Kenneth S. Keyes, Jr.
Jacque Fresco
Miami, Florida
PART I. THINGS THAT SHAPE OUR FUTURE
1. The Leap from the Jungle
The lives of most men and women are blighted by problems they cannot solve. And people usually blame themselves, or they blame “fate”—whatever that is. However, when two cars collide at an intersection, should we, as students of society, concentrate our attention on the individual blame of the drivers, on “fate” or on the way transportation is engineered so that it permits collisions?
If you believe that cars and roads should be designed so that it is almost impossible for people to lose their lives through collisions, this book is for you. If you believe that the mind is capable of gradually applying the method of patient, scientific investigation to find out how to rearrange the structure of our society to give each individual a greater opportunity for self-realization and happiness while he is on earth, we welcome and need your help. If you believe it’s about time for the human race to stop spinning its wheels, then let’s get going!
But this book on the future of our civilization is not for everyone. Few will be able to read it without forming an opinion before they see the picture as a whole. To enjoy this book you will have to blend open-mindedness with critical skepticism. It is hard enough to face the problems of our own time. And it is many times more difficult to understand a projection of fantastic and shocking changes that may occur over the next hundred years!
Suppose an intelligent man in New York City around 1860 had sat down one evening with a book predicting life a century later. He would have refused to believe that almost everyone in 1960 would be able to own a horseless carriage that could whisk about at 60 or more miles per hour. With his Victorian attitudes he would have been deeply shocked by the brief bikinis. In 1860, not even a “woman of ill repute” would have appeared so undressed in public. He would have smiled smugly at the ridiculous prediction that man-made flying machines would travel faster than the speed of sound. The thought of sending pictures and sounds through miles of air would have seemed impossible to a sensible person in 1860. It would have been incredible to him that the art of war would progress to the point where one small bomb would destroy a city. Our Victorian would have been alarmed that a part of his wages could be withheld to provide for retirement. At this point, let us leave this gentleman of the last century muttering to himself about loss of freedom and the world’s moving too fast.
Are we more flexible—more farsighted—today? We will need to become experts at changing our minds. The differences between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will probably be small when compared with the accelerating pace of the next century.
You will understand this book best if you see today as only a stepping stone between yesterday and tomorrow. You will need a sensitivity to the injustices, lost opportunities for happiness, and searing conflicts that characterize our twentieth-century civilization. If your mind can weigh new ideas and evaluate them with insight, this book is for you.
We have no crystal ball that gives an accurate picture of the twenty-first century. We want you to feed our ideas into your own computer. Perhaps you may find even better ideas that may play a part in molding the future of our civilization. In the next six chapters we’ll explore the “why” and “wherefore” of the unfamiliar, alarming, unbelievable, wonderful, and exciting picture we will paint of the twenty-first century. Then we’ll join Scott and Hella, who live in the next century. We’ll experience with them the new dimensions of life in the changed world of the future.
The Long Journey
To understand the probable courses of man’s future development, let’s spend a few minutes looking into his past. The world came into existence around four and one-half billion years ago, and all sorts of weird fishes and monstrous dinosaurs got into the act before we did. Millions of years ago our ancestors were little apelike fellows that spent most of their time in trees. Then some of these little beasts began to do things that were to make a lot of difference to you and me. They quit jumping from branch to branch like the squirrels and, instead, began swinging from limb to limb somewhat like the man on the flying trapeze. This led to some important changes from head to toe. The arms, which previously moved in a restricted arc, developed free rotation. This makes it possible for a baseball pitcher to whirl his arms around and zing one over home plate. The intestinal organs, which had been slung from the backbone, as in a dog, were now supported by the pelvis, which became somewhat bowl-shaped. The front feet didn’t have to support the weight of the body anymore, and they developed into a bunch of skyhooks that we call fingers. Since animals that misjudged distances when swinging from branch to branch left fewer offspring, we are blessed today with excellent stereoscopic vision and neuro-muscular coordination. We owe a large part of what we are today to our swinging primate ancestors.
Man has made three big steps away from his animal cousins. The first cultural jump occurred when he began to use fire, tools, and language. Although men of our own species, Homo sapiens, have been here about 50,000 years, radioactive carbon datings show that our ancestors were using tools and fire as much as 600,000 years ago.
The
