Memes
Our Natural Tendency is to Doubt Ourselves
am enthusiastic over humanity's extraordinary and sometimes very
timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are
gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes
along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that
the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top.
I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting
yesterday's fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for
solving a given proble...
notesAnd leave the big decisions concerning civilization to others.
Specialization is Unnatural
All universities have been progressively organized for ever finer
specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural,
inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is
interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends,
comprehends, and co-ordinates an ever expending inventory of
experiences. Children are enthusiastic planetarium audiences.
Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its
wanting to understand all and put everything together.... notesHomo sapiens most prominent adaptation is our adaptability.
There are Many Leonardo's Today
Many persons wonder why we do not have such men today. It is a
mistake to think we cannot. What happened at the time of Leonardo
and Galileo was that mathematics was so improved by the advent of
the zero that not only was much more scientific shipbuilding made
possible but also much more reliable navigation. Immediately
thereafter truly large-scale venturing on the world's oceans
commenced, and the strong sword-leader patrons as admirals put
their Leonardos to work, first in designing their n... notesA great observation, that Leonardo was an anomaly for his time, but he did solve problems that allow other to become Leonardos. A great example of this today would be the field of computer programming, where geniuses are commonplace, but so common and their work so unknown that they go unrecognized by our culture.
Specialization is the Way to Extinction
Now let us examine more closely what we know scientifically about
extinction. At the annual Congress of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, as held approximately ten years ago in
Philadelphia, two papers were presented in widely-separated parts
of the Congress. One was presented in anthropology and the other
in biology, and though the two author-scientists knew nothing of
each other's efforts they were closely related. The one in
anthropology examined the case histories o... notesSpecialization comes at the cost of general adaptability. So when the environment changes, the highly-specialized go extinct.
The Computer is the Solutions to Over-Specialization
Getting ready for the assumed inexorable Armageddon, each
applied science and all of the great scientific specialization
capabilities only toward weaponry, thus developing the ability to
destroy themselves totally with no comprehensively organized
oppositional thinking capability and initiative powerful enough to
co-ordinate and prevent it. Thus by 1946, we were on the swift way
to extinction despite the inauguration of the United Nations, to
which none of the exclusive sovereign prerogatives... notesWith computers taking over the responsibility of specializing in computational and processing tasks, human minds are freed to resume our plasticity or "comprehensivlty" as Buckminster puts it.
The Parameters of "Spaceship Earth"
Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter,
which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of
space. Our nearest star — our energy-supplying mother-ship, the
Sun — is ninety-two million miles away, and the nearest star is one
hundred thousand times further away. It takes approximately four
and one third years for light to get to us from the next nearest
energy supply ship star. That is the kind of space-distanced pattern
we are flying. Our little Spacesh... notesOur place in the cosmos. This is the situation in which we find ourselves.
Spaceship Earth Didn't Come with Instructions
One of the interesting things to me about our spaceship is that it is
a mechanical vehicle, just as is an automobile. If you own an
automobile, you realize that you must put oil and gas into it, and
you must put water in the radiator and take care of the car as a
whole. You begin to develop quite a little thermodynamic sense.
You know that you're either going to have to keep the machine in
good order or it's going to be in trouble and fail to function. We
have not been seeing our Spaceship Ea... notesIt requires maintenance in order to continue supporting our growing civilization, but we have to discover, through empiricism and experimentation, what that maintenance is.
Humanity has Reached the Hatching Point
To begin our position-fixing
aboard our Spaceship Earth we must first acknowledge that the
abundance of immediately consumable, obviously desirable or
utterly essential resources have been sufficient until now to allow us
to carry on despite our ignorance. Being eventually exhaustible and
spoilable, they have been adequate only up to this critical moment.
This cushion-for-error of humanity's survival and growth up to now
was apparently provided just as a bird inside of the egg is provided
wi... notesThinking of our Earth as an egg, we have been living on the yolk so far. We are reaching the point, by burning our fossile fuels off and exceeding the production capacity of our agriculture, where our intellect must launch us into the stars.
A Logical Process to Understand True Wealth
I have tried out the following intellectual filtering procedure with
both multi-thousand general public audiences and with audiences
of only a hundred or so advanced scholars and have never
experienced disagreement with my progression of residual
conclusions. I proceed as follows: I am going to make a series of
analytical statements to you, and if anyone disagrees with me on
any statement we will discard that statement. Only those of all my
statements which remain 100 per cent unprotected wil... notesIt is not the artificial concept of wealth we have invented, but the resources we use to combat the forces of entropy and survive.
Homo sapiens' Adaptability is Our Greatest Adaptation
All tools are externalizations of originally integral
functions. But in developing each tool man also extends the limits
of its usefulness, since he can make bigger cups hold liquids too
hot or chemically destructive for his hands. Tools do not introduce
new principles but they greatly extend the range of conditions
under which the discovered control principle may be effectively
employed by man. There is nothing new in world technology's
growth. It is only the vast increase of its effective r... notesWe extend ourselves through our tools.
Craft vs Industrial Tools
All of humanity's tool extensions are divisible into two main groups:
the craft and the industrial tools. I define the craft tools as all those
tools which could be invented by one man starting all alone, naked
in the wilderness, using only his own experience and his own
integral facilities. Under these isolated conditions he could and did
invent spears, slings, bows, and arrows, etc. By industrial tools I
mean all the tools that cannot be produced by one man, as for
instance the S.S. Queen M... notesInteresting taxonomy. Crafts are things we can make by our naked selves in a forest, while industrials require another human to produce.
A Positive Spin on Automation
Our labor world and all salaried workers, including school teachers
and college professors, are now, at least subconsciously if not
consciously, afraid that automation will take away their jobs. They
are afraid they won't be able to do what is called "earning a living,"
which is short for earning the right to live. This term implies that
normally we are supposed to die prematurely and that it is
abnormal to be able to earn a living. It is paradoxical that only the
abnormal or exceptional are ... notesBuckminster believes in automation because it will create more freetime and allow more adaptive behaviors in human beings, but he fails to take into account capitalist society where livings must be earned.
Fossil Fuels are Humanity's "Starter"
Now we have comprehended and peeled off the layers of petals
which disclosed not only that physical energy is conserved but also
that it is ever increasingly deposited as a fossil-fuel savings account
aboard our Spaceship Earth through photosynthesis and
progressive, complex, topsoil fossilization buried ever deeper
within Earth's crust by frost, wind, flood, volcanoes, and earthquake
upheavals. We have thus discovered also that we can make all of
humanity successful through science's world-e... notesThey are here to get the engine of sustainable energy running, we have to get the engine running before they are exhausted or the car of civilization is dead.
A Thought is Like Film Being Exposed Over and Over
A thought is a system, and is inherently conceptual-though often
only dimly and confusedly conceptual at the moment of first
awareness of the as yet only vaguely describable thinking activity.
Because total universe is nonsimultaneous it is not conceptual.
Conceptuality is produced by isolation, such as in the instance of
one single, static picture held out from a moving-picture film's
continuity, or scenario. Universe is an evolutionary-process
scenario without beginning or end, because the ...
1 Each new exposure layers onto the old, with echoes of the old still faintly visible. The Universe shares this characteristic over time.
