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  Looking Forward

  KENNETH S. KEYES, JR.

  and

  JACQUE FRESCO

  Designs and Illustrations by Jacque Fresco

  Dedicated to the youth of the world who must meet the challenge of the twenty-first century.

  About the Authors

  Kenneth S. Keyes, Jr., is a multi-faceted man. He attended Duke University and obtained a BA from the University of Miami, majoring in psychology and minoring in music. His interests include art, symphonic music, yachting—he lives aboard a 71-foot yacht named Caprice—and writing—he is the author of How to Develop Your Thinking Ability and How to Live Longer-Stronger-Slimmer. He has taught in the Evening Division of the University of Miami.

  Jacque Fresco worked as an industrial designer for thirty years, designing all types of equipment from prefabricated houses to automobiles, electronic and medical equipment, human factors systems, and hundreds of commercial products and inventions. He has designed and patented such varying items as a radical aircraft wing structure patented by the USAAF and three-dimensional motion pictures not requiring the use of viewers. Numerous articles and photographs have been published about his work in many magazines and newspapers. He has served as technical advisor in a number of motion pictures, including one of the first on space stations and a journey to the moon called Project Moon Base. He lives in Miami.

  Annotation

  Looking Forward is an imaginative and fascinating book in which the authors take you on a journey into the culture and technology of the twenty-first century. After an introductory section that discusses the Things that Shape Your Future, you will explore the whys and wherefores of the unfamiliar, alarming, but exciting world of a hundred years from now.

  You will see this society through the eyes of Scott and Hella, a couple of the next century. Their living quarters are equipped with a cybernator, a seemingly magical computer device, but one that is based on scientific principles now known. It regulates sleeping hours, communications throughout the world, an incredible underwater living complex, and even the daily caloric intake of the “young” couple. (They are in their forties but can expect to live 200 years.)

  The world that Scott and Hella live in is a world that has achieved full weather control, has developed a finger-sized computer that is implanted in the brain of every baby at birth (and the babies are scientifically incubated—the women of the twenty-first century need not go through the pains of childbirth), and that has perfected genetic manipulation that allows the human race to be improved by means of science.

  Economically, the world is Utopian by our standards. Jobs, wages, and money have long since been phased out. Nothing has a price tag, and personal possessions are not needed. Nationalism has been surpassed, and total disarmament has been achieved; educational technology has made schools and teachers obsolete. The children learn by doing, and are independent in this friendly world by the time they are five.

  The chief source of this greater society is the Correlation Center, “Corcen,” a gigantic complex of computers that serves but never enslaves mankind. Corcen regulates production, communication, transportation and all other burdensome and monotonous tasks of the past. This frees men and women to achieve creative challenging experiences rather than empty lives of meaningless leisure.

  Obviously this book is speculative, but it is soundly based upon scientific developments that are now known. And as the authors state:

  “You will understand this book best if you are one who sees today only as a stepping stone between yesterday and tomorrow. You will need a sensitivity to the injustices, lost opportunities for happiness, and searing conflicts that characterize our twentieth-century civilization. If your mind can weigh new ideas and evaluate them with insight, this book is for you.

  “We have no crystal ball. ... We want you to feed our ideas into your own computer, so that you can find even better ideas that may play a part in molding the future of our civilization.”

  Designs and Illustrations by Jacque Fresco

  South Brunswick and New York: A. S. Barnes and Company

  London: Thomas Yoseloff Ltd

  © 1969 by Kenneth S. Keyes, Jr. and Jacque Fresco

  Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 68-27189

  A. S. Barnes and Co., Inc.

  Cranbury, New Jersey 08512

  Thomas Yoseloff Ltd

  108 New Bond Street

  London W1Y OQX, England

  SBN 498 06752 1

  L.C. 68-27189

  Printed in U.S.A.

  Other Books by

  Kenneth S. Keyes, Jr.

  Member of the Authors League of America

  How to Develop Your Thinking Ability

  How to Live Longer—Stronger—Slimmer

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Part I. THINGS THAT SHAPE OUR FUTURE

  1. The Leap from the Jungle

  2. The Confusion of Our Times

  3. Predicting the Future

  4. Our Values Chart Our Course

  5. The Scientific Method

  6. Cybernated Technology

  7. Away We Go!

  Part II. A PROJECTION OF OUR FUTURE

  8. At Home in the Twenty-first Century

  9. A Multi-Dimensional Life

  10. Designing the New Generation

  11. A Visit to Corcen

  12. The Cultural Center

  13. The Cybernated Industrial Complex

  14. The Limitless Frontiers of Space

  15. The New Personality

  Part III. LOOKING FORWARD

  16. Education for Change

  Acknowledgments

  The authors are indebted to countless people for the ideas and encouragement that have made this book possible. Most of those who reviewed the manuscript felt that these enormous changes in man and his environment might happen in 1,000 years but not in the next century as we suggest. The authors, however, have wondered whether the future society they describe may be partially in existence by the time the book is published. We see so many of our predictions of things to come being discussed, developed and tried that we suspect we have been too conservative in estimating the time.

  The following kind friends have read the manuscript and offered excellent suggestions—some of which were used: Anne Ammirati, John Bethea, Louise Boches, Janice Burr, Charles Kimball, Shirley Lewis, William A. McCall, Gretchen McCall, Graham Miller, Joe Prospero, Charles Ray, Christie Ray, Arden Richards, Velma Richards, Marjofie Sherrill, and Anitra Thorhaug. We are indebted to Herbert Wallach, Jr., for suggesting our title—Looking Forward. Bonita Bennett listened to these “far-out” ideas, typed them studiously, and still had the stamina to assist greatly in editing and revising. Shirley Rosichan offered many excellent editorial suggestions. Others who helped with various phases of the work were Marty Costello, Karen Brandt, and Stephanie Brovold. Frank Seldon and Carl Green tirelessly assisted in reproducing copies of the manuscript. Also thanks to Ivan García who helped digitalizing the paperbook trough OCR and Igor Mukhin who made this e-book. Our thanks are also due to the authors and publishers who have kindly given permission to quote from their works.

  Kenneth S. Keyes, Jr.

  Jacque Fresco

  Miami, Florida

  PART I. THINGS THAT SHAPE OUR FUTURE

  1. The Leap from the Jungle

  The lives of most men and women are blighted by problems they cannot solve. And people usually blame themselves, or they blame “fate”—whatever that is. However, when two cars collide at an intersection, should we, as students of society, concentrate our attention on the individual blame of the drivers, on “fate” or on the way transportation is engineered so that it per
mits collisions?

  If you believe that cars and roads should be designed so that it is almost impossible for people to lose their lives through collisions, this book is for you. If you believe that the mind is capable of gradually applying the method of patient, scientific investigation to find out how to rearrange the structure of our society to give each individual a greater opportunity for self-realization and happiness while he is on earth, we welcome and need your help. If you believe it’s about time for the human race to stop spinning its wheels, then let’s get going!

  But this book on the future of our civilization is not for everyone. Few will be able to read it without forming an opinion before they see the picture as a whole. To enjoy this book you will have to blend open-mindedness with critical skepticism. It is hard enough to face the problems of our own time. And it is many times more difficult to understand a projection of fantastic and shocking changes that may occur over the next hundred years!

  Suppose an intelligent man in New York City around 1860 had sat down one evening with a book predicting life a century later. He would have refused to believe that almost everyone in 1960 would be able to own a horseless carriage that could whisk about at 60 or more miles per hour. With his Victorian attitudes he would have been deeply shocked by the brief bikinis. In 1860, not even a “woman of ill repute” would have appeared so undressed in public. He would have smiled smugly at the ridiculous prediction that man-made flying machines would travel faster than the speed of sound. The thought of sending pictures and sounds through miles of air would have seemed impossible to a sensible person in 1860. It would have been incredible to him that the art of war would progress to the point where one small bomb would destroy a city. Our Victorian would have been alarmed that a part of his wages could be withheld to provide for retirement. At this point, let us leave this gentleman of the last century muttering to himself about loss of freedom and the world’s moving too fast.

  Are we more flexible—more farsighted—today? We will need to become experts at changing our minds. The differences between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will probably be small when compared with the accelerating pace of the next century.

  You will understand this book best if you see today as only a stepping stone between yesterday and tomorrow. You will need a sensitivity to the injustices, lost opportunities for happiness, and searing conflicts that characterize our twentieth-century civilization. If your mind can weigh new ideas and evaluate them with insight, this book is for you.

  We have no crystal ball that gives an accurate picture of the twenty-first century. We want you to feed our ideas into your own computer. Perhaps you may find even better ideas that may play a part in molding the future of our civilization. In the next six chapters we’ll explore the “why” and “wherefore” of the unfamiliar, alarming, unbelievable, wonderful, and exciting picture we will paint of the twenty-first century. Then we’ll join Scott and Hella, who live in the next century. We’ll experience with them the new dimensions of life in the changed world of the future.

  The Long Journey

  To understand the probable courses of man’s future development, let’s spend a few minutes looking into his past. The world came into existence around four and one-half billion years ago, and all sorts of weird fishes and monstrous dinosaurs got into the act before we did. Millions of years ago our ancestors were little apelike fellows that spent most of their time in trees. Then some of these little beasts began to do things that were to make a lot of difference to you and me. They quit jumping from branch to branch like the squirrels and, instead, began swinging from limb to limb somewhat like the man on the flying trapeze. This led to some important changes from head to toe. The arms, which previously moved in a restricted arc, developed free rotation. This makes it possible for a baseball pitcher to whirl his arms around and zing one over home plate. The intestinal organs, which had been slung from the backbone, as in a dog, were now supported by the pelvis, which became somewhat bowl-shaped. The front feet didn’t have to support the weight of the body anymore, and they developed into a bunch of skyhooks that we call fingers. Since animals that misjudged distances when swinging from branch to branch left fewer offspring, we are blessed today with excellent stereoscopic vision and neuro-muscular coordination. We owe a large part of what we are today to our swinging primate ancestors.

  Man has made three big steps away from his animal cousins. The first cultural jump occurred when he began to use fire, tools, and language. Although men of our own species, Homo sapiens, have been here about 50,000 years, radioactive carbon datings show that our ancestors were using tools and fire as much as 600,000 years ago.

  The beginnings of language probably occurred several hundred thousand years ago. This was a tremendous leap forward. The development of language may have played a part in helping us be as intelligent as we are today. Suppose someone had yelled, “Watch out for the tiger in the tree behind you!” The more intelligent ones would have got the message fast. They probably charmed the greater number of females that evening and, thus, left more offspring.

  The second big cultural jump taken by our ancestors occurred about 7,500 years ago. This was the discovery of how to raise food. The development of agriculture and animal-raising made it possible for us to live in crowded nests known as cities. When man had to gather his food in the form of fleeing animals and random plants, it took a lot of land to support a small group. For example, there were probably not over 100,000 people on the entire continent of Europe before they learned to raise food. A good year might have increased the birth rate. But they would soon have been killed off by famine and disease if there were even one rough year when the game and plants were less available.

  When man began to raise food, he could stay in one place instead of roaming all over the countryside. Socially and technologically, lots of things began to happen for the first time. He began to accumulate bric-a-brac. The wheel was developed. He learned how to heat metals to make them soft so that they could be poured or beaten into useful shapes. He developed the plow for working the land and the loom for weaving cloth. Social patterns that were needed in city life were developed. He amplified political structures and created armies equipped with death-dealing instruments. Within a thousand years after our ancestors acquired the know-how for raising food, the cultural patterns of city life, politics, business, and technology were invented. Since then they have continued with very little change until recently.

  Many anthropologists consider the city as our most fundamental social invention. The first cities evolved in southwestern Asia, and the pattern of the city was well worked out in Mesopotamia by 4,500 to 4,000 B.C. Cities did not appear in China until around 2,000 B.C. Europe had to wait until the Greeks put together a few cities around 900 to 800 B.C. The city did not appear in Scandinavia until after 1,000 A.D.

  Writing developed almost simultaneously, about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley. The Chinese invented their cumbersome symbols 2,000 years later. When a man’s thoughts were written, they could speak out after his death. The human race began to accumulate information that permitted the building of a modern civilization with a complex value system.

  Whereas learning was previously a monopoly of a privileged class, the development of the alphabet eventually made it possible for everyone to acquire an education. All alphabets now in use seem to stem from a single point of origin in the Sinai Peninsula where the Egyptians were busy mining. Most of the time the Egyptians used criminals and prisoners of war for this type of work. Occasionally, some wandering Semites who needed food came to work for them. Since they were pretty smart fellows, the sheiks of the Semites were appointed foremen of the mines. As part of their job they drew up reports on how much metal was mined and how much money was earned by the various men. From the complicated Egyptian system of writing, these foremen abstracted the simple symbols representing single sounds in the Egyptian system. We are indebted to them for giving us the f
irst alphabet.

  We were doing business as usual by at least 3,000 B.C. Standard weights and measures were in use in Sumeria. Barley was one of the earliest mediums of exchange. A measure for barley was available for public use in the market place. If a farmer had felt he was being gypped, he could have walked over and measured it out. By 3,000 B.C. convenient metal coins began to be used in place of the more awkward sacks of barley, and a shortage of money became a continual problem for the government. The Code of Hammurabi set the value ratio of barley and metal. This code provided serious penalties for anyone caught cheating. To make sure this money system would work, a merchant could have been put to death if he had refused to accept either barley or coins in payment for his merchandise.

  There are cuneiform records of loans with interest that ran as high as 300 per cent when an individual could not offer security. Even the lowest rate was 25 per cent per year. The Sumerians worked out business methods such as stock companies and corporations. Many tablets recording their business deals and their private correspondence have survived. One tablet dated before 2000 B.C. describes the complaint of an old man about the degeneracy of the younger generation. Another tablet is from a boy at school telling his parents about the “lousy food.”

  The late Ralph Linton, a noted American anthropologist, wrote:

  Many of the economic and social patterns which still operate in modern Western society can be traced to this region. It has been said that if George Washington had been transported back to the court of Hammurabi of Babylon, about 2067–2025 B.C., he would have felt vastly more at home there than he would in the modern capital city which bears his name. Apart from language difficulties, he would have encountered very few things in Hammurabi’s empire which were not familiar and understandable, while in Washington he would have been baffled and confused by the tremendous technological changes ... and the fumbling efforts which our society is making to bring the other aspects of its culture into adjustment with these.