The Gravity Bottle

The World as a Closed System

The Earth is a gravity bottle, from which man has only recently learned to escape. At the center of the bottle is the solid core of the Earth, the generator of by far the greatest portion of its gravitational field. Around the solid core with little exception is a liquid sheath and above that a blanket of atmosphere. In a roughshod way all the things in the gravity bottle are sorted with the heavier things toward the center (the Earth's iron core) and the lightest things at its periphery (the gases of the atmosphere). Except for meteoric debris and the escape of some light gases by diffusion and an occasional astronaut, the gravity bottle of the Earth is essentially a closed system with respect to matter. And man as matter is essentially trapped on its solid surface. It is bathed in enormous quantities of radiation and in turn it radiates energy to space. But it is a bottle that in the vast macrocosm of space is the microcosm of life we know.

The World in a Carboy

Picture a 5-gallon bottle, two-thirds filled with water, containing a supply of minerals in the form of soil at the bottom and with some oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere above the water as well as dissolved in the water. Since none of the contents of the bottle would have been sterilized it will contain fungi, bacteria, and microscopic animals and plants, notably the algae. Some higher green plants such as elodea or eel grass, together with some higher animals: goldfish and snails complete the picture. The bottle is tightly corked and sealed with wax. It is necessary only to provide a proper temperature and a source of light (sunlight or artificial) for the establishment of a self-regenerating biological system; a "world in a bottle," a microcosm."

The Primary Producers

The green plants are the primary producers, making foodstuffs through photosynthesis - enough for themselves as well as all other living things in the system. The fish are primary consumers, consuming the bulk of the excess food produced by the green plants, with the snails and the non-green microorganisms as the scavengers. The system regenerates because each organism contributes to the "turnover" of the carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients, making them available to each other by the in nate workings of their metabolism. If these conditions are maintained, the living organisms in the 5-gallon bottle will grow, reproduce them selves, die and be replaced by their progeny repeatedly. The relation ship is not tenuous or delicate and the system is capable of absorbing a great deal of shock. It is self-correcting.

Plain Chemistry and Physics

It maintains itself not by mysterious magic, but by the chemistry and physics of biological metabolism in self-regenerating systems. The system can do nothing else. When it reaches the stage where changes are not readily noticeable, and where the same character and quality of life seem to be always present, the system is in equilibrium. It is in the steady state, popularly called "the balance of nature." It is not static or unchanging, materials are constantly undergoing transformation, but the net result is the maintenance of the system. The steady state or equilibration is the chemical and physical partitioning, directed by metabolism, of the materials of the system into the various compartments of the system - the green plants being one compartment, the fish another, and so on. As long as conditions remain the same, the system relentlessly regenerates itself.

Process and Change

Conditions change. Metabolism, the unique chemistry of each of the living things in the "world in a bottle," is the obvious key to the system. All living organisms have a great many requirements in common, but they have obvious differences. It is the intermeshing of these differences, the utilization of the waste products of one as the primary nutrient of another, the production of carbohydrate by green plants and its transformation into all sorts of different things by the plants, animals and microorganisms, that make the system work. The life and death of each of the organisms provide the materials for the lives of others.

Changes do occur. Should the light be turned off, or reduced to a low intensity, the photosynthesis of the green plants will stop. Such a system is doomed because the supply of food in the form of carbohydrate, fat and protein that the plants produce will stop. So will the oxygen produced by the green plants. Should the temperature rise unreasonably in a lighted bottle, the plants and the microorganisms may survive, but not the fish and snails. If one nutrient were to become suddenly more abundant or in short supply, through chemical kinetics, a new partitioning of the substance would occur, which may cause a radical shift in the overall equilibrium; the fish may die, or the plants, then the fish.

Cycles

It is certain that as the situation changes and becomes unfavorable for one kind of cycling, other cycles will take over, usually more simple ones. The higher animals will perish first; the green plants are the only organisms capable of sustaining their own life indefinitely. As long as they persist, there will inevitably be some microorganisms living with them. If there were not, they would tie up all the nutrients themselves, for they are quite capable of utilizing some but not all of their own decay and waste products. With no microorganisms to decay the most refractory plant parts, all the available supply of certain substances would end up in these materials, and the system would terminate. Or elimination of any major segment (with the exception of the higher animals) results in a degeneration of the system, with its ultimate destruction. To sustain life in the gravity bottle of the Earth, all elements of the living self-regenerating system are necessary.

The green plants of the Earth form the great substrate that feeds and nourishes all other life on Earth. The green plants support the microorganisms, the animals, the fungi and man. The carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the great hydrological cycle, operate in the gravity bottle of Earth in a manner no different from the 5-gallon bottle, and while to understand the cycling is important (in fact, it is the key to the management of the Earth), the most important lesson is that, like the 5-gallon bottle, the gravity bottle of the Earth is finite. It is closed. They differ only in a scale size. The forests were not too vast ever to be cut. The atmosphere is not so vast that infinite dilution of waste gases can occur in it. The ocean is not so vast that its fish cannot be depleted nor that its waters cannot be fouled.

The World is Vast

The average man is less than six feet tall. For him the world is so vast it cannot be conceived of as anything but flat from his vantage point. (But even the ancient builders knew that for a building more than 600 feet long, the curvature of the Earth must be accounted for.) Even the mountains appear on flat plains, and from even airplanes the Earth looks flat. To consider an Earth that is really spheroidal but when viewed from almost any position looks flat is to evoke the notion of an Earth truly stupendous in size, so large, so vast that no human scale factor can conceive it except in abstract terms; and yet the forest was cut, in Eastern North America, in Mexico, in Europe, in China. The prairie sod was broken everywhere there was prairie sod to break.

More fish were caught off Grand Banks in 1840 with dories and hand lines than were caught in 1959 with factory ships. Whaling has shifted from Iceland in the Atlantic, to Hawaii in the Pacific, to Antarctica, because of the depletion of whale stocks, and the Blue Whale, the prize of them all, is on the verge of extinction.

There are Beer Cans Everywhere

The Indian Ocean was connected to the Atlantic Ocean through the Suez Canal, dug by hand. The Atlantic is soon to be joined to the pacific by a sea-level canal, dug, in one afternoon, by nuclear devices. There are beer cans everywhere. Cities, roads, highways and other man made features cover millions of square miles of the surface of the Earth.

The Earth is Warming

The accumulation of heat-absorbing debris on the Antarctic Ice Sheet is causing concern for fear of its melting, while others plan to drag it to the desert areas of the Earth for irrigation water. The animals brought to extinction by man are legion. Those currently doomed are considerable in number. Forested regions of the Earth, fully clothed with forest just a few short centuries ago, are denuded desert mountain slopes. Probably associated with the release of enormous quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, the overall temperature of the Earth is increasing.

Its Now Cheaper to Destroy

The cities of Europe were rebuilt in less than 20 years after - World War II. It took a little less time after World War I, but the damage was not as extensive, since the aircraft was in its infancy. For World War II and all previous wars, it cost more to destroy cities than to build them. For some cities in World War II, the cost to destroy them exceeded by several fold the cost to build them in the first place and to rebuild them afterward. With nuclear devices, cities can be destroyed much more cheaply than they can be built, and so many of them could probably be destroyed at the same time that it might become impossible for several hundred years to assemble enough capital equipment in one place even to make a decent start toward rebuilding them. The new and added feature with nuclear devices is that not only is the physical destruction of cities possible with mass killing of people, but it is now possible to poison large parts of the countryside with radioactive materials, some with quite long half lives. More than anything else, atmospheric testing of nuclear devices clearly demonstrated that the Earth is a gravitational bottle with virtually no leaks. All the radioactive debris is still with us - in the soil, in the water, in the bones of virtually every person on the globe. Man may or may not survive a nuclear war - but the biosphere has seen worse.

Nothing Deters Technological Man

Oil exploration on the North Slope of Alaska will open up one of the largest oil fields and petroleum operations in the history of the world. The North Slope is not too far away, the climate is not too rigorous, nor is the task too difficult for today's technology or men. Oil tanks breaking up at sea, the breaching of the Northwest Passage, the movement of large quantities of oil on the surface of the Earth from even the remotest parts of Alaska, will not deter technological man. (New transmission means - perhaps plastic pipe manufactured on shipboard or on the bottom of the sea and laid to specific depths of the sea - may ameliorate some of the problems.) The frozen Arctic is not too far away.

The C5A

The controversial C5A aircraft is the center of a fiscal storm involving Perhaps two billion dollars. The Defence Department curtailed the size of its order as a result of the furor, but the manufacturer has not given up plans to produce a commercial version of the giant aircraft. Among the least of its accomplishments will be its ability to carry 500 fully equipped troops or 900 people aloft and take them anyplace in the world. What is far more important is that it will herald an age when aircraft will surely compete with oceangoing vessels, river barges and railroads in the movement of "raw" materials over the face of the Earth.

The Rich Grasslands

The Llanos of Colombia is one of the richest grasslands in the world. In the bowl of mountain slopes at the headwaters of the Amazon, its climate is most favorable to grass and therefore could easily be converted to another of the world's much needed granaries and meat-producing areas (cattle). The produce of the Llanos must now go more than 2,000 miles down the Amazon to the sea (to begin its journey to a market) or must surmount 20,000 foot mountains to arrive at the Savannah of Bogota, its closest market, and one it could saturate with a tiny portion of its productivity. To the Pacific Coast or to any other place in South America from Bogota are routes as difficult and hazardous as getting to Bogota in the first place. A fleet of 747s could open up the Llanos, bulk move its agricultural produce to any market in the world, and bring back what its cities would require on the return trip. Once the aircraft is bought and paid for, it is only a matter of maintenance and fuel as to where it goes.

Air Supply

The Berlin airlift demonstrated beyond all doubt that a major city could be supplied completely by air. The 747 has made it economically feasible to do so. Orchids from Brazil, carnations from Colorado, radishes from California, computers from New York, wheat from Argentina, cattle from Colombia, furniture from Denmark, precision instruments from Japan, gold bullion from the Union of South Africa, chemicals from Switzerland, industrial machinery from Germany, all could be carried to markets anywhere in the world by the 747. And the 747 is just a prototype. In the way that the B-47 spawned the B-52 and the 707,727, the 747 will spawn a whole line of freighter aircraft, both smaller and bigger than the original. No ocean going vessel, no matter how large or inexpensive to operate, can seriously compete with the 747 when it's a matter of time, for the cargoes on the 747 travel at just under the speed of sound.

It will Never Leave the Earth

But the 747 will never leave the Earth. It will require huge runways, with huge industrial-type facilities to minister to it. It will require vast amounts of technical skill and equipment and will bring into being entirely new concepts in cargo handling and packaging. It will burn prodigious quantities of fuel, contributing enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and water to the atmosphere, in addition to the usual unburned kerosene and carbon particles. It will contribute to a "one world" economy and will tie people together in friendly enterprises by the only durable tie that binds - the money belt.

We Can Kill the Goldfish

We cannot obliterate life from the surface of the Earth; we cannot alter the fundamental life system of the Earth so radically that all life will perish. We can destroy ourselves. We can kill the goldfish in the "world in a bottle," but just as the goldfish cannot destroy the 5-gallon bottle, neither can we destroy the Earth. The irresistible chemical kinetics are here, and long before the forest trees or the prairie grasses or the weeds or the insects or the microorganisms are critically threatened, man will have become extinct. The Earth existed for about a billion years without animals, just plants, growing, dying and evolving. If it is to be the destiny of the Earth to be vaporized by an over-mature star evolving into a red giant, a good likelihood is that the last remnants of life on Earth will be plants. It is inconceivable that man could destroy life on Earth, without himself being the first victim, not even through over population. If he destroys himself first, the biosphere will chug on, merrily. It did for two billion years before he evolved. There is no reason to believe that potential lost.

The population problem will or can be solved in one generation. The human organism can be considered to be a compartment into which is flowing a whole host of organic and inorganic substances. As the population increases the demand for these substances increases, and no matter what man may do to increase the amount of materials needed to sustain the population, there is a limit to which the population can grow — and in all probability, it is a much smaller number than "standing room only." What happens if the growth of population is unchecked is irrelevant to the consequence. It is doubtful if it can be reduced by contraception, except in populations that have the desire to reduce their numbers. It will surely be reduced by the degradation of the environment. It will be more surely reduced when it is no longer economically feasible to have large families.

The population problem viewed only as one of increasing numbers in relation to a food supply has little chance for solution. As food becomes scarce, the body size will reduce, requiring less food to be maintained. If increasing agricultural technology keeps apace with technology in general and there is no reason to suppose it won't, food supplies will increase as the need for food will decrease. (If all the obese people in the United States went on a reasonable diet, the food price structure would collapse with a market glutted with commodities.

2 Billions in the USA Alone

An estimate made in 1950 placed at 2 billion the number of people that could be supported in the United States alone on a subsistence level. With a 5% increase in productivity due to technology per annum, that number could easily be 4 billion by 1969 technology and more later. The problem with population is not space but commodities, raw products, and their consumption. If all the people of the United States were residentially packed as are the four most densely packed city blocks of Harlem, the entire population of the United States could be housed in four of the five boroughs of New York.

Automobile Crowding

The crowding problem in our cities at the present time is not the crowding of people but the crowding of automobiles. It is our carapace's size and speed that have distorted man's habitation out of scale to man himself. This is in no way related to the population problem—it is a car parking problem. The real crunch will come, if it ever does, when the quality of life for man becomes so degraded that he cares little what happens to him; then population decimation can and will occur that will stop population growth and drastically reduce the numbers of living human beings. It will make little difference whether the ultimate limiting factor is food, or pestilence, or the resignation to death. In the space of one generation, most of the people alive on the face of the Earth could be dead, for any reason whatever.

Man = Passenger Pigeon

The Earth is a gravity bottle. It is a closed system. Man will either flourish as one of several compartments of biological organisms on the face of the Earth or he will perish. His particular path of demise makes no difference and need not even be speculated upon, except that it also may result in his extinction. The passenger pigeon may provide the model. The passenger pigeon flourished in great numbers, their multitudes darkening the sky as they flew overhead. Their slaughter was sport, for there was no thought that their numbers could ever be depleted. A pigeon shoot meant just that, and thousands of pigeons were killed in sporting events. Their numbers when they settled in trees could be so great that their weight could break the branches of the trees. At some point, that no one knew had been passed, the passenger pigeon was on the skids to oblivion. Its extinction was a foregone conclusion; its lease on life was foreclosed, probably because of its breeding habits. It was a highly social animal, and as the conjecture goes (there is obviously no-scientific data on extinction), the population diminished below some number where the birds could be induced (socially) to breed. And they just died off, the last one in the Cincinnati Zoo.

Man is a social animal, he does not require great numbers to be in his company to breed but he is dependent upon others for much of his wants, and, in fact, without the socialization of others, it is well agreed that the development of man is not possible. The "Lord of the Flies," "Swiss Family Robinson," "By the Waters of Babylon," etc., are fictional attempts to predict the consequences of the isolation of social groups. But in all cases, social principles are built intact into the groups. The consequence that cannot be predicted is what will be the response of man to the destruction, not of himself per se, but of his social system, or more properly, to his system of socialization. It is more than passingly conceivable that after a nuclear holocaust, or after mass death for any reason whatever, (the more people there are the more intensive the collapse will be), man will have passed the point of no return. Some may escape in true science fiction form, should overpopulation continue out of control. But for the vast majority of human beings now alive or yet to be born on the surface of the Earth, the Earth is a closed system from which there is no escape.

Nobody is in Pain

Nobody is in pain because of the population problem. The world's poor seem more numerous but they certainly can be thought of in terms quite comfortable to us: "lack of initiative," "the poor are always with us," "if the poor had ambition they could improve their lot." This is all irrelevant, because it is not only the poor but everybody that contributes to the population problem, and after all, there is money to be made out of it - more shoes, houses, consumer goods, etc., etc. In the short run the problem is not visible. It springs from the best traditions of family and home and is associated with the concepts of humanity that we hold dearest to us. Respect for parents, love of life, sanctity of the family. Our failure to understand the relationships between the gross increase, in the protoplasm of man and the materials cycling between him and the other compartments of the biological system of the Earth, will make no difference in the inexorableness with which the changes occur that make the support of man increasingly difficult. When the breaking point is reached, if it ever is, it is likely to be, from man's viewpoint, with the obvious release of the materials of the now defunct protoplasm of man for other uses in the biosphere. The system is irresistibly self-regulating—precisely what any biological system is, regardless of its scale size. The foregoing is not a description of the apocalypse; it is the simple minded observation of any biological system. There is no mystery about it.

Finding the Steady State

The living system is dynamic, it is changing, it moves irresistibly to it's most stable configurations. Chemistry, physics and thermodynamics dictate that it do just that. The equilibrium position may be a mature deciduous forest or a tropical rain forest. The most stable position may be a savanna, or a spartina marsh, or the kelp stands of the Sargasso Sea. It may be the boreal forest with moose and elk, or the prairie with pronghorn and bighorn sheep, and bison, or it may be a city with man, or a cornfield, or a river. Discovering what the steady state biological condition for any given place on the Earth is and adapting human activities to that end is obviously the most simple-minded direct way to utilize to its fullest advantage the tremendous energy of the equilibrating biological system.

How Many BTUs to Mow the Lawn?

Or we can disequilibrate, at some great cost and energy; we can keep the biological system in its most unbalanced form, evoking its greatest energy responses for change. What does it take in calories or BTU's to keep a yard in lawn? It's pretty, that's for sure. That's why so many people do it. But what is the cost compared, say, to a wild flower and shrub undergrowth, especially under the big yard trees of suburbia? A well equilibrated shrub and herb layer under some mature trees would cost nothing to maintain, not a dime.

The Sun has been Shining for 5 Billion Years

Biological change is irresistible and it has time on its side. The biological system of the Earth has been evolving for some two billion years. Animals and plants have come and gone. The weather has changed. Mountains have washed into the sea and others have risen from the deep. The sun has been shining for perhaps five billion years and may have another 10 billion to go. No doubt man can claim to be the great mover and shaker, the most powerful, the most cunning, the most intelligent creature in the history of the Earth, if not the universe. The claim is irrelevant. Man is part, only part, of the biological system of the Earth. He cannot act for or substitute for the whole. He cannot in any manner of conception become the whole living system of the Earth. As part of the biological system of the Earth, he occupies a compartment, a niche.

250 Feet of Water in Manhattan?

Man can and does influence the biological system in which he is, just as every other living organism influences the living system. (Consider for a moment the Asian flu virus at the present, and the plagues and epidemics of history in the longer perspective.) There is reason to believe the Trade Winds Deserts formed as a result of climatic changes in the last 10 to 20 thousand years. The continental ice sheets are known to have receded from North America only in the last eight to 10 thousand years. The melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, if it occurred, would raise sea level 300 feet. The tall spires of lower Manhattan would be isolated towers in 250 feet of water that stretched away from them hundreds of miles across New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

There is reason to think we are living in an inter-glacial period, and perhaps in ten thousand or one hundred thousand years, the ice sheets will again advance over North America, covering Canada and Northern United States with ice five to 50 miles thick.

Man May Perish by His Own Hand

It is not unreasonable to suppose the biological system of the Earth will survive man's onslaughts. Man himself may perish by his own hand or for inscrutable reasons, but it seems entirely unreasonable to consider that man is capable of sterilizing the Earth. A few very prominent solar flares might do it, but it is more reasonable to consider that man himself will perish long before he could accomplish the job. The problem facing mankind is several orders of magnitude less limited and less gigantic than that of destroying life on Earth.

Man's Problem is Learning

Man's problem is learning to understand the powerful forces in the biological system of which he has only recently become aware, and in the best research and developmental fashion, develop the technology to take advantage of the tremendous flow of energy that courses through the biological system, tending the system toward biological (thermodynamical) steady state. Mediating this energy flow, whether it is reckoned in ATP's, kilo-calories, or dollars, is the basis for man exerting his dominion over the world - probably with more simple mindedness than ingenuity, this energy can be harnessed, not to drive the machines of industry and communication directly (although it could), but to provide an environment where man can maintain his compartment, his niche, with the least cost to himself, taking the maximum advantage of the tremendous energy inherent in the system itself.

The North American Indians, perhaps more than any other people on the face of the Earth, learned to do just that - they learned to tap the enormous energy resources of the biological system and to use it without destroying the integrity of the biological system they were utilizing. The white settlers coming to the North American continent found a wilderness only in the sense that it did not look "developed" like their homelands in Europe. It was no wilderness but the most highly developed system of biological husbandry on the face of the Earth, past or present.

To the white man, the North American continent looked pristine, original, virgin, in spite of its having supported a population numbering in the tens of millions for ten thousand years or more.

One need not look to the country today after 300 years to see the changes introduced by Western technology. The changes were apparent and could have been foretold from the basic attitude of the settlers, who considered the wilderness something to be "conquered." Reexamination of the Europe from whence the settlers came would be comparison enough. Samoset spoke English to the Pilgrims when they landed at Plymouth Rock. The aborigines of the continent received the settlers as equals and were quite willing to share the land and its resources.

The Ultimate Disagreement

The ultimate disagreement that estranged white man and Indian and resulted in the pattern of development with its resultant genocide was how the land was to be used, particularly how it was to be occupied. The North American Indian and the resulting influx of white settlers were probably the largest population of the world to feed themselves from an essentially wild food economy.

We are not at the Brink

The destruction of the forests, the pollution of the rivers, the erosion of the soil, is past history. But we should understand that the reason we are not at the brink of doom is that we came into the possession of a country that was in remarkably good condition when we go it. In regard to our resources we are still the richest nation on Earth, even after 300 years of exploitation, including a couple of insane World wars.

We have not had the time to bring it to the state of deterioration that is prevalent in much of Europe and Asia.

Its not too Late

We are far from late in starting now to get our house in order. It was necessary that the citizens as a whole acquire an understandable scale size of the problem of the deterioration of the environment before anything resembling a problem can be described, let alone solved. We are certainly past the point of problem recognition, but we are only now beginning to advance to the stage of groping for solutions. The clock will not be turned back. We will not become a hunting culture. As much as one can admire the remarkable stewardship by the American Indian of the North American continent, we will never abandon our cities with the cultural accouterments we have accumulated to return primitively "to nature."

We have the management skills to proliferate a worldwide communications system. The world community is becoming a single community; we are overwhelmed with information almost coincidental with the events that evoke it. We are coming to recognize that the socialization of humans through education and through wholesome community experiences is intimately related to environmental consequences. We see future technology abolishing (or nearly so) the labor of man. A material abundance is waiting to be shared and enjoyed by the entire human community if and when ways can be devised for sharing it. With all this movement toward the understanding of the basis for survival of man as a social animal, learning to curb his own suicidal impulses (the SALT), there is no reason to believe that man cannot solve the problems of the environment.

The Earth is Finite

Man must start with the full realization that the Earth is not infinite, the atmosphere is not infinite, the oceans are not infinite. There is a finite supply of water; there is a finite supply of air, pure or foul. The forests are not limitless, the minerals of the seas, no matter how large the number used to describe their abundance (billions of tons or trillions of tons), are limited. The pollution from New York does not merely blow to sea, but adds permanent increments to the total pollution of the atmosphere and the oceans. There is an infinite supply of timber, or cotton, or beef, only in the sense that they are a part of the self-regenerating renewable resource of the Earth; an integral part of the biological system of the Earth. The quantity available at any one time is finite, the quantity available through time is dependent upon the care exercised to maintain the system. All the atmosphere can be polluted-- but it is not necessary; all the oceans can be polluted — but that isn't necessary either. The topsoil from the forest areas and over-grazed and overused crop areas can be lost as well, at rates as high or higher than they are currently being lost. But it isn't necessary.

We Can't Fight Time

We can continue to fight the inexorable forces of biological equilibration by maintaining much of the living system of the Earth in a disturbed condition needlessly. We can disequilibrate biological populations and have them permanently destroyed (the salmon fishery on the northeast coast of North America), or we can learn to do some simple things, like finding out how biological change tends in different places. We can discover which changes occur slowly and which occur quickly. We can begin to assess in terms of time what some things will cost us. (A full-grown elm tree may cost 100 years, one-half inch of lichen 75 years, a mature human community, 100 years.) We can begin to look around us and see not how to make money on a hit-and-run basis, but how to take advantage of the vaster wealth of the self-renewing resources. We can find ways to make money by stopping pollution and start harvesting the real benefit--healthy human minds, the be all and end all of our economic and social system.

A Rich Heritage

The American Indians left us a handsome treasure. Can we utilize it to carry the development of the nation to greater heights by maintaining our high culture, our cities and our industry, but in a healthy world where the irresistible biological forces are utilized to support the society of man on Earth?

We could do well to start by considering the Earth a gravity bottle that has trapped us here in space, together with a finite amount of the substance of the universe, a biological microcosm in the microcosm of space. Just like the 5 gallon bottle sitting in the sunlight with some seaweeds, some algae and fungi and bacteria, a fish or two and a couple of snails. The bottle is stoppered and sealed with wax. Gravity like that wax seal seals our fate here at this time, in our bottle called Earth.

. . . Ted Sudia . . .
January 6, 1970

© Copyright 1989
Institute for domestic Tranquility