Above photo: HVDC France-Spain Interconnection | RTE France
Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science
The effective application of the principles of science to the conscious design of our total environment in order to help make the Earth's finite resources meet the needs of all of humanity without disrupting the ecological processes of the planet.
Pillow Dome
We have today two utterly different levels of technology, the high performance and the low performance. The latter might best be called the indifferent performance arts. The high performance, and historically scarce, weapons producing arts are called, during wartime, the high priority arts. For every priority there must be an anti-priority and the anti-priority has always been applied to the land buildings or so called peaceful home arts. This dichotomy between the science-based high performance weaponry producing arts and the fortuitous, non science benefacted, home front arts is responsible in a major way for the development of the great chasm noted by Sir Charles Snow that exists at present between the sciences and the humanities and their respective economic rewards in wage scales, and employment opportunities.
The domestic economy was never made the comprehensive focus of generalized systems theory and the prime beneficiary of scientific knowledge. The high performance technology items were only progressively substituted for low performance items within the overall low performance or indifferent performance of the total structural and mechanical scheme of the forever-fortuitous, land-borne edifice. Parts became improved without improvement to the total concept of land borne technology. All of our televisions, our radios, our electronic developments in general, came out of the original weaponry development. We see millions of glistening metallic T.V. antenna sprouting above the roofs of filth festering, bathroomless, fire trap living shacks – the world around. Thus we find ourselves eventually advancing in domestic technology, but only as the secondhand gadgetry, by-producted by the cast off segments of the weaponry industry.
R. Buckminster Fuller| Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs | 1963
Ocean Arks International | Omega Center for Sustainable Living
Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science
I was convinced that within the twentieth century all of humanity on our planet would enter a period of unprecedented crisis. I could see that there was an alternative to politics and its ever more wasteful warring, and inherently vain attempts to solve one-sidedly all -humanity's basic economic and social problems.
That realizable alternative was through invention, development, and reduction to physical practice of working, mass production prototypes of human-circumstance-advantaging technology. This complete family of intercomplementary artifacts I determined must be designed - structurally, mechanically, chemically, metallurgically, electromagnetically, and cybernetically - to provide so much performance per each erg of energy, pound of material, and second of time invested as to make it eminently feasible and practicable to provide a sustainable high standard of living for all humanity. It must be a standard of living far more advanced, pleasing, and increasingly productive than any ever experienced or dreamed of by anyone in all history.
R. Buckminster Fuller | Humanity’s Critical Path: From Weaponry to Livingry | 1983
Money is not wealth. Wealth is the technological ability to protect, nurture, and support the needs of life. Money is only a means of exchanging items of real wealth.
R. Buckminster Fuller | Critical Path | 1981
