4 Keynote Address at Vision 65
6 Our theme subjects of communications and vision are of immediate interest because today world society is operating almost exclusively in the inaudible and nonvisible area of the physical universe. I think it is safe to say that 99% of all the important work now being done by man—relating to our evolutionary advance—is work going on in the areas above and below the tunable range of man’s direct optical or other sensorial participation in the electromagnetic spectrum. Society neither hears nor sees the great changes going on.
7 You who are convening as participants in the Vision 65 meeting are those rare individuals, only one of whom appears in every one hundred thousand humans. You intuit the necessity, and take the initiative in trying to comprehend the significance of the invisible evolution. Thereafter, you develop ways of alerting society to its newly evoluting conditions. It is possible to develop means for society to intercommunicate its new concepts and adjustments thereto at greatly accelerated rates. You are uniquely concerned with finding effective ways for man to visualize, understand, and respond advantageously to what is going on despite approximately total inaudibility and invisibility.
8 In the very short time which I have to think out loud with you, I want to think about what I know of high potential trends in communication.
9 Certainly, the accelerating accomplishments in electroprobing of the brain are important. I find that the men who are the physiological probers of the brain are beginning to understand its energy patterns. They have identified many of the storage areas for specific types of information. They have apprehended much of the traffic pattern of the brain’s information processing. I find these men are not prone to be prognosticators but do not shudder or feel me to be overdaring when I say in their presence that possibly within the next decade we will have discovered that what we have always spoken of in the past as telepathy is in fact ultra, ultra-high-frequency electromagnetic wave propagation. We may find that we are doing a great deal more subconscious communicating with one another than we are accomplishing in the ‘‘reality’’ of the visually tunable ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. That is one reason why I do not prepare and read or memorize my lectures. I prefer to think my way along in front of my audience, speaking my thoughts as they occur. I am confident that my spoken thoughts are greatly affected by subconscious feedback from my audiences.
10 I’d like also to prospect a little regarding my Skyocean World Map on the stage’s backdrop behind me. It is an aid in effectively conceiving the totality of world (and universe) events, as we shall presently realize.
11 With our enormous specialization we have powerful insights in a variety of unique directions, but we have very little integrated comprehension of the significance of the total information. I find that not only does our vision have a narrow electromagnetic spectrum range but that we also have a very limited apprehending range within the spectrum of motive velocities. For this reason, we see and comprehend very few motions among the vast inventory of unique motions and transformation developments of the universe.
12 Universe is a nonsimultaneous complex of unique motions and transformations. Of course, we don’t ‘‘see’’ and our eyes cannot ‘‘stop’’ the 186,000-miles-per-second kind of motion. We don’t see the atomic motion. We don’t even see the stars in motion though they move at speeds over one million miles per day. We don’t even see the hands of the clock in motion. We remember where the hands of the clock were when last we looked, and thus we accredit that motion has occurred. In fact, experiment shows that we see and comprehend very little of the totality of motions.
13 Therefore society tends to think staticly and is always being surprised, often uncomfortably, sometimes fatally. Lacking dynamic apprehension it is difficult for humanity to get out of its static fixations and specifically to see great trends evolving.
14 We do from time to time take progressive stage photographs of subvisibly changing phenomena, such as plant growth, and accelerate the rate of projection of the successive pictures to make possible man’s seeing the changes take place at a rate that he identifies as ‘‘motion.’’
15 To rectify this condition, I have speculated and experimented a great deal on the development of what is called the ‘‘Geoscope’’ or miniature earth. The particular Geoscope that we think about a great deal is 200 feet in diameter. The reason that we have chosen that 200-foot size—which is about twice the diameter and eightfold the volume of the world globe at the New York World’s Fair—is that if we use the aerial mosaic contact photographs taken by the Air Force at the lowest standard flight level, and put the whole world inventory of contact-size photographs together as a continuous spherical surface mosaic picture, they will make a 200-foot-diameter globe. In the 200-foot-diameter spherical aerial mosaic we can see men’s houses—but we can’t see men. In a sense we can recognize man because we recognize his farm and his house. On a 200-foot globe, pasted up with an aerial photo mosaic, you could see all of humanity’s highways, railways, towns, and houses. Any human could identify his home on such a sphere.
16 This 200-foot sphere could be mounted 200 feet above the water, suspended invisibly from masts arising from the Blackwell Ledges in the East River of New York City, just south of Welfare Island. The weight of the structure would be so light that the cables suspending it from the masts would be invisible. You would have a 200-foot-diameter miniature earth apparently floating out in space one-half mile away from the United Nations Building. The miniature earth’s top would be at about the height of the top of the United Nations Building.
17 Fourteen years’ development work on the 200-foot Geoscope makes it possible to describe it with accuracy. Ten million electric light bulbs, one for each two square inches, evenly covering the sphere’s entire surface would be hooked up to a computer. The light intensity in each bulb is controllable. We would, in effect, have an omnidirectional ‘‘spherical’’ television tube which seen from the United Nations Building would have as good resolution as a fine-mesh halftone print. This spherical TV-like ‘‘tube’’ would accurately picture the whole earth. We wouldn’t need a rigid structural outline of the continents, for the latter would be part of the spherical picture described by the lights. You would be able to look at any part of the earth that you want—because you could have the computer rotate the spherical earth picture on the 200-foot sphere surface in any preferred way.
18 How would we use this giant Geoscope? We could, for instance, show all the population data for the world for the last 300 years. We would identify every thousand human beings by a red light located at the geographical centers occupied by each one thousand human beings. You would then be able in one minute to develop the picture of the world’s population growth and geographical spread for 200 years. You would see the glowing red mass spreading northwestward around the globe like a great fire. You would be able to run that data for another second or two which would carry you through three or four more decades of population growth. While the edge of the data would be unreliable, the gravity and momentum centers of population would be quite reliable.
19 All the satellites going around earth make their circuits at about the pace of the minute hand of the clock—roughly one circuit per hour. So we couldn’t see the satellites’ motion around the earth except by accelerated motion which is easy to introduce into the Geoscope. All the cloud cover and weather information around earth can be shown and accelerated to predict the coming weather everywhere.
20 The Geoscope is only one of many devices that could provide man with a total information-integrating medium. We’re going to have to have some way for all humanity to see total earth. Nothing could be more prominent in all the trending of all humanity today than the fact that we are soon to become a world man; yet we are greatly frustrated by all of our local, static organizations of an obsolete yesterday.
21 I will speak about other technical devices which may develop to facilitate communication. One has been developed in respect to language problems. For instance, there have continued to be great explorations to determine the geographical origins of the Pacific peoples. It has been possible to take all the languages of the Pacific and of all of its, as yet, existing tribes and to identify transitional stages in the evolutionary sound pattern developments of the whole range of words. It is possible to identify the earlier and later sound forms in evolutionary sequences. A Southern Illinois University professor was able to identify all these sound patterns and to put them into the computer to find the lines pointing toward origins. The computer showed that the languages of the Pacific clearly came from the region of New Britain just east of New Guinea.
22 The same kind of evolutionary working with word sounds shows that it is going to be quite possible for the computer to find the most commonly recognizable and speakable sound and meaning relationships common to all world people. Indications are that the computers will probably develop some kind of phonetic acceleration leading toward a common world language. I don’t think we need to talk about too many more of such trends, but many will be realized.
23 Men must have been in critical life-sustaining crises to have invented words. When we have something vital to say we can usually develop the means of communication. Today with our great vocabulary inheritance we squander meanings on unworthy causes and communicate little that needs to be said.
24 I will now talk about what it seems to me needs to be communicated by man today. Up to the time of Thomas Malthus at the opening of the 19th century we had had many great world empires—but all the pre-16th-century great world empires such as those of Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, the Ottomans, and Rome, were all what I call ‘‘flat empires,’’ that is, they were all part of the same pre-l6th-century cosmology of man which conceived of the earth as being flat—a great island, apparently surrounded horizontally to infinity by the sea. All the great empires were flat postage-stamp empires inside of the great infinity. All our ancient world maps show that flat concept with civilization centered around the Mediterranean Sea, which term means sea in the middle of the land.
25 And the people, in the times of Alexander the Great or of Caesar or of Saladin, all thought in that flat way. That is why ‘‘simple, elementary plane geometry’’ is used and taught to beginners and ‘‘solid’’ is considered more difficult and ‘‘spherical trig’’ even more advanced and more difficult.
26 When you think about the real consequences of that psychologically, philosophically, and mathematically, it is devastating. It means that ‘‘inside’’ the empire, we have something we call civilization while ‘‘outside’’ the empire begins the unknown wilderness with pretty rough people and outside of that live dragons and beyond the dragons, flat infinity. What we have in flat land is an only local finiteness, and all outward around us extends the flat infinity. This meant then that the Greeks in attempting to communicate their mathematical conceptioning defined the circle as ‘‘an area bound by a closed line of equal radius from one point,’’ or a triangle as ‘‘an area bound by a closed line of three angles, three edges, and three vertexes.’’ The Greeks talked only about the area that was ‘‘bound’’ as having validity, finiteness, and identity while outside, on the other side of the bounding line, there existed only treacherous terrain leading outwardly to infinity and therefore boundless. This has a tremendous feedback effect and explains the ingrained fundamental biases in our present thinking. We tend to think only of one side of a line as definable, organized, and valid. ‘‘Our side’’ is natural, right, and ‘‘God’s country’’ and vice versa. All humanity has been conditioned to accredit only its own local area of experience as being natural, and the logical prototype of all that is good and acceptable with all else remote, hostile, treacherous, and infinite. Infinite systems may contain an infinity of variables. The ancient world was imaginatively controlled by an infinity of gods.
27 The British Empire was so called because the great business venturers—the great outlaws—the world men—who ruled the world’s ocean found the British Isles to be their most easily defendable shipbuilding bases which coincidentally and conveniently also commanded the whole waterfront of all the European customers for the venturers’ Oriental booty. The venturers ‘‘Shanghaied’’ their crews out of the British pubs and because there were so many ships with so many British sailors aboard the world came to identify the most successful world outlaw organization as the British Empire. This was the first empire of man to occur after we knew that the earth was a sphere. A sphere is a mathematically finite or closed system. It is an omnisymmetrical closed system. A sphere is finite unity.
28 Thomas Malthus, the professor of political economics of the East India Company, was the first economist ever to receive all the vital statistics and economic data from a closed system world. Once the world is conceived of as a sphere and finite, there are no longer an infinite number of varying possibilities identifiable uniquely as whims of gods.
29 Because earth had been discovered by its high-seas masters to be a closed and finite system, the great pirates who controlled the seas took their scientists around the world to discover and disclose to them its exploitable resources. Only because the earth constituted a closed system could the scientists inspect, in effect, all the species and only thus was Darwin able to develop the closed-system theory of ‘‘evolution of species.’’ Such a theory could not have existed before that. It would have had to include dragons and sea-serpents. All the people in all the previous open-edged empires lived in a system, within whose bordering infinity anything could happen. Paganism (or peasantism) wasn’t illogical. Geometrically speaking, the pagans could have any number of gods because any kind might occur in infinity. There were an infinite number of chances of upsetting the local pattern which was a most satisfying idea if it happened that the individual didn’t like the prevailing local pattern.
30 It seems strange that we were not taught about the historical, philosophical, and economic significance of the foregoing transition from an open to a closed world system. However, the omission can be explained by realizing that a closed system would exclude any variables supposedly operating external to the system. This automatically would exclude any supernatural phenomena such as the theologies of the organized religions. And because the churches were strong and the great pirates wished to obscure both their monopoly of the riches of the closed system and their grand world ocean strategy for its control, significance of the concept of a closed world system was popularly unrealized.
31 Once a closed system is recognized as exclusively valid, the list of variables and the degrees of freedom are closed and limited to six positive and six negative alternatives of action for each local transformation event in universe.
32 In view of Thomas Malthus’ discovery that the world’s people multiplied themselves much more rapidly than they were able to produce goods to support themselves, what could prayers do to alter those hard facts? For approximately a century the world-mastering venturers ‘‘classified’’ Malthus’ books as secret information, belonging exclusively to the East India Company.
33 Once ‘‘classified’’ that kind of information leaked out only amongst the pirates and the scholars. Marx, as a great scholar studying in England, encountered the Malthusian data.
34 It was equally clear to Marx that there was not enough to go around.
35 Marx said, ‘‘Since there is not enough to go around for all and not enough even for ‘many’—certainly those few who are arbitrarily favored by the prevailing system and thereby enabled to survive their allotted span of ‘four score years and ten ought to be the ones who are most ‘worthy’ and those who do the work ‘obviously’—to Marx—were the most ‘worthy.’ ’ ’’
36 That is logical thinking.
37 Those who opposed him said that headwork and daring enterprise which alone conceived of the great value to be realized by society could also increase the abundance and support more people and that the enterprisers should be conceded to be the exclusive few who could and should survive. Others said it should be the bright ones—who by their superior intellectual fitness alone could increase the numbers who could be supported. The choice of ‘‘who’’ should survive has always underlain all class warfare. Should it be the brightest, the toughest, the bravest—or who should it be?
38 Certainly, the corollary to Darwin’s theory of evolution which expounded ‘‘Survival only of the fittest’’ seemed to fit neatly with Malthus who observed that only a few were attaining their full span of years. It was assumed to be obvious by those in power that a scientific law supported and vindicated their position. Despite the great pirates’ satisfaction, the question persisted amongst the ‘‘outs’’ as to ‘‘who were the fittest’’? Would it prove in the end to be the workers, or would it be some military class or would it be some intellectual class?
39 Just before I went to Harvard University in 1913, before the start of World War I, an ‘‘uncle’’ gave me some counsel. He was a very rich ‘‘uncle.’’ My father had died when I was quite young. My ‘‘uncle’’ said, ‘‘Young man, I think I must tell you some things that won’t make you very happy. I know that you are impressed with your grandmother’s golden rule: ‘‘do unto others as you would they should do unto you.’’ But my uncle went on to tell me about the discoveries of Thomas Malthus. He spoke about the pre-Malthusian times when there could reasonably have been any number of gods. He made it clear that in the early empires, the concept of the golden rule was highly plausible. There seemingly were an infinity of chances that it could work. ‘‘But,’’ my uncle said, ‘‘a few of us now know from the closed-system experts that the golden rule doesn’t work. Those few of us who are rich and who really have the figures know that it is worse than one chance in one hundred that you can survive your allotted days in any comfort. It is not you or the other fellow; it is you or one hundred others. And if you are going to survive—and have a family of five and wish to prosper—you’re going to have to do it at the expense of five hundred others. So, do it as neatly and cleanly and politely as you know how and as your conscience will allow. At any rate, that’s what you’re up against.’’ He went on to say, ‘‘I’m not going to try to educate your grandmother because she’s quite happy in thinking her own golden-rule way, and—of course unknown by her—I have taken care of her one hundred alternates.’’ My uncle said, ‘‘There are few even today who really know this is so. There are those all around the world who have their gods. They keep dying off, short of their potential years, but they keep themselves happy by having their hopes and infinite possibilities. So we don’t tell them about it.’’
40 That ‘‘you or me’’ pattern began to emerge in sailor’s jargon around the time of World War I. In the time of the 1929 to 1941 Depression, Americans began to learn about Malthus. But I also found Malthus unknown as I interrogated educated audiences, for instance, the university audience in the city of Stockholm in 1961. The people of Sweden think deeply in economics. I asked how many of them knew of Malthus, and found that they had never heard of him. I asked the question around the world and found that Malthus is hardly known outside of the United States and England. So, the Malthus concept—‘‘knowing what it was all about’’—was not disseminated by the economically successful few to the rest of the world.
41 At the present moment in history, we find ourselves in a fundamentally different economic position. When, a decade ago, Eisenhower went to meet with Khrushchev in Geneva, both had bee informed by their military and scientists regarding the magnitude of the destructive capability of the atomic bomb. And Eisenhower said, as he went to that conference, ‘‘There is no alternative to peace.’’ I’m sure Khrushchev, with the same realization, must have felt the powerful responsibility of that moment. Both, being political realists and hard-fact men, knew that they would not be able to make any important peace agreements as conceived solely by themselves. Their proposals and agreements, if any, would have to be backed by their respective political parties, and their parties were always in mortal contest at home with their chief opposition parties which waited upon altruistic moves of the ‘‘ins’’ as opportunities to impeach them for treachery to their respective sovereign power’s ideological premises. Any softheaded step on the part of the leader would throw the party out. While Eisenhower and Khrushchev couldn’t yield an inch politically, ideologically, and militarily, both of them brought along their atomic scientists and allowed them to talk to each other in a limited manner regarding any at all possible peaceful uses of the atom.
42 Only one decade ago, at the meeting in Geneva and its companion meeting of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, it came so clearly into scientific view that the leading world politicians could acknowledge it to be true that—as reported unequivocally by Gerard Piel, publisher of the Scientific American—for the first time in the history of man, it was in evidence that there could be enough of the fundamental metabolic and mechanical energy sustenance for everybody to survive at high standards of living—and furthermore, there could be enough of everything to take care of the increasing population while also always improving the comprehensive standards of living. Granted the proper integration of the world around potentials by political unblockings, there could be enough to provide for all men to enjoy all earth at a higher standard of living than all yesterday’s kings, without self-interferences and with no one being advantaged at the expense of another.
43 But clearly both political leaders and their respective states were frustrated by all the political checks and balances each side has set up to protect and advantage only their own and their allies’ side in view of yesterday’s dictum that there was only enough of what it takes to support one in a hundred. So, all the ages-long fears; all the bad habits; all the shortsighted expedients that have developed in custom and law frustrated whatever might be done to realize the new potential. But the fact to remember is that it was only one decade ago that man had this completely surprise news that Malthus was indeed wrong and there now could be enough to go around—handsomely.
44 Inasmuch as I have found that the majority of people around the world had never heard of Malthus—coupled with our observation that not more than 1% of humanity read what Piel said and thereby understood what had occurred at Geneva a decade ago; and at present not more than one-thousandth of 1% of humanity as yet recall and as yet accredit the scientists’ realization at Geneva that Utopia was now for the first time feasible; it is easy to understand that what I am saying to you now must be jolting.
45 World society’s confusions regarding what we are reviewing here are great. The fact is, however, that the foregoing economic facts are mankind’s now most important considerations. We are faced with the necessity of developing effective ways to educate all humanity as rapidly as possible regarding this completely new and vital economic situation.
46 To start with, here is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today’s industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations and careful study shows that within six months, two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way.
47 However, if we leave the industrial countries with their present industrial machinery and their energy-distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away from all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political party workers and send them off by rocketship to forever orbit the sun—the result will be that as many world people as now will keep right on eating, possibly getting on a little better than before. This will remove all barriers to completely free world intercourse and thereby permit realization of enough for all.
48 The fact is that now—for the first time in the history of man—and only for the last ten years, all the political theories and all the concepts of political functions are completely obsolete in any other than secondary housekeeping functions. The primacy of political ideologies is obsolete because they were all developed on the basis of the exclusive survival only of your party or my party—simply because there was not enough for both.
49 The whole realization that mankind now can and may be comprehensively and mutually successful is so startling that we must have it—as both the whole and as the essence of the theme of our forward undertakings. But to have enough to go around for all requires a design revolution, for as now designed the world’s metals are invested in machinery and structures which are so inefficient that they can only take care of 44% of humanity. Engineers and scientists agree that the technical knowledge to correct this now exists. So it is also part of the great message to humanity of those who have the power to communicate that the world’s problems cannot be solved by politics and can only be solved by a physical invention-and-design revolution.
50 In pursuance of this theme and under auspices to be announced later, we are going to undertake at Southern Illinois University, in the next five years, a very extraordinary computerized program to be known as ‘‘How to Make the World Work.’’ It is based on general systems theory, combined with von Neumann’s game theory as ‘‘played’’ by the national defense and joint chiefs of staff in the development of computerized world-war games and the theory of world economic warfaring.
51 We find that man is developing an increasing confidence in the way in which computers are resolving heretofore vexing and seemingly unsolvable problems. Lest one defective computer may lead mankind seriously astray, he is learning to check results in several computers. We, herewith, review typical ways in which society has gained confidence in the computers’ ability to solve heretofore unsolvable problems.
52 After World War II, when enormous new magnitudes of energy-mastering tools had been developed, America, despite the astronomical costs of World War II, found itself manyfold wealthier than it ever had been before. This was because vast improvements of the means of production, more than of the special end products, won the war. Enormous quantities of energy were now flowing to the ends of levers to produce wealth. American labor began to realize that it could ask for a great deal more participation in the advantages accruing to further regeneration of this vast wealth.
53 The problem of sustaining postwar economic and technical growth in our country was one which involved centrally coordinated scientific, technical, industrial, and economic organization, while also developing the profitable growth of the nation’s prime contractors. This was accomplished by inducing a regenerative self-amplification of the moneys which would flow irrigationally through the whole economic system in ten recyclings per year which could convert $50 billion in war orders into a $500 billion gross national product that would yield a $55 billion tax extraction for reintroduction of next year’s $50 billion cold-war orders to the prime contractors. To implement this economic irrigation system, Congress extended the President’s World War II emergency powers to implement his ‘‘anticipation’’ of the next war—which realized anticipation we speak of as the cold war. In this way, the economy could and has attained omniprofitable probing for the new economically capitalizable industrial-advantage augmentations inherent in the scientific and technical invention evolution of each new military program’s development of greater production power of greater hitting power with ever less effort per each function.
54 The total grand strategy of cold warring introduced an immediate preview of the astronomical complexity of its accounting problems both anticipatory, current, and retrospective.
55 World War I and World War II had demonstrated that human beings were inherently inadequate, as ‘‘directors’’ of the war-production complexities. I’ll just point out to you quickly that a single-family house has about 500 types of parts, a fighter plane has 25,000 types of parts, while a big corporation, e.g., International Harvester, has to keep a live inventory of 135,000 types of service parts—and these are the figures of just one corporation. When we begin to talk about all the corporations and all the evolution-anticipating undertakings and all the stockpiling for 10, 15, and 20 years ahead—of the whole national economy—in getting ready for the next war—the myriad millions of types of parts and functions and raw materials and tools to produce and handle them rocketed beyond the thinking capabilities of any individuals. The obvious economic complexity of the cold warring made the swift development of the computers mandatory to the U.S. military leaders. Production of the modern computers had been found to be theoretically feasible in the 1930s in the course of development of the great electrical-power-distribution systems’ ‘‘network analyzers.’’ There were computers in the invention and laboratory-development stage and a few minor prototypes of both the analog and digital computers. It was only a question of allotting enough money to the big universities to pay for the major development research programs. Computers which worked with electronic tubes were developed but were swiftly improved after the invention of transistors.
56 After the universities had developed the prototype computers, they were given to the big corporations to reproduce. The skilled machinists of the U.S.A.’s labor force had to produce, assemble, and tune up the production computers.
57 Though it cannot be confirmed by any published document, I—as a card-carrying ‘‘journeyman machinist’’ of the International Association of Machinists, one of the U.S.A.’s oldest labor unions—am confident that Walter Reuther put into the computers the problem of, ‘‘Which would pay General Motors the greatest profit: to grant or not to grant the United Auto Workers not only shorter hours and more pay, but also vacations, retirement, and complete life benefits?’’ The computer said, ‘‘General Motors will make much more money by granting.’’ Boards of directors having been elected by the stockholders have always heretofore been mandated to secure all the profits of their corporations for the shareholders and therefore not to yield an inch to labor. However, with the introduction of computers, General Motors’ board of directors yielded without a battle to Reuther’s unprecedented demands. Therefore, General Motors’ board of directors also must have put the problem into the computer because they acquiesced so quickly. Within three years after granting, General Motors became the first corporation in history to make a billion dollars net after paying all taxes. This is how well it paid off to allow a percentage of accrued profits to fund labor’s wider buying power. They made money because mass production cannot exist without mass consumption and the wider and more persistent the distribution of wealth as buying power the greater and more persistent the sales and profits to all. General Motors’ decision to heed the computers insured their profits.
58 The wealth which we as industrialized society are now dealing in is the tooled and tuned capability to shunt the free-flowing inexhaustible energies of universe on to the ends of levers to do the work for us. The tooled capability to satisfy tomorrow’s metabolic regeneration of each man is what underlies our wealth today. Though this is not yet officially recognized by either business or by U.S. government, wealth is our tool-organized capability to deal with the forward metabolic regeneration of humanity in terms of forward man-days of increasing degrees of mutual enjoyment of the whole of the earth without interferences and without the gains of one to be realized only by the loss of another.
59 Very recently another extraordinary computer decision occurred. As you know, in America the greatest opposition to centralization of economic power in government authority has been that of the organized private electricity-generating industry. The means of electrical-power generation and distribution were one of the last great holdings of the old pirates who came off the sea and onto the dry land with their railways to own the mines and control energy as power. They built many electric-power and light-generating companies within the U.S.A. and in foreign countries. These ‘‘utilities’’ were adamant against any public control. After the 1929 crash came the New Deal and the government underwriting and control of the banking system, and the public entry into the electrical-generating industry—along with flood control—as for instance in the Tennessee Valley. Next came the U.S. government’s rural electrification and many other governmental developments and ownership of public power services.
60 As Eisenhower became President, he found himself in the middle of a battle waged between the ‘‘private’’ and the ‘‘public’’ sectors of the electricity producers for control of the fabulously grown energy resources. The private-sector progeny of the old pirates hoped not only to win, but in so doing to take over atomic energy despite the fact that its development had cost the government unprecedented billions to develop. This battle was joined in 1952 when the old pirates’ progeny, led by a Wall Street admiral, made a skilled and powerful attempt to reverse their catastrophic loss in 1929 of control of the world’s overall economic intercourse and its monetary systems as well as of the prime initiative in guiding the world’s capital reinvestment evolution; as well as their loss by default to democratic government of their position as the ultimate creditor, forecloser, and underwriting dictator of the comprehensive economic recovery system and its grand domestic and international strategy formulations. Ensconced only in their privately owned security-trading houses, divorced entirely from access to bank-deposit funds, and possessing only their privately operated public utilities and their privately owned mines whose profitable operation had been bedeviled by the vast and unexpected magnitude of recovery and recirculation of World War I and subsequent industrial evolution’s scrapped metals, the private sector of the 1952 battle had only the momentum of wide public affluence of World War II’s vast productivity gains and the McCarthy-stilled voices of democratic dissent to support their campaign of ‘‘righteous indignation’’ of a long-suffering private enterprise to be restored to supreme power. An intuitively alerted democracy frustrated their coup.
61 In the last four years metals coming back as scrap into the world’s metal markets, with government stockpiling ended, have threatened comprehensive deflation of metals prices and impoverishment of the mines and metals cartels. With the scrap of World War II about to reappear in 1966, we will have a flood of metals. Combining this flood with the weapons industry’s continual accomplishment of more power with less resources per each function, it is seen that the metals market will go way down unless a new major use for metals develops. This ‘‘use’’ may be in weapons and ammunition. But other forces are at play.
62 The major interests in metals who are also by heritage close to the major interests in private power began about 1960 to look for new outlets for the major metals, iron, copper, etc., other than for war. One of the ways in which the metals could be employed was, very appropriately, in the electrical-transmission systems—and that requires some explaining.
63 There is no way in which we can get energy from here to there as fast as by wire. Energy by wire is manyfold faster than its delivery over the pipelines, or by ships full of oil. When you want to send electricity great distances, you have to get very high voltages and the higher the voltages the wider apart and higher the apparatus must be to avoid shortcircuiting and overloading by lightning strokes. Distance in electrical distribution has been limited during the last forty years to about 350 miles. That was the capacity of electrical generating and transmission apparatus as then designed. In the 1920s the power- and metals-controlling pirates had built apparatuses with as large a voltage capacity as was feasible in view of the quantity of metals then to be made available without elevating the metals prices beyond negotiability. And the top distance of that 138,000--230,000-volt system was 350 miles. It was discovered, however, in 1960 that with the glut of metals coming into availability as scrap from World War II, that there would be sufficient to build a new national network of greatly increased dimensions permitting elevation of long-distance transmission from 230,000 volts up to 500,000 and 1,000,000 volts. With the new high voltage, we could transmit up to 1,500 miles. The metals flood made this new overall voltage magnitude a very practical matter. No part of this story seems to have reached the newspapers or magazines until this year. But, starting about three years ago, the private sector of the electrical-apparatus-designing industry began to put the feasibility and quantation problem of a designed reworking and integration of the national electricity networks into the computer. The problem was to discover in which way the private-power interests would make the most money—by or by not upping the voltage and integrating the national distribution networks. With the ultrahigh voltage it was possible to reach great distances and integrate remote networks systems as we have not been able to do previously even at a top 230,000-volts capacity, between the different time zones of the United States. Every electrical-generating company has the problem of maintaining the experience-proven minimum surplus margin of standby power to take care of unexpectedly compounding big electrical-power loads—the unpredictable peak loads. And all standby power that is not used is completely wasted. If used, it could be pure profit. Network integration smooths out the power-loss peaks and increases profits.
64 It became evident that if the networks of different time zones of the U.S.A. were interconnected by the ultrahigh voltage, long-distance transmitters, that the peaks and valleys of adjacent systems would fit together very efficiently. The computers indicated that with ultrahigh voltage it would be possible to integrate the whole United States and all four of its time zones. It was discovered by the design researchers, however, that such nationwide integration also involved merging of both the public and private networks which integration heretofore had been theoretically opposed by the private interests as an unwanted reconciliation with their ‘‘enemy.’’
65 The computers however showed both the public and private sectors that ultrahigh voltage integration would result in both sides making a 33% additional profit. Of course both sides signed up and the long battle between private and public power was ended. There was nothing about the merger in the newspapers. If the public had known what had happened, they would have known that Johnson was going to be elected. That was the end of private power’s financial underwriting of the Republican party. Because it was the private-power interests who most opposed government centralization, this economic point of contention is removed. A new Republican party if it arises will have to find some other kind of economic base. To find an adequate one will mean joining forces with the forces of change and that will mean a liberal Republican party or none at all. The residual old-line reactionaries are too few to have significance.
66 What I am pointing out mostly is that the computer was able to solve this public- vs. private-power problem which it had been thought could never be solved. So, I assert that we are a society that is going to be developing an increasing confidence in the competently programmed computer to provide clear unbiased answers to questions heretofore held to be unsolvable, particularly those questions which provide answers which can show which way powerful segments of world society will mutually and most copiously profit, in both short and long terms. This will bring about a large series of surprising mergers of heretofore opposed interests.
67 For instance, it is now visible that after integrating the network across the United States, the new 1,500-mile transmission reach will bring connection to Alaska. This will bring in also the enormous water-generated electrical power of the Canadian Rockies. From Alaska we cannot only go right into the Aleutian Islands, but we can go under the Bering Straits and hook up with the great Russian networks in eastern Siberia. This will provide an intercontinental powerhead immediately adjacent to and ready to flow into China. China’s leaders have promised their people physical success through industrialization. The essence of successful industrialization is energy available as unlimited power by wire anywhere. This integrated powerhead will make possible China’s achievement of full industrialization decades earlier than expected. The Americans, the Russians, and the Chinese will put the problem into the computer to find which is most profitable to each and all—to integrate or not integrate. All hands will be informed by their respective computers that network integration will bring large mutual advantages. The Chinese and Russians will have to choose between the political advantages of deliberate, but unnecessary, prolongation of a class struggle between the haves and havenots and letting the controlled energy flow into their systems to altogether eliminate havenotness everywhere and thereby to eliminate all basis of class struggle. The political leaders will be forced by their engineers and science-educated public to choose to integrate and the ideological differences will vanish. Thus, all unexpectedly almost all obstacles to man’s comprehensive physical success will be removed.
68 On Southern Illinois University’s Carbondale campus, we are going to set up a great computer program. We are going to introduce the many variables now known to be operative in world-around industrial economics. We will store all the basic data in the machine’s memory bank; where and how much of each class of the physical resources; where are the people, what are the trendings and important needs of world man?
69 Next, we are going to set up a computer feeding game, called ‘‘How to Make the World Work.’’ We will start playing relatively soon. We will bring people from all over the world to play it. There will be competitive teams from all around earth to test their theories on how to make the world work. If a team resorts to political pressures to accelerate their advantages and is not able to wait for the going gestation rates to validate their theory, they are apt to be in trouble. When you get into politics you are very liable to get into war. War is the ultimate tool of politics. If war develops, the side inducing it loses the game.
70 Essence of ‘‘success in making the world work’’ will be to make every man able to become a world citizen and able to enjoy the whole earth, going wherever he wants at any time, able to take care of all the needs of all his forward days without any interference with any other man and never at the cost of another man’s equal freedom and advantage.
71 I think that communication task of reporting on the computerized playing of the game—‘‘How to Make the World Work’’—will become extremely popular all around the earth. Because we’re going to be playing that game so soon at Southern Illinois University and because there is such a fabulous acceleration in the rate of world events, I felt that we could no longer wait and am therefore announcing it to you now at this Vision 65 congress.
72 I am deeply interested in the play of our intuitions. I am inclined to think that our integrated organic capability is much more powerful than any of us tend to accredit. I have learned how much we can apprehend in just the flash of an eye. In one ten-thousandth of a second, a strobe light can get a beautifully detailed photograph. I am quite certain that humans can enter a room and tell instantly what the real situation is. But they don’t usually trust their own high capabilities so they spend hours trying to find out whether their first flash impression was right or wrong. As I travel around the world today, I see in a flash that the eyes of youth see that the world could be made to work for all of humanity. And I see that they will settle for nothing less. And I see that they are impatient. And I see above all that they can and will soon make it so.