost of driving progressively bigger ships through the water at a given speed increases in direct proportion to the increase in friction of the wetted surface, the eightfolding of payload volume gained with each fourfolding of wetted surface means twice as much profit for the same effort each time the ship's length is doubled. (233)

This principle of advantage gain through geometric size increase holds true for ships of both air and water. Eventually doubling of length of seagoing ships finally runs into trouble. For instance, an ocean liner made more than 1000 feet long would have to span between two giant waves and would have to be doubled in size to do so. If doubled in size once more, however, she could no longer be accommodated by the sizes of the great world canals, dry docks, or harbor depths. At this point the miniaturization of doing more with less first ensues through substitution of an entirely new art - David's slingshot over Goliath's club operated from beyond reach of the giant. (233, 234)

This overall and inexorable trending to do more with less is known sumtotally as "progressive ephemeralization." Ephemeralization trends toward an ultimate doing of everything with nothing at all which is a trend of the omni-weighable physical to be mastered by the omniweightless metaphysics of intellect. (234)

All the missile-hurling arts of man and men's warring or fighting to the death have followed this same fundamental evolutionary pattern of bigger, then smaller. (234)

Assuming that there were not and never will be enough vital support resources to go around, we conclude that there must be repeating eventualities in wars to see which side could pursue its most favored theory of survival under fundamental inadequacies. Humanity has continually done more killing with less human effort at greater and greater distances and at ever-higher speeds and with ever-increasing accuracy. (234)

The killing went from a thrown stone to a spear to a sling to a bow-and-arrow to a pistol, a musket, a cannon, and so on until man used the great weapons-carrying battleships. Suddenly a little two-ton, torpedo-carrying airplane sank a 45,000-ton battleship, and then the 2,000-miles-per-hour airplane was outperformed by the 16,000-miles-per hour, atom-bomb-carrying rocket of minuscule weight in comparison to the bomb-carrying plane. If world warring persists as a consequence of the concept of "survival only of the fittest minority," there will come the approximately weightless death rays operating at 700 million miles per hour. (234)

At the present point of history the uranium bomb has been displaced by the hydrogen bomb, and then it was discovered that if either side used that new greatest weapon, both sides and the rest of humanity would perish, so the biggest weapon could not be used. Nor could the equally large and mutually destructive biological or chemical gas warfaring. Both sides then discovered that killing of the enemy's people was not their objective. (234)

Killing the enemy's ideology is the objective. Killing the enemy's people brings sympathy and support for the enemy from the rest of the world, and "gaining the good opinion and support of the rest of the world" is one of the new world-warring's objectives. (234)

At this point both sides have started to explore the waging of more war with lesser-more limited-killing but more politically and economically devastating techniques. Just as ephemeralization employed ever-more-minuscule instruments and thus took technology out of the limited ranges of the human senses into the vast and invisible ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum reality, so too has major warfaring almost disappeared from the visible contacts of human soldiery and entered into the realm of invisible psychology. (234, 235)

In the new invisible miniaturization phase of major world-warring both sides carry on an attention-focusing guerilla warfare (as was conducted in Vietnam) while making their most powerful attacks through subversion, vandalism, and skillful agitation of any and all possible areas of discontent within the formally assumed enemy's home economics. In carrying on this new and unfamiliar world-warring they do not have to send ideological proselytizers to persuade the people of the other side to abandon their home country's political system and adopt that of their former enemies. Instead they can readily involve, induce, and persuade individuals of the other side to look for discontent wherever it manifests itself and thereafter to "amplify" that condition by whatever psychological means until the situation erupts in public confusion, demonstrations, terrorism, etc. The idea is to make a mess of the other's economy and customs and thus to discredit the other's political system in the eyes of the rest of the world and to destroy the enemy people's confidence in their own system. (235)

Because the active operators are sometimes engaged on a basis of just gratifying their own personal discontent, they are often unaware that they are acting as agents. Because almost everyone has at least one discontent, a well-trained conscious agent can invoke the multiplyingly effective but unwitting agency of hundreds of other discontent promoters and joiners-in ever-larger, more amplified, masses. (235)

As a consequence of this new invisible phase of world-war trending, a most paradoxical condition exists. The highly idealistic youth of college age who are convinced that they are demonstrating against war are, despite the most humane and compassionate motives, often in fact the front-line soldiers operating as unwitting "shock troops." Meanwhile the conventionally recognized soldiers engaged in visible "war-zone" warfare (either of ambush or open battle) are carrying on only a secondary - albeit often mortally fatal - decoy operation. (235)

This invisible world-around warring to destroy the enemy's economy wherever it is operative, above all by demonstrating its homeland weaknesses and vulnerabilities to the rest of the world, and thus hoping to destroy the confidence of the enemy people in themselves, is far more devastating than could be a physical death ray, for it does everything with nothing. Furthermore it operates as "news," which moves around the Earth by electromagnetic waves operating at 700 million miles per hour. (235)

At the moment the highly controlled political states have a great defensive advantage over the "open, freedom-nurturing" states by virtue of the former's controlled "news." For it is the omniexcitable news in the "free" countries that is primarily exploited to publish and spread and thus create a chain reaction of dismay throughout any and all of their organized discontent actions. (236)

With the United States and Russia jointly spending over $200 billion a year getting ready for an ultimate showdown between them, they each average about $20 billion a year waging psycho-guerilla warfare. Both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. were intent to break down the other one's economy before coming to the far more costly all-out war. The brilliantly trained individuals in Russia who came out to train other individuals in America did so in such a manner that those trained in America had no idea that what they were being excited into doing had anything to do with Russia. The American students' idealism was often brilliantly exploited by Russia to break down America's confidence in advanced education. Theretofore Americans had such blind confidence in education that they would elect any politicians promising to provide state-financed advanced-education facilities. (236)

What the Russians' strategists knew was that the presidents of the U.S.A. universities, public or private, were "sitting ducks" for their psychological shooting. The university presidents of both private and state universities were primarily involved in the politics of raising funds for their institutions. The presidents had no internal "defenses" because they had never had need for them. They found that neither the faculty nor the students knew much about the presidents and that it would be very easy to attack their on-campus positions. They could effectively exaggerate any faults manifest by the presidents. (236)

Within one year the presidents of 100 universities of America were "shot down." None of them were defended by their faculties, whose numbers were scared to death of losing their tenure. The determination of the students to do their own thinking was readily exploited in attacking the university presidents. (236)

While all the foregoing curves of the rising and falling of the technical evolution of weaponry have taken place, there has also occurred, all unnoticed by all parties to the warfaring, a vast "fallout" from the "defense" technology into the domestic technology of ephemeralization's doing ever more with less. Within two-thirds of a century this unnoticed and inadvertent fallout has converted 40 percent of total humanity from have-not-ness to a high standard of living have-ness and makes clear that the only way all of humanity may be elevated to such advantage is by further acceleration of the technical invention revolution. (236)

It becomes evident that all of youth's world-around clamor for peace can only be realized through technological revolution, which will do so much more with so much less per each function as ultimately to produce enough to support all of humanity. It is also clear that such a task can only be accomplished by the technical design revolution. (237)

As those many who have become involved in the new invisible warfaring discover that their aims can be attained only through the design revolution, all the young world-around idealists will have to face up to the question of whether they prefer to keep on agitating simply because they have come to enjoy a sense of power and importance by so doing. All who are really dedicated to the earliest possible attainment of economic and physical success for all humanity - and thereby realistically to eliminate war - will have to shift their efforts from the political arena to participation in the design revolution. The latter course involves the development of ever-self-regenerating and improving scientific and technical competence. In turn this means that the individual must plunge earnestly and dedicatedly into initiating self-development, using the resources of the educational system. (237)

All the aforementioned class-one evolutionary trending provides powerful long-distance prognostication data. Keeping track of the integrated ephemeralization and acceleration trends and their socioeconomic resultants, per each world human, made possible my 1938 Nine Chains to the Moon and my 1950 magazine-published Prognostication that by 2000 A.D. all humanity either would be enjoying a higher but generally unfamiliar standard of living than any humans had ever known - or would have altogether perished. (237)

This book has already mentioned many of these class-one evolutionary trendings. (237)

In naval science we have four scientifically developed prognosticating arts. In my own semantic formulating "prognosticating" is both subjective and objective: subjective - "if I don't do anything, such and such will happen"; objective - "if I do so and so, such and such will happen." Pure science means "setting in order the facts of experience and therefrom deducing generalized principles if and when they are manifest." Applied science means "the development of technological procedures for objective employment of a plurality of the generalized principles." Art means "the skillful realization of humanly satisfying or challenging special case applications of the theoretical schemes of applied science." (237)

The number-one naval prognosticating science and art is that of designing and producing the generalized tools - machine tools - that, when housed and assembled in navy yards or floating dry docks, can produce both macro and micro special-case tools - with both the generalized and special-case tools operative at degrees of dimensional controls beyond that of human sight; at temperatures above and below humans' organic tolerance; at weights and sizes beyond human muscle-maneuverability; at electromagnetic frequencies beyond the range of human optical or tactile tunability or tolerance; at quantation determination and integration of metallurgical and chemical formulations, in temperature and pressure regions beyond humans' direct sensorially apprehending control. (238)

The number-two naval prognosticating science and art is that in which, employing the number-one prognosticating science and art tools, we design fleets of ships and special case ships and other special case tools as a complex of intersupportive technology capable of coping with nature's conditions at the interface of sea and sky while traveling on, over, or under the seas to any part of the world reachable by the deep water's continuum - i.e., to three-quarters of all the surface of planet Earth; with the sea-transport capability of integrating the world's remotely occurring, unique, and intercomplementary physical resources; and with the ability to protect such sea commerce against any and all pirates or others hostile to class-two evolutionary phenomena. (238)

The number-three naval prognosticating science and art is that of celestial navigation, which permits us to reliably prognosticate the arrival of our ship anywhere around the world at such and such an hour and on such and such a date. The number-four naval prognosticating science and art is that of ballistics - "the art and science of controlling the trajectory of an explosively hurled missile." Ballistics is divided into two parts - interior and exterior. Interior ballistics deals with all the controllable variables governing the trajectory of the gun's explosively hurled missile, which controllable variables are operative before the gun is fired; exterior ballistics deals with all the controllable variables operative after the gun is fired. These controllable interior- and exterior-ballistics variables altogether govern the trajectory of the gun's explosively hurled missiles. (238)

Interior-ballistics variables include the design of the gun, its bore, its length, its metallurgy, its expansion and contraction in changing temperatures, and similar factors. Interior ballistics is also concerned with the design of the missile itself, with the gunpowder to be used, and with the temperature of that powder. The interior variables are exhaustively studied, scientifically recorded and controlled. (238)

The exterior-ballistics variables relate to the direction and velocity of the winds blowing between the firing ship and the target ship. The exterior-ballistics variables include all weather conditions. They are concerned with the course and speed of the gun-firing ship as well as of the target ship. The exterior-ballistics variables are numerous but not as numerous as the interior-ballistics variables. The exterior-ballistics variables include the information regarding the relative accuracy of the previously fired missile and the swiftly calculated corrections to bring the trajectory on to the target. (239)

In the science of ballistics the variables entering into the problem of firing from a swiftly moving, steerable ship on a heaving sea at a variably steerable target ship moving at unannounced variable speeds on a heaving sea are much more numerous than the variables entering into the firing of a gun from a fixed position on the dry land toward another fixed-position target on the same dry land. (239)

In naval gunnery in the precomputer days large charts, containing titles and spaces for all the known variable data of both interior and exterior ballistics, were printed. These charts were laid out and tacked to a great table in the "plotting room" in the most structurally protected positions within the bowels of the ship. All the interior-ballistics data was corrected when any of its data changed and was immediately entered onto the chart. There was no use entering any exterior-ballistics data until the enemy ship was located, after which all the up-to-the-minute-and-second changing data of the exterior ballistics were entered onto the charts. When all the data were in, complex mathematical integration of the data took place, and the proper angles of elevation and horizontal compass orientation of the guns themselves were arrived at. Guns were at first individually, then coordinatedly, aimed at the target ship by both horizontal and vertical angle controls, being separately and continuously human-eye-and-hand aimed at the target ship by easily spun hand-wheels geared to power-driven equipment that kept the big guns in constant adjustment to the rolling, pitching, and yawing of the firing ship. The rate of changing of interior-ballistics data was - and as yet is - very slow compared to the rate of change of the data of exterior ballistics. (239)

As a naval officer I was once concerned with all these matters. I became gradually interested in the possibility that all the variables involved in naval ballistics might be identified with all the variables operative in the most complex problems of Universe. I intuited that the combined sciences of navigation and ballistics might embrace all the variables governing Universe-event prognostication. It could be that: (1) navy yard industrialization, (2) fleet operation and individual ship design, (3) astronavigation, and (4) ballistics constituted the four "special case" corner complexes of a generalized tetrahedral complex of variable design factors governing all human-mind-controllable participation in all cosmic, alternative-intertransforming potentials. (239, 240)

It was eminently clear that astronomy, enormously advantaged by Newton's mass-interattraction law, having acquired comprehensive data regarding the ever-changing interpositioning of celestial bodies, groups of bodies, and galaxies of bodies, was extremely successful in prognosticating for many years, centuries, and millennia ahead the relative interpositioning of all known celestial bodies to split-second accuracy almost anywhere within millions of light-years around and away from Earth. We could say that the more cosmically comprehensive the consideration, the more accurate the prognosticating. (240)

I therefore decided to always include the most micro-macro cosmically inclusive data in all my prognosticating. Obviously this was not "crystal-balling" nonsense but a very elegantly inclusive and incisive integration of the four naval sciences and arts of prognosticating. (240)

Quite clearly the four special case design systems of the naval sciences and arts can be generalized to accommodate the realization of all the objective initiatives of humanity. The four-cornered tetrahedron is the minimum structural system in Universe. It excludes all the irrelevant information of Universe and includes all the information relevant to the system. The tetrahedral structure system has six unique interrelationships existing among the system's four unique groups of system variables. (240)

We have also mentioned elsewhere in this book and in other books the differentiation between craft and industrial tools - i.e., craft tools are all the tools that can be invented and produced by one individual alone in the wilderness, such as spears, bows and arrows, pottery, baskets, fire, etc., whereas the industrial tools are all the tools that cannot be produced by one human. Because it takes two humans to produce the need to communicate and to invent the means of that communication, we say that the spoken word was the first industrial tool. "In the beginning [of industrialization - i.e., technologically effective human cooperation] was the word." The spoken and comprehended word greatly expedited the development of humanity's information on how to cope with life's challenges. (240)

The four naval sciences and arts make it possible for us to sort out the human capabilities provided by class-one- evolution- developed industrialization as a human-cooperative-interadvantaging system-differentiated from all the illusory propaganda of industrialization's exploitation by exclusively monetary-profit-motivated business or personal-kudos- profit-motivated politics. Our "Legally Piggily" chapter clearly recounts the manner in which business took over industrialization for its own special-case self-advantaging. See this Time magazine item of August 6, 1979, to clarify the aptness of the word "Piggily." (240)

Those Record Oil Company Profits

With memories of long gasoline lines still fresh, the earnings reported by many oil companies last week could hardly be expected to be greeted by cheers. All told, the industry had its best second quarter ever. Profits of the 23 biggest U.S. firms totaled $5.47 billion, a rise of 66% over the same period last year. Among the five large international companies, Texaco's earnings leaped by 132% to $365 million. Earnings of the others: Exxon, up 20% to $830 million; Mobil, up 38% to $404 million; Socal, up 61% to $412 million; and Gulf, up 65% to $291 million. These gains came on top of strong earnings in the first quarter. For the first half, the combined profits of the five giants came to $4.6 billion, or an increase of 49% over the same period last year.

See also p. 401 of Chronology in Appendix 11. (241)

The strictly government-operated NASA Apollo Project - its Cape Canaveral blast-off base in Florida; its Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas; its design- and theory-development base in Alabama; and its administration headquarters in Washington, D.C. - employed business's industrial facilities but was a human-endeavor cooperating project. It held at bay any importantly diverting manifests of selfishness, even amongst its dramatically publicized astronauts. Their individual names have faded into a dim admixture of identities - omnisublimated by the magnificent demonstration of humanity's industrially cooperative capability to accomplish history's most imaginatively "impossible," scientifically "possible" feat-rocket-ferrying of humans over to the Moon and returning them safely back on board our Spaceship Earth. (241)

We now directly address the accomplishing by humanity of a less visually dramatic but far more difficult task - that of rendering comprehensively and eternally successful a failure-prone, competitively greedy, selfishly wasteful, fearful, and inferiority-conditioned humanity - and of doing so in a decade. (241)

Starting in 1927 (fifty-three years ago) I developed an as-comprehensiveas-possible inventory of relevant scientific and industrial data and set about making systemically scientific prognostications regarding trends affecting our Spaceship Earth and all of its passengers. This attempted scientific prognosticating involved the comprehensive inventorying of resources aboard our Spaceship Earth. These resources broke down into all the energy associative as matter and all the energy dissociative as radiation. The metaphysical resources broke down into all the inventory of generalized principles and all the inventory of special case knowledge considerations. (241)

To ensure that I was comprehensively adequate in dealing with cosmicscale prognosticating, I undertook in 1927 and thereafter to discover and scientifically demonstrate nature's own mathematical coordinate system. I had intuitively initiated that search in 1899, at the age of four. This latter search and its successful discovery of that cosmic-coordination system is treated with both comprehensively and incisively in my two-volume Synergetics (Macmillan, 1975 and 1979) - each volume about 800 pages. All those who would like to understand the relatively high accuracy of my prognosticating science will find it necessary to become students of those two volumes of Synergetics. They make clear that I have found a method of guaranteeing that my prognostications include all relevant variables. (241, 242)

For those who do not have time to study Synergetics or my books such as Nine Chains to the Moon, I will point out such studies as my 760-year-long chart of the chemical element isolations by humans, which discloses the interrelationship of pure science with technological science as applied to world-encircling, human-protecting and -transporting, environment controls and the accelerating acceleration in human evolution that it undeniably discloses. (242)

In 1942 I sought a means of discovering whether any regular rate of occurrence of scientific events existed. I, of course, discovered that the relative importance of a suitable cut and classification of the events into pure and not-so-pure scientific events had first to be accomplished. (242)

As I started so to do, I immediately realized that there was one single pure-science set of events that belonged to one family - that is, the history of human scientists' progressive isolation of the family of ninety-two regenerative chemical elements - a family of exactly and successively numbered members whose membership qualifications could not be confused - one electron, one proton; two electrons and two protons. I decided to make a chart of the isolations plotted against time. (242)

The first known isolation by a human - that of arsenic- occurred in Italy in 1250 A.D. So I designed my chart to be 760 years long, running from 1250 A.D. to 2010 A.D. I made my chart high enough to accommodate twenty posturanium isolations, should any occur. One year after I made and posted my chart, the first posturanium element was isolated. The last of the first ninety-two to be isolated - promethium, chemical element #61 - was not discovered until 1954, twelve years after I designed and posted the chart. The preuranium element isolations did not occur without regularity. I planned the designing of my 760-year-long chart in such a manner that vertical room was left for 112 horizontal steps, so that as each element became isolated, the position of it went one step higher. When history opens, humans had already at some earlier times isolated and put to use nine chemical elements. Nobody has any idea how, when, and where the isolations of carbon, lead, tin, mercury, silver, copper, sulphur, gold, and iron occurred. They were found already in use in different parts of the world when humans first made record of the fact long before 1250 A.D. Because nine isolations had already occurred, I started plotting my chart nine steps high. I posted arsenic, chemical element #33, on the tenth step. The next isolation came 200 years later - chemical element # 5 1, antimony. This was followed by a 220-year hiatus running to 1670, when science isolated chemical element # 15, phosphorus. Another sixty-two-year lag brought us to the isolation of chemical element #27, cobalt, in 1732, and later in the same year element #78, platinum. Thereafter they arrived at an average rate of one every two years. (242, 244)

The rate accelerated markedly for the next forty years until element #5, boron, was isolated; during those forty years thirty-one other elements were isolated. Between boron, in 1810, and gallium, element # 31, there is a slowing down in the rate, with seventeen more elements being isolated. Between gallium and europium, chemical element #63, another twelve were isolated. There is a very steady rate of acquisition by humans of the next five isolated chemical elements - from europium to polonium, element #84. Then there is a marked slowing down of the rate of isolation from actinium, # 89, to rhenium, #75. In the isolation of the next five elements, technetium, #43, to plutonium, #94, there is an almost vertical rate of isolating, all five isolations taking place during 1930-1931 although not announced until years later. Between 1932 and 1969 ten elements were isolated, from curium, element #96, to lawrencium, element #103 - the 103rd successive isolation. Not only is there a very steady rate of climb of these transuranium element isolatins but all of them are successively isolated in the order of their successive atomic numbers, whereas none of the pre-uranium - before element #92 - isolations occur by their successive numbers. (244)

What we have been witnessing is a series of accelerations and slowdowns. The accelerations always occur in peacetime and the slowdowns in wartime. In wartime the military uses what the scientists developed in peacetime. Quite clearly the purest of pure science activity, chemical-element isolating, occurs under peaceful conditions. (244)

This whole 760-year curve of pure-science isolations is altogether a curve of acceleration against calendar time. I then recalled that what pure science does today does not get into the academic curricula for a few years. A few years later again applied science makes special case objective use of the pure-science finding as some invention. Use of the invention by industry begins to alter the environment of the everyday happenings. The altered environment calls for an evolutionary advancement of everyday human life. (244)

I then said to myself that history makes it clear that environmental advancements alter life-styles and introduce new economic eras. (244)

Because environmental-technology advancements embodying the technical advancements are clearly implemented by pure science's discoveries, and the altered environments introduce new eras in human experience, I asked myself to isolate out from all other inventing of history the unique stages of human-advantaging environment controls that made it possible for humans to thrive under conditions in which the humans would, but for the new environment control, perish and, from within the uniquely advanced life-style within the environment, accomplish control of energies operating outside the environment control, and therewith propel the environmentcontrolling device and its human occupants in one occupant-controlled complete circuit of the Earth. (244, 245)

Along the top of the chart, in 1520, we see how Magellan used a sailing vessel in which he went most of the way around the world before he was killed. His crew completed the circumnavigation, which took two years. Three hundred fifty years later, humans circumnavigated the globe in a steel steamship. Seventy-five years later, they circumnavigated in a special-alloy aluminum airplane. Thirty-five years later, they circumnavigated in an exotic metals rocket. The wooden sailing ship took two years to circumnavigate; the steel steamship, two months; the aluminum airplane took two weeks and the exotic metals rocket capsule took only a little over one hour to encircle the planet Earth. (245)

In the successive circumnavigation arts no one at each successive stage could dream of the next stage of circumnavigation. We have on this chart the curve of the basic acceleration of science accomplishments as plotted against time. (245)

We have on the chart a second-degree acceleration manifest in the contraction of the lags between the successive circumnavigation from 350 years to sixty-five to thirty years between four states of the art of circumnavigation and a third-degree acceleration manifest in the contraction of time taken to circumnavigate from two years ... to two months ... to two weeks ... to one hour. It is implicit in the rate of contraction between completely inconceivable later arts that by 1985 we should be able to transmit humans around the globe by radio scanning or an equivalently unexpected means. (245)

For those who wish to gain only a cursory concept of my prognosticating I point to my fifty-three-year-maintained curves of ephemeralization as manifest in a number of charts - for instance, the one recording the annually decreasing pounds-per-delivered-horsepower of aircraft engines. The tenth-anniversary issue of Fortune magazine (February 1940) has an article I prepared on industrialization in which many charts of ephemeralization in various technologies are shown. In such comprehensive surveying of human experiences and the lessons we have learned it became progressively clearer that humans were given their minds to discover generalized principles and to employ those principles objectively in special case technologies. That led me to assume that the class-two evolution was a designed-in but sometime-to-be-terminated phase of class-one evolution. It seemed logical, as humans progressed from absolute ignorance-learning only by trial-and- error - that they would go through a very long period of doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons. Quite clearly nature did not tell the honeybee to go out and crosspollinate the vegetation. What nature did was to chromosomically program the honeybee to go after honey and inadvertently - at right angles - to crosspollinate the vegetation. What nature told humanity chromosomically was, "I'm hungry, my kids are hungry; I'm cold, my kids are cold. Go after that food and that coat. They cost money - go after money. They say you have to earn it. OK, I'll earn it." Buzz, buzz, honey-money bee. No human chromosomes say make the world work for everybody - only mind can tell you that. (245, 246)

In support of the integrity of ecology's complex regeneration of life on planet Earth, class-one evolution first designed all the vegetation to photosynthetically (syntropically) convert the randomly occurring entropic Sun radiation into highly orderly molecular structures, which are consumed by other orderly molecule-proliferating biological organisms. That syntropic complex of ecological interactions not only made possible the gradual conduct of human society by mind instead of by cunning and muscle but also led to human minds' consciously acting as local-in-Universe information-harvesters and local-in-Universe problem-solvers, all in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. (246)

It seemed that the time would come evolutionarily when humans might have acquired enough knowledge of generalized principles to permit a graduation from class-two (entropically selfish) evolution into class-one (syntropically cooperative) evolution, thereafter making all the right moves for all the right reasons. (246)

This book should make it quite evident that I think humanity has now reached that critical moment of potential transformation of humans' affairs from class-two evolution into class-one evolution. Assuming that to be so, we look upon "Legally Piggily" (see Chapter 3) as the last and highest tide of doing all the wrong things for the unknown right reasons, just before reaching the condition of all of humanity having acquired enough of the right information to graduate from class-two evolutionary entropic nonsense into consciously competent syntropic participation in class one's eternally intertransforming evolution in support of the integrity of cosmic scenario - Universe's eternal regeneration. (246)

Prognostication is often a subjective science - it anticipates what is going to happen to us. Navigation and ballistics are always objective sciences, for they make possible prognostication of what will happen if we employ the full family of mathematically integratable factors governing local systemic intertransformabilities, as permitted by the generalized principles, which always provide six alternative moves with every turn to play in "the game of Universe." These permitted six moves for each turn to play are the six edges of the tetrahedral system and are clearly explained in Synergetics, vol. 2, §537.40. (246, 247)

Class-one evolution has succeeded in ever increasing the range, frequency, and safe velocity of human travel, exploration, and information growth. Further, humans have developed environment-controlling vehicles and local environment-controlling habitats that permit their survival under conditions uncopable-with prior to the technological evolution. All these are resultant upon human mind's being given access to the generalized principles governing the design of the successfully operating, eternally regenerative, scenario Universe. (247)

The space programs entered into by the Russians and the Americans, because of the military implications of possible containment of one by the other, were class-two evolutionary events; however, they opened the possibility for humanity to participate consciously in class-one evolution's continual increase in the range, speed, and frequency of humanity's travel and information-gathering in local Universe as well as its participation in ever-more local problem-solving within the ever-greater ranges of Universe thus reached.(247)

The space program integrated the sciences of navigation, ballistics, astrophysics, metallurgy, chemistry, and bio-anthropology. Bio-anthropology is the positive class-one evolution's anticipatorily undertaken improvement of both subjective and objective, energetic, environmentally controllable events in order to keep already-healthy life even healthier, whether in safely penetrating environments theretofore lethally hostile to human life or in just improving the chances for the healthiest to continue their optimum health or in multiplying the numbers of humans who enjoy optimum healthworking eventually toward avoiding any humans ever losing their optimum health. (247)

Bio-anthropology is class-one evolution's takeover and expansion of class-two evolution's medicine, which copes essentially only with humans who have lost their good health. (247)

The space program, as an integration of the plurality of projective-objective sciences, called for the employment of what is known as the "critical path" as the comprehensive design science's individual parts production, subassembly, general assembly, progressive full assembly testings, and launch scheduling. (247)

A critical path develops an exhaustive list of all that has to be accomplished in order to arrive successfully at a given objective theretofore never reached. The Apollo Project was the official name of the undertaking that was to ferry humans over to and land them on the Moon and return them safely to mother-Spaceship Earth. (248)

The critical-path organization of the Apollo Project disclosed some two million tasks that had to be successfully accomplished before the human astronauts were to be returned safely to Spaceship Earth. NASA's Apollo management then put a scientifically and technically competent control group to work to identify all the approximately two million tasks, a million of which required technological performances the design, production, and successful operation of which had never before been undertaken by humans. (248)

In this book we have set down our prehistory, our techno-social history of "Humans in Universe," and then in the "Legally Piggily" chapter we have chronicled the overall pattern of class-two evolutionary events that have, during the last half- century, gone critical - bringing humanity to a moment of crisis adequate in magnitude to springboard humanity into oblivion or into a relatively utopian future. (248)

Because automobiles were becoming ever-more popular in the 1920s and because they were using inherently exhaustible fossil fuels, such an approaching critical moment in human history as we are now experiencing was clearly visible to me and many others a half-century ago. I did not, however, know of any other humans who thought there was anything that they personally could do about this problem and any other such "too big" problems. Nonetheless, I committed my life to dealing only with total Spaceship Earth and all its passengers' regeneration. I have therefore included the chapter on the self-disciplines I adopted at thirty-two years of age at the 1927 outset (or soon thereafter) of my lifetime commitment. These disciplines were adopted in view of the physical magnitude and the metaphysical integrity involved in the balance-of-my-life commitment. Many of the disciplines are importantly relevant today in respect to the way in which unknown, economically insecure, individual humans may function effectively in this world crisis. (248)

Soon after 1927 I developed the World Game as an especially important integration of the complex of self-adopted disciplines and tasks I found myself progressively adopting as the years passed and as my inventory of discovered errors and lessons thereby learned multiplied. Our chapters on the Geoscope and the World Game provide important frames of reference in the formulation of a critical-path chart of what humanity must accomplish within a decade - or probably perish. (248)

This last section of the book focuses on the critical path itself and constitutes my own single human being's inherently limited, 1927-and-thereafter, anticipatory formulations of the order of absolutely essential tasks to be successfully accomplished between 1927 and crossing of the epochal threshold into happy continuance of all humans in Universe. Others can and will vastly improve upon my critical path. What is now needed, however, is an "icebreaker" critical-path submission. Here it is, in the order of my spontaneous formulations of it. (248, 249)

In presenting it I need first to develop, if possible, some powerfully integrating generalizations of already-introduced concepts. For instance, we have developed the earlier concept of a system as dividing all the Universe into all the Universe outside the system - the presently tuned-out, irrelevant macrocosm - all the Universe inside the system - the presently untuned-in, irrelevant microcosm - and all the small remainder of the present, individually tuned-in Universe of which the Universe-dividing system consists, together with all of its presently integrated, common knowledge of tuned-in, omnirelevant considerations. Systems scientifically describe conceptual ramifications of thoughts and ideas. This omnicosmic, four-dimensional, geometrical conception of a system is a scientific generalization (see "System-400.00" in Synergetics, vols. 1 and 2). (249)

Human organisms are systems. They are complex but very important systems of energetically operative, integral tools. Some of them are internally operative in manufacturing, maintaining, repairing, and replacing the whole inventory of specialized interior as well as generalized exterior tools. All of the integral exterior tools such as the human hand and eyes have highly generalized but circumstantially limited capabilities - for instance, they cannot work nakedly above or below a very small temperature range, but within their temperature limits their uses are myriad. (249)

Human mind, discovering principles, devises special case, less frequently employed, nonintegral, from-self-detached, craft tools. In due course human mind, discovering more principles, uses the organically integral tools to operate the simple, detached craft tools such as the stone hammer and knife, to produce much more effective generalized industrial tools, such as a blacksmith's forge and anvil, metal hammers and tongs, with which the smith in turn produces even more specialized tools, such as metal horseshoes and forged metal carpenter's hammers, to outperform wooden mallets and stone hammers. Human mind, stimulated by the succession of experiences attendant upon hitching an ox, a water buffalo, a camel, or an elephant to an earth-working tool, came to the discovery of the windmill and the waterwheel, and then coupled the windmill or waterwheel with a grain-grinding stone milling wheel; then in time conceived of the principle of using energy other than human muscle to operate a class of tools known as the machine tools, consisting of lathes, drill presses, metal planers, milling machines, grinding machines, shapers, slotters, etc. Each such machine tool performs in far finer, more powerful degree the metallic-substance-forming and surface-finishing functions initially performed in principle but under much more limited conditions only by the human hands and other of the integral organic exterior tools. (249, 250)

All of the foregoing involves energy as work and as matter and a complex of energy interexchanging. All such complex internal and external energy intertransforming and exchanging can be spoken of as interior and exterior metabolics. We are gradually working toward a complex integration of many of our already-introduced complex concepts into a generalization of interior and exterior ballistics, which as energy intertransforming and exchanging can be spoken of as interior and exterior metabolics. (250)

How apt a name for the human organism is "an interior and exterior metabolic system." We find that in these interior and exterior metabolic systems, the interior tooling is highly generalized, while the exterior tools are highly specialized and able to cope with many variables, but that the data regarding the different toolings vary hardly at all, which is to say that the more nearly generalized the system, the less variable the inventory of its constituents, wherefore the great scientific generalizations are eternal and never vary. We find in the succession of naval science and arts that the navy yard machine tools varied hardly at all, being improved upon only slowly, and that the number-two science and art of designing fleets and ships and their integral interior ballistics varied more frequently than did the design of the navy yard machine tools, whereas the exterior ballistics and navigation dealt with swiftly changing sea and weather conditions, though the navigational mathematics of spherical trigonometry itself consisted of eternally invariant generalized principles. We find our concept of industrialization to be an exterior-to-humans metabolic system. (250)

We find our critical path to consist of a succession of omnirelevant, frequently varying, widely ranging, highly specialized exterior metabolic systems, being operated by humans, which humans themselves are limited-range, rarely variant, interior and exterior metabolic systems. (250)

A. In the "Self-Disciplines" chapter of this book, I recounted that the larger the number of humans I undertook to serve, the more effective I became, wherefore I concluded that if I committed myself to serving everyone, I would be optimally effective. (250)

B. I find the foregoing (A) to be sociologically akin to the hard-science fact that astronomy and astrophysics - dealing in total-known-Universe - enjoy humanity's farthest-ahead-in-time, reliable prognosticating record by a reliably proven prognosticated-events-margin of hundreds of years. (250, 251)

C. There seems to be a scientific generalization at work here that relates intimately to the phenomena synergy-behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior or integral characteristics of any parts of the system when the parts are considered only separately. What is inferred here is that a competitive employment of the whole family of generalized principles employed to serve the successful human functioning in Universe renders one maximally effective. (251)

All scientific generalizations are synergetic - that is, they describe scientifically discovered interrelationships of system parts that vary in respect to one another at only mathematically describable different rates of change, which interrelationships are in no way suggested by separate inspection of any one part of the system. (251)

D. The generalization discovered to be commonly operative in the foregoing paragraphs A, B, and C says, "To be optimall effective, under-take at outset the most comprehensive task in the most comprehensive and incisively detailed manner." (251)

In undertaking our critical-path development of a practically realizable means of bringing about all humanity's spontaneously realizable escape from fearfully ignorant self-destruction-and entrance into a design-science- artifacts- produced-and-induced, sustainable, and unprecedentedly high standard of living for all, to be accomplished within a generation - we are being taught by the foregoing paragraphs A, B, C, D, to immediately "undertake the greatest task with thorough commitment of attention to every detail." (251)

We are being taught by all the foregoing to assume as closely as possible the viewpoint, the patience, and the competence of God.(251)