All the foregoing observations of human misorientations constitute but a minor fraction of those which can be truthfully and cogently made today with some chance of their not only being heard but heeded. And all this brings us all to this book by Gene Youngblood— an excellent name for one of the first of the youth who have emerged from childhood and schooling and "social experience" sufficiently undamaged to be able to cope lucidly with the problem of providing worldaround man with the most effective communication techniques for speaking universal language to universal man— for helping universal man to understand the great transitions, to understand the reasonableness of yesterday's only-transitional inadequacies, to understand that the oldsters are victims of yesterday's ignorance and not Machiavellian enemies of youth, to understand that any bias— one way or another— utterly vitiates competent thinking and action, to understand that 100 per cent tolerance for error of viewpoint and misbehavior of others is essential to new-era competence— and, finally, to understand that man wants to understand. Nowhere have we encountered a youth more orderly-minded regarding the most comprehensively favorable, forward functioning of humans in Scenario-Universe than in Gene Youngblood. His book Expanded Cinema is his own name for the forward, omni-humanity educating function of man's total communication system.
Isaac Newton, as the greatest Olympian of classical science whose influence reigned supreme until the turn of the Nineteenth into the Twentieth Century, assumed the Universe to be normally at rest and abnormally in motion. Einstein realized that the experimental data regarding the Brownian Movement and the speed of light made it clear that Universe was not normally at rest, for when its energies were released in a vacuumized tunnel they traveled linearly at 186 million miles per second. This he assumed to manifest its norm, since that is how Universe behaves normally when unfettered in a vacuum. Any seemingly motionless phenomena, he reasoned, such as seemingly solid matter, consisted of energy moving at 186 million miles per second but in such small local orbits that their speed and the exquisitely small, self-huddling orbit made them impenetrable; ergo, apparently solid. This was the basis of his formulation of his extraordinary E=mc2, which, when fission and fusion occurred, proved his locked-up-energy formulation to be correct. The utter difference between Newton's norm of at rest and Einstein's norm of 186 million miles per second provides humanity's most abrupt confrontation regarding the epochal difference of conceptioning between that in the womb of yesterday's ignorance and in the womb of new-dawning awareness, from which and into which, respectively, man is now experiencing the last phases of delivery.
Thinking in terms of 700 million miles per hour as being normal— and informed by the experiments of scientists that no energies are lost— Einstein abandoned the Newtonian thought of Universe and assumed in its place Universe to be "A scenario of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping transformative events." Einstein's observational formulations, however, are subjective, not objective. In the mid-1930's I suggested in a book that Einstein's work would eventually affect the everyday environment of humanity, both physically and mentally. After reading what I had written, Einstein said to me, "Young man, you amaze me. I cannot conceive of anything I have ever done as having the slightest practical application." He said that to me a year before Hahn, Stressman, and Lisa Meitner had, on the basis of E=mc2, discovered the theoretical possibility of fission. You can imagine Einstein's dismay when Hiroshima became the first "practical application."
Gene Youngblood's book is the most brilliant conceptioning of the objectively positive use of the Scenario-Universe principle, which must be employed by humanity to synchronize its senses and its knowledge in time to ensure the continuance of that little, three-and-one-half-billion-member team of humanity now installed by evolution aboard our little Space Vehicle Earth. Gene Youngblood's book represents the most important metaphysical scenario for coping with all of the ills of educational systems based only on yesterday's Newtonian-type thinking. Youngblood's Expanded Cinema is the beginning of the new era educational system itself. Tomorrow's youth will employ the video cassette resources to bring in the scenario documents of all of humanity's most capable thinkers and conceivers. Only through the scenario can man possibly "house-clean" swiftly enough the conceptual resources of his spontaneous formulations. Tomorrow's Expanded Cinema University, as the word uni-verse— towards one— implies, will weld metaphysically together the world community of man by the flux of understanding and the spontaneously truthful integrity of the child.
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Inexorable Evolution and Human Ecology
Until humanity starts behaving
In logical ways
For logical reasons
Natural evolution will force it
To keep on behaving logically
For seemingly illogical reasons—
Resulting inexorably, as at present,
In humanity's backing
Rump-bumpingly into its future
While disregarding opportunities
To about-face and realize
Its inspiring passengership
Aboard Planet Earth—
As its exploratory mothership
Of ever vaster and more exquisite
Macro- and micro-cosmic realms.
And the frustrations
Of fearfully clung-to customs
Will persist unabated until
Humanity undertakes
Seriously, imaginatively,
Courageously, inspiringly
To employ effectively
The ever-more with ever less—
Of effort, material, time
And tolerance of error
Per each accomplished task
The comprehensively anticipatory
Design science revolution—
Being intent thereby
To make all of humanity
Successful in every sense.
As it undertakes design revolution
Humanity also must realize
That it can always afford rearrangements
Of the physical environment constituents
Which produce sustainable increases
In the proportion of all of humanity
Enjoying comprehensive success—
Provided only the task
Is physically feasible
Within ecologically critical limits
Of electro-magnetics, chemistry, time.
"We cannot afford" assumes spending
Intertransforming as matter or radiation
Energy cannot be spent
Know-how always increases
Wealth multiplies irreversibly.
And not until then will nature
Cease to cope with humanity's
Ignorance-prolonged inertia
Just in the same way
That human parents
Cope with their newborns'
Innocently ignorant
Self-helplessness—
And that is by forcing man