THE SPACESHIP EARTH

One of the interesting things to me about our spaceship is that it is a mechanical vehicle, just as is an automatic. If you own an automobile, you realize that you must put oil and gas into it, and you must put water in the radiator and take care of the car. You begin to develop quite a little thermodynamics sense. You know that you are either going to have to keep the machine in a good order or it's going to be in trouble and fail to function. We have not been seeing our spaceship earth as an integrally-designed machine which,to be persistently successful, must be comprehended and serviced in total.
Quite clearly, all living beings are utterly helpless at the moment of birth. The human child stays helpless longer than the young of any other species. Apparently, it is part of the "invention" man that he is meant to be utterly helpless through certain anthropological phases and that, when he begins to be able to get on a little better, he is meant to discover some of the physical principles inherent in the universe as well as the many resources around him which will further multiply his knowledge.
To comprehend this total scheme, we note that long ago, a man went through the woods, as you may have done, and I certainly have, trying to find the shortest way through the woods in a given direction. He found trees fallen across his path. He climbed over those criss-crossed trees and suddenly found himself poised on a tree that was slowly teetering. It happened to be lying across another great tree, and the other end of the tree on which he found himself teetering lay under a third great fallen tree. As he teetered, he saw the third tree third tree lifting. It seemed impossible to him. He went over and tried using his own muscles to lift that great tree. He couldn't budge it. Then he climbed back atop the first smaller tree,purposely teetering it, and sure enough it again elevated the larger tree. I'm certain that the first man who found such a tree thought that it was a magic tree, and may have dragged it home and erected it as man's first totem. It was probably a long time before he learned that any stout tree would do, and thus extracted the concept of leverage out of all his earlier accidental discoveries. Only as he learned to generalize fundamental principles of the physical universe did man learn to use his intellect effectively. By virtue of the leverage principles in gears, pulleys, transistors, and so forth, it is literally possible to do more with less in a multitude of physio-chemical ways.

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