"...world state, orderly, scientific, and secured..."
-HG Wells, The War In The Air (Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex), Chapter 11, p. 228.
The World State is built in Well's The Shape Of Things To Come.
Robert Heinlein's Future History Time Chart ends with:
"...the end of human adolescence, and beginning of first mature culture."
-Robert Heinlein, The Man Who Sold The Moon (London, 1963), p. 7.
A U.N. world government is established in 1965 in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History Chronology of the Future but does not last.
However, Sandra Miesel's Foreword to the Psychotechnic History, Volume I, is written:
"From the standpoint of our mature integrated culture..."
"From the standpoint of our mature integrated culture..."
-The Psychotechnic League (New York, 1981), p. 10.
In these futures, mankind is going somewhere.
1 comment:
Technological progress is profoundly disruptive; it upsets social balances and disrupts the distribution of power.
In Europe, that was a notable difference between England (later Britain) and the Continental states; in England property-owners -as such- (not the same thing as the nobility) were firmly in the saddle and they didn't allow caution to get in the way of profit.
But because Europe was divided into quarreling separate states, no state could allow its rivals to get ahead in technology -- you'd be eaten alive if you did.
So countries, despite misgivings, had to follow Britain's innovations because falling too far behind would be a disaster.
China didn't have that incentive to change. Eg., the central government could suppress overseas voyaging -- in Europe, that would have been impossible.
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