Man, as we know him, is a comparative late-comer in the history of the Earth and tenuous film of life which its surface has supported. In certain respects he is one of the most fragile of living creatures—yet, in the manner of his explosive appearance on the scene, and the ways in which he has profoundly altered the environment within which he developed, he is the most powerful organism to have emerged so far.
His capacity to transcend the temporal limits of his own life span by communicating his thought and feelings through many generations has given him an unique ‘continuous’ quality. Though his physical body may be entirely changed through cell renewal many times in his life and eventually be dissolved into its constituent parts. In the sense referred to even the individual may be ‘continuous’, and the overlapping and interweaving of generations of communicating individuals make man, potentially, an organism which never sleeps, dies, or forgets.
The major environ tools of our day, like the airline or telephone system, can only be made and operated by the coordinated effort of a great many men. They require drawing upon the material resources of the entire world for their creation, and they comprise within themselves the integrated experience, the science, which is drawn from the whole of man’s universal history. They are comprehensive systems rather than local, and function most efficiently when organised in their largest universal patterns or networks. All of our other comprehensive tool network systems, like electrical power and communications grids, operate on the same principles. Their optimum efficiency networks may no longer be contained within national boundaries and the necessary development amortization has gradually gone outside the capacities of private enterprise, and begins to transcend any one national capacity to wholly operate and maintain.
When we speak generally about technical advantage we refer to the ability to convert energy into work. This channeling of natural forces into preferred use patterns is basically the organic life process—the energy conversion cycle.
A new volumetric and dynamic dimension: wireless, trackless, omnidirectional. It is a moving picture. Everywhere its physical facilities move with ever-increasing velocity and synchronized knowledge, allowing man to choose when and how and where he wishes to move. He specifically controls his own accelerations and decelerations.
The world we now live in, with its particular qualities of speed, mobility, mass production and consumption, rapidity of change and communication, is the latest phase of this development. It has no historical precedent as a cultural context. Man can now see further, move faster, produce more than ever before. Technical devices like the high speed camera, radio telescope, the jet and the rocket, etc., have extended the range of our sensory experience far beyond that ever dreamt of. Besides enormously enlarging the extent of the physical world available to our direct experience in an ordinary lifetime, such new tools provide us with what is virtually an extension of our environment. Through them we extend our psychic mobility. We can telescope time, move through history, span the world through visual and aural means in a variety of unprecedented ways.
There are very few men today who are disciplined to comprehend the totally integrating significance of the 99% invisible activity which is coalescing to reshape our future. There are approximately no warnings being given to society regarding the great changes ahead. There is only the ominous general apprehension that man may be about to annihilate himself. To the few who are disciplined to deal with the invisibly integrating trends it is increasingly readable in the trends that man is about to become almost 100% successful as an occupant of Universe.