Buckminster Fuller--"Grandfather of the Future"
Buckminster Fuller--"Grandfather of the Future"
The artist's rendering of the Buckminster Fuller Earth Observatory and Global Strategic Gaming Complex depicted below is Tetworld's interpretation or version of Buckminster Fuller's original concept for a global game--"To Make The World Work For Everyone".
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The artist's rendering of the Earth Observatory and Global Gaming Comples depicted above is Tetworld's interpretation or version of Buckminster Fuller's original concept for a global game--"To Make The World Work For Everyone".
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Here are summary remarks written by R. Buckminster Fuller in 1968, which serve as an introduction to our mission, aims, fundamental gaming rules and goals at the Tetworld Center for Peace and Global Gaming...and from his book, "Critical Path" a rationale, description and plan for building and "gaming" with our Earth Observatory.
BUCKMINSTER FULLER ON GLOBAL GAMING
"To start with, here is an educational bombshell: Take from all of today's industrial nations all their industrial machinery and all their energy-distributing networks, and leave them all their ideologies, all their political leaders, and all their political organizations and I can tell you that within six months two billion people will die of starvation, having gone through great pain and deprivation along the way.
"However, if we leave the industrial machinery and their energy-distribution networks and leave them also all the people who have routine jobs operating the industrial machinery and distributing its products, and we take away all the industrial countries all their ideologies and all the politicians and political machine workers, people would keep right on eating. Possibly getting on a little better than before.
"The fact is that now -- for the first time in the history of man, for the last ten years, all the political theories and all the concepts of political functions-in any other than secondary roles as housekeeping organizations-are completely obsolete. All of them were developed on the you-or-me basis. This whole realization that mankind can and may be comprehensively successful is startling.
"In pursuance of this theme...we are going to undertake...a very extraordinary computerized program to be know as 'How to Make the World Work'...We are going to introduce the many variables known to be operative in economics. We will store all the basic data in the machine's memory bank; where and how much of each class of the physical resources; where are the people, what are the trendings-all kinds of trendings of world man?
"Next we are going to set up a computer feeding game, called "How Do We Make the World Work'...We will bring people from all over the world to play it. If a team resorts to political pressures to accelerate their advantages and is not able to wait for the going gestation rates to validate their theory they are apt to be in trouble. When you get into politics you are very liable to get into war. War is the ultimate tool of politics. If war develops the side inducing it loses the game.
"Essence of the world's working will be to make every man able to become a world citizen and able to enjoy the whole earth, going wherever he wants at any time, able to take care of all the needs of all his forward days without any interference with any other man and never at never at the cost of another man's equal freedom and advantage. I think the communication problem--of 'How to Make the World Work'--will become extremely popular the world around.
"...'The game' will be hooked up with the now swiftly increasing major universities information network. This network's information bank will soon be augmented by the world-around-satellite-scanned live inventorying of vital data. Spy satellites are now inadvertently telephotoing the where-abouts and number of beef cattle around the surface of the earth. The exact condition of all the world's crops is now simultaneously and totally scanned and inventoried. The interrelationship of the comprehensively scanned weather and the growing food supply of the entire earth are becoming manifest.
"In playing 'the game' the computer will remember all the plays made by previous players and will be able to remind each successive player of the ill fate of any poor move he might contemplate making. But the ever-changing inventory might make possible today that which would not work yesterday. Therefore, the successful stratagems of the live game will vary from day to day. The game will not become stereotyped.
"If a player resorts to political means for the realization of his strategy, he may be forced ultimately to use the war-wagering equipment with which all national political systems maintain their sovereign power. If a player fires a gun--that is, if he resorts to warfare, large or small--he loses and must fall out of the game.
"The general-systems-theory controls of the game will be predicated upon employing within a closed system the world's continually updated total resource information in closely specified network complexes designed to facilitate attainment, at the earliest possible date, by every human being of complete enjoyment of the total planet earth, through the individual's optional traveling, tarrying, or dwelling here and there. This world-around freedom of living, work, study, and enjoyment must be accomplished without any individual being physically or economically advantaged at the cost of another.
"Whenever player or team first attains total success for humanity wins the first round of the gaming. There are alternative ways of attaining success. The one who attains it in the shortest time wins the second round. Those who better the record at a later date win rounds 3, 4, and so on.
"All the foregoing objectives must be accomplished not only for those who now live but for all coming generations of humanity. How to make humanity a continuing success at the earliest possible moment will be the objective. The game will also be dynamic. The players will be forced to improve the program--failure to improve also results in retrogression of conditions. Conditions cannot be pegged to accomplishment. They must also grow either worse or better. This puts time at a premium in playing the game.
"Major individuals and teams will be asked to play the game. The game cannot help but become major world news...the game will be visibly developed and may be live-televised the world over by a multi-Telstar relay system.
"The world's increasing confidence in electronic instrumentation in general-due to the demonstrated reliability of its gyrocompasses, and its 'blind' instrument landings of airplanes at night in thick fog, and confidence in opinion-proof computers in particular, will make the playing of fundamental and spontaneous interest to all of humanity.
"Ultimately its most successful winning techniques will become well known around the world and as the game's solutions gain world favor they will be spontaneously resorted to as political emergencies accelerate.
"Nothing in the game can solve the problem of two men falling in love with the same girl, or falling in love withthe same shade under one specific tree. Some are going to have to take the shade of another equally inviting tree. Some may end up bachelors.
"Some may punch each other's noses. For every problem solved a plurality of new problems arise to take their place. But the problems need not be those of physical and economic survival. They can be perplexing and absorbing in entirely metaphysical directions such as those which confront the philosophers, the artists, poets, and scientists.
"The game must, however, find ways in which to provide many beautiful shade trees for each---that is to say a physical and economic abundance adequate for all. There will, of course, have to be matching of times and desires, requiring many initial wait-listings. As time goes on, however, and world-around information becomes available, the peaks and valleys of men's total time can be ever-improvedly smoothed out. Comprehensive coordination of bookings, resource, and accommodation information will soon bring about a 24-hour, world-around viewpoint of society which will operate and think transcendentally to local 'seasons' and weathers of rooted of rooted botanical life. Humanity will become emancipated from its mental fixation on the seven-day--week frame of reference. It is my intention to initiate on several occasions in a number of places anticipatory discussion of the necessary and desirable parameters to establish for playing the world game."--Buckminster Fuller ___________
The following is Buckminster Fuller talking about his world game concept/proposal --- it is excerpted from his book Critical Path--
�World Game's integrated world computer system will have the task of differentiating out the abundant resources and facilities from the scarce, and differentiating the scarce into degrees of scarcity as well as into the day-to-day fluctuations of the borderline cases. The computer will keep constant track of where the resources are geographically located or where they are traveling. That which is in constant abundance is 100-percent socializable. That which is scarce must be reserved for tasks that serve all society in general. The element oxygen in the atmosphere is in abundance at sea level and need not be distributed by artifacts. Oxygen at 11,000 feet and more above sea level is critically scarce and must be compressed into tanks and distributed for breathing through masks and tubes.
The gas helium is very scarce on planet Earth. It has very important, unique characteristics. Number one, it is not flammable, as is hydrogen, though it weighs almost as little as hydrogen. Helium, though the socially theoretical property of everyone, becomes useless to anyone if compressed into four billion separate bottles, each of which is distributed to each of our at-present four billion Earthians. There are a number of technical tasks that helium can perform to the advantage of all humanity, all of which can be programmed into the computer.
The relative abundance of the ninety-two regenerative chemical elements in the thus-far-known Universe is about the same as the inventory of their relative abundance on Earth. The relative abundance of the chemical elements is also approximately the same as that of their occurrence in the organisms of the human bodies. All this data and all the tasks that can be performed by each element to the greatest advantage of all humanity will be programmed into the world-integrated computers to make it evident to all humanity which eco-technological strategy at any given time will produce the highest advantage for all, against which information it can be determined what alternative advantages might attend implementing and supplying the essentials for realization of newly proposed invention initiatives of various humans.
It was World Game that asked one of the world's greatest oil geologists, Francois de Chadenedes, if he could write an accurate scenario of nature producing petroleum on planet Earth through the photosynthetic transformation-into-hydrocarbon of Sun radiation by the vegetation and algae and the succession of events following their transformation as the vegetation is consumed by other biologicals, or is transformed into various residues, all of which are blown by winds or washed by streams and gradually accumulate in various geographical locations and become progressively buried within the planet's outer crust.
Thereafter there were various heats and pressures (caused by ice ages, etc.), earthquakes, or deep burial below water or soil until those chemical heats and pressure conditions occurred which are essential to the production of petroleum. De Chadenedes said he could, and after a year he presented us with the scenario with all of its time increments and pressure conditions spelled out. We then asked him to figure how much it would cost nature per each gallon of petroleum for that much pressure and heat for that much time, were it calculated at the retail rate for that much energy for that length of time as charged us by the public utilities. The cost came to well over a million dollars per gallon.
Since World Game's accounting system is that of the Universe's own time-energy intertransforming requirements, we must accept as cosmically unquestionable this costing of petroleum, coal, and gas resources, which nature has been syntropically importing and accumulating on planet Earth in order, ten billion years hence, to turn the Earth into an energy-exporting (entropic) star.
For this reason World Game considers all fossil fuels to be nature's own savings account, deposited in our Earth and not to be stolen by exploiters. Everyone knows that we should live on our (energy) income and not our savings account. Nor should we burn our capital-account production equipment in order to produce meter-marketable energy, for there will soon be no further production capability. Atomic energy by fission or fusion constitutes burning our terrestrial production equipment.
As mentioned, World Game finds that 60 percent of all the jobs in the U.S.A. are not producing any real wealth; i.e., real life support. They are in fear-underwriting industries or are checking-on-other-checkers, etc. The majority of the jobs occasion the individuals using three to four gallons per day in their automobiles to go to and from work at true cosmic costing this means four million dollars per worker per day.
Obviously the computer finds that it would save the planet Earth's energy account $500 trillion a day to give all the non-wealth-producing workers their full pay to stay at home.
In the same way the World Game's world-around-integrated computers will show that it will save-pay handsomely to pay all professors and teachers in full to stay at home or in their laboratories and relinquish all teaching to video cassettes, whose selectable programs are to be called out by the individual students of all ages around the world to be shown on their home television sets. The old educational facilities and a small fraction of individual teachers who love most to teach will use the old educational facilities within which to produce the cassette programs.
The computer will prove to society that it will pay to introduce automation wherever feasible and to allow the machines to work twenty-four-hour days while paying yesterday's workers in full to stay home. Only those who love each particular technology will keep the world-around video education in operation. Those who pass the exams to qualify for such working will not be paid for it. They will act as does any amateur athlete doing what they do for the love of it. This competing to qualify for all the production and service jobs will govern all work. The work will not be paid for. Everything the individual needs is already paid for.
Rudyard Kipling tells the story... When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted
When Earth's last picture is painted,
And the tubes are all twisted and dried,
The oldest of colors have faded And the youngest of critics have died,
We shall rest And well shall we need to
Lie down for an eon or two 'Til the master of all good workmen Shall put us to work anew.
Then only the master shall praise us, And only the master shall blame,
No one will work for money, And no one will work for fame.
But all for the love of the working
And each in his separate star Shall draw the thing as he sees it
For the God of things as they are.
World Game shows that we can discontinue newspapers and save the trees for fuel-alcohol production. World Game finds that all news can be disseminated by television and that computers can keep track of all the information that fills the advertising and want-advertisement pages, and any individual looking for any kind of opportunity can get the matching information from the computer in seconds.
Individuals can go shopping by cable television. Local Universe is the term used by World Game to identify the macro-cosmic limits of human observation. These macro-limits are identified as the radius of the present maximum phototelescopic and-radar-reached information (in 1980 the spherical sweepout of an approximately eleven-and-one-half-billion-light-year radius) around planet Earth in all directions.
World Game takes the inventory of relative abundance of all the chemical elements present within that radius as spectroscopically analyzed by the light received in all directions around us from all the stars of all the galaxies within that eleven-and-one-half-billion-light-year radial distance.
World Game takes the relative abundance of all the chemical elements thus far found on planet Earth. The local Universe inventories and the Earthian inventory of the relative abundance are somewhat similar, as is the relative abundance of the chemical elements present or acceptably present in human beings' bodies. The Earthian inventory includes all the isotopes of all the chemical elements and the relative abundance of the latter. In respect to the Earthian abundance, some of the elements are so relatively plenitudinous as to make them available for various universal technological uses; they are therefore socializable, but only when employed with other elements in instruments, machinery, structures, medicines, and nutriment.
World Game notes that gold is the most electrica11y conductive of all elements. It is also the most highly reflective of all metals, and therefore has many functional uses. New computer circuiting and such functions as the new laser energy beaming with rubies will occupy the majority of the rare metals and jewels.
Rubies function in producing laser beams, etc. Diamonds, being the hardest of all elements, have many cutting and other technical functions. All the rare stones and metals will have industry's unique industrial tasks to perform. The question then arises as to who will determine which technological initiatives should have prior access to the inherently scarce, high-advantage functionings of the scarce and rare inventories of chemical elements.
World Game finds that the computers fed with all the relevant energy efficiency facts will be able to demonstrate which uses will produce the greatest long-term benefit for all humanity
World Game foresees that the greatest problems for humanity to solve in the future will be how to accommodate the initiatives of millions of humans who, freed from muscle-and-nerve-reflexing jobs, find their inventory of past experiences and their minds integrating synergetically to envision ever greater advantages to be realized for humanity. We will realize this age of regenerative inventing which is rendering humans very effective in their cosmic functioning as local Universe information-gatherers and local Universe problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe�--Buckminster Fuller
__by RBF--"On the working assumption that humanity had established implicit confidence in the computers and automated instrumentation, I proposed in 1964 that the United States Expo '67 exhibition should have a 400'-diameter 5/8 sphere building similar in shape to the 250'-diameter building actually built for Expo '67. In the basement of this building would be housed an extraordinary computer facility. On entering the building by thirty-six external ramps and escalators leading in at every ten degrees of circumferential direction, the visitors would arrive upon a great balcony reaching completely around the building's interior quarter-mile perimeter.
The visitors would see an excitingly detailed 100-foot-diameter world globe suspended high within the 400-foot-diameter 5/8 sphere main building. Cities such as New York, London and Tokyo, and Los Angeles would appear as flattened out, basketball-sized blotches with the tallest buildings and radio towers only about 1/16th of an inch high.
Periodically the great spherical Earth would be seen to be transforming slowly into an icosahedron--a polyhedron with twenty (equilateral) triangular facets. The visitors would witness that in the process of these transformations there are no visible changes in the relative size and shape of any of the land and water masses of the 100-foot-diameter miniature Earth. Slowly the 100-foot diameter icosahedral Earth's surface would be seen to be parting along some of its triangular edges, as the whole surface slowly opens mechanically as an orange's skin or an animal's skin might be peeled carefully in one place. With slits introduced into its perimeter at various places it would be relaxed to subside into a flattened-out pattern as is a bearskin rug. The icosahedral Earth's shell thus would be seen to gradually flatten out and be lowered to the floor of the building.(see the map at: https://members.tripod.com/~Tetworld/center.html ) The visitors would realize that they were now looking at the whole of the Earth's surface simultaneously without any visible distortion of the relative size and shape of the land and sea masses having occurred during the transformation from sphere to the flattened-out condition we call a map. My cartographic projection of the "Sky-Ocean-World" functions in just such a manner as I have just now described.
This stretched-out, football-field-sized world map would disclose the continents arrayed as one world-island in one world-ocean with no breaks in the continental contours. Its scale would be 1/500,000th of reality. Three millimeters or 1/8 of an inch would represent a mile. A big 1000-foot-long oil tanker would appear to be less than one millimeter or only on fiftieth of an inch in length. A major airport's runways would each be about three millimeters or 1/8 of an inch long. A major football stadium would measure less than one millimeter or one fiftieth of an inch long at this scale.
The great map would be wired throughout so that minibulbs closely installed all over its surface could be lighted by the computer at appropriate points to show various, accurately positioned, proportional data regarding world conditions, events and resources. World events would occur and transform on this live world map's ever-evoluting face. If we had 100,000 light bulbs for instance, each mini-light-bulb could represent 40,000 people--a medium-sized town. Mexico City, New York or Tokyo would be a cluster of 250 bulbs. The bulbs could be computer-distributed to represent the exact geographical distribution positioning of the people. Military movements of a million troops would be dramatically visible. The position of every airplane in the sky and every ship on the world ocean could be computer-control displayed. Weekend and holiday exoduses from cities into the country or travel to other cities would be vividly displayed by computer-controlled tallying instruments.
I propose that on this stretched-out, reliably accurate, world map of our Spaceship Earth a great world logistics game be played by introducing into the computers all the known inventory and whereabouts of the various metaphysical and physical resources of the Earth. (This inventory, which took forty years to develop to high perfection, is now housed at my headquarters.)
We would then enter into the computer all the inventory of human trends, known needs, and fundamental behavior characteristics.
I propose that individuals and teams would undertake to play the World Game with those resources, behaviors, trends, vital needs, developmental desirables, and regenerative inspirations. The players as individuals or teams would each develop their own theory of how to make the total world work successfully for all of humanity. Each individual or team would play a theory through to the end of a predeclared program. It could be played with or without competitors.
The objective of the game would be to explore ways to make it possible for anybody and everybody in the human family to enjoy the total Earth without any human interfering with any other human and without any human gaining advantage at the expense of another.
To accomplish the game's objective the resources, pathways, and dwelling points around the surface of our 8,000-mile-diameter, spherical Spaceship Earth must be fully employed by the players in such a way that the world's individual humans would each be able to exercise complete actional discretion and would have such freedom of decision regarding the investment of their time in their waking hours that they would be able to travel independently, or in groups, either to and from locally or continuing intermittently on around the world, dwelling from time to time here or there, finding everywhere facilities to accommodate their needs in an uncompromising manner. The game would seek to use the world's resources, interprocesses, and evolutionary developments in such a way that all the foregoing would be possible."
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