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istime, andI¢
‘* we need some measure of progress; you could
say that we can |» .t take an arbitrary unit of man's feeling of well-
being, of gross national product, or anything you want to take. There
certainly has been a general increase, with it's ups and downs, which |
has perhaps been an exponential increase.
FREMONT-SMITH: A general increase in something.
EISENBUD: Something, whether you measure population, gross
national product, well-being or ieisure time in technically advanced
countries, those countries that are going to be involved in the logue.
DUNHAM:
Directly.
FREMONT-SMITH:
EISENBUD:
Something ta going up.
Then something happens.
What we have been
.
talking about now is "pro," We start the logue with an all-out nuclear
.
war which suddenly throws the society back, and I would certainly
think that one of the things we would want to debate, when we get to
this point, is how far it is going to decline. Is it going to retreat
to where we were in 1400 or just to 1800, or will it go back 10,000
years?
This is an important question of a social nature.
Equally important is the epilogue. Inthe epilogue the society
continues to retrogress because the recovery mechanism fails to
operate. There is a period of leveling off followed by the recovery
of progress. We are interested in the rate of decline and the rate
of recovery, and we can speculate on what happens aa the epilogue
continues through history.
We will bear in mind that it ie thia dive and the rate of recovery
that are perhaps the subjects of most speculation and, I think, probably the aspects of the whole story about which we can do the least
at this moment, in contrast with the prologue, where perhaps there
are some things that we can do because we are all participating in
- one way or another in the efforts to forestall the “logue, " to put it
off to infinity. If we push it off to infinity, it doesn't happen.
ATTITUDES TOWARD NUCLEAR WARFARE AND DEFENSE
EISENBUD:
There's been a good deal written on this subject, and
some of you—notably Bob Ayres—hav- written extensively on the
'
.
-