Chapter 5 How to Make the World Work

Abstract

How to Make the World Workearth piece Listen to the sound of the earth turning.1963 spring -Yoko Ono, "Earth Piece" I now see the Earth realistically as a sphere and think of it as a spaceship.-Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth Those scientists who ushered in the Atomic Age felt responsible to humanity.Whether they worked on the Manhattan Proj ect or not, and even if they helped the war effort in socially justifiable ways, they felt responsible.The dawn of a new postwar world had left behind the Great Depression and created a country with a clear leadership mandate on the global stage but without a clear strategy to articulate the mandate.It was also a nation that found the bottle of technology and science empty and the genie nowhere to be seen.That which had enabled victory in the war partially hobbled the future in peacetime.Most scientists had carried out a given task and had plowed a narrow furrow in the larger research field, head down and duty tasked, but once successful as a collective, the individual felt a need to save civilization, perhaps again, without the specter of war driving the agenda-even as the Cold War darkened the new US horizon.These scientists knew they could do better.