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What we need is some sort of federal, world government, and the only problem is how we manage to do that.
Well, there are two ways in which this can be done:
The carrot and the stick.
And now you'll notice, this is not something new that you've never heard of before.
This is well known.
Now the stick is the fear of danger, the fear of destruction.
And it works, it works fine, for 40 years now.
For 40 years we've been engaged in a Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union,
Which sometimes it lightens up and sometimes grows more severe.
I don't think, as I look back in History, that there has ever been a period of 40 consecutive years
In which two nations have yelled at each other without going to war in that interval of time.
At least once, sometimes twice. They haven't.
Not only have we not gone to war with the Soviet Union, we haven't even broken off relations.
In other words, we not only don't dare fight, we don't even dare stop talking.
This is a good thing, but why is it so?
The answer is, really, there's nothing else they can do.
There's no way in which we can really fight a war with the Soviet Union.
It doesn't matter whether we hit them, or they hit us, or we hit each other.
Whatever we do is going to destroy the Earth.
Obviously, the nations are going to cooperate,
and as a matter of fact they are doing it in more ways then they are willing to admit.
We cooperate on the weather, for instance.
We let each other have information needed for the weather.
We let each other have information that we learn in space.
And we cooperate in Antarctica. We cooperate in the high seas.
We cooperate in many respects that we don't talk about.
There's a lot of it being done, and more all the time.
So that the stick is driving us to cooperation.
But I always say: “Why try the stick alone? Why not the carrot as well?”.
In the United States' history we had both the stick and the carrot.
After the end of the Revolutionary War,
we had something we called the United States of America, but it wasn't.
Each state was virtually independent.
There was a congress, but it had no powers.
It couldn't even tax.
It could only get the voluntary contributions from the individual states who were always in arrears.
Does that remind you of anything right now called the United Nations?
Well, that's what the Articles of Confederation Congress was.
It was a small version of the United Nations. And it was powerless.
And the states were in constant trouble.
And because they were afraid of the consequences of disunion,
afraid we'd just be picked up by various European powers and go to war with each other,
they set up the Constitution by which the various states gave up some of their sovereign powers
and embodied them in a Federal government. And then voluntarily voted for that federal government
and formed a true United States of America.
So that was the stick, the stick- the fear of disunion.
But where was the carrot?
The carrot came after the Civil War.
Now, the Civil War was a perfect case, that we've seen a million times in human history,
of a settlement, which doesn't settle.
The Union beat the Confederacy, but the Confederacy put up one hell of a fight
that it had no cause to be ashamed and, in fact, it felt that it had lost only narrowly.
And on top of that the Union was vengeful, and we treated the Confederacy after its defeat
as though it were an occupied foreign power.
And the South wasn't likely to forget that.
So you'd expect that the South would always remember the Confederacy, not as it does with the kind of sentimental attachment,
but powerfully, and would rebel every once in a while,
whenever it seemed that the occasion was right for it,
and would be forever indulging in terrorism.
Like the Basques in Spain.
When will the Basques be an independent power?
Like the fighting between the two sides in Northern Ireland.
Like the fighting between the Shiites and everybody else in Lebanon.
There'd be constant, constant terrorism from the United Confederacy Brothers or something.
And there isn't. There isn't. There was a healing somehow and we became one nation again.
And that was the workings of the carrot.
Because immediately after the Civil War came the period of the opening of the West.
The development of the West. Where the nation went west, founded new states.
And anyone, from any state, could go to any part of the west.
So that when a new state was developed, it consisted of people from all parts of the Union.
The United States found its unity in a gigantic project that included all the states
and that made the differences between the states look small by comparison.
It wasn't done, I think, out of intelligent purposes.
It just happened. We were lucky we had the carrot.
We need a carrot now.
We need some other project so huge that it can only be done by all the nations of the world
acting together to the best of their ability.
We need a project so all encompassing that we can manage to have all the various nations work at it,
and be glad to have it.
Something that would create something that all the nations could benefit from.
And, to me, the only candidate for it is the effort at space exploration.
If we can establish space stations.
If we can establish mining stations on the moon.
If we can build power stations in space.
If we can use energy directly from the sun converted into microwaves beaming down to the Earth,
we would finally have energy free of geography.
We wouldn't have coal, that existed in some nations and not in others.
Oil, in which some nations were rich and others were poor.
We wouldn't have forever to have the manufacturers exploit the agriculturalists
or the raw material owners exploit those who need it, and so on.
We would have something out in space that all contributed to and that reached all equally.
Space would be equally reachable by all parts of the Earth.
The energy that came down would go as easily to one part of the Earth as to another.
Furthermore, if we did have power stations in space,
they would require, I'm sure, constant maintenance, constant attendance.
Very difficult labors to keep them going.
We would probably have to have large settlements in space.
Any disturbance on Earth, anything that would keep the earth from concentrating on space
would endanger the energy supply for the entire earth.
In other words, it would be immediately and obviously apparent to everyone on earth
that it would pay them to maintain a stable world order
because only so could their energy supply be maintained, undisturbed.
We would have the carrot there.
A huge project that would please us all, that would lift us out of our narrow, parochial concerns,
that would give us something we couldn't have otherwise.
A kind of prosperity and peace that we've never known before.
And in going out we can forget those little devisive effects that have made us suffer so long.
I am not any more idealistic than anyone else.
I don't go around saying that human beings are going to love each other
so much that they're going to set up Utopia.
No. What I say is that if human beings have any sanity,
enough sanity to fear the consequences of notdoing it
and enough sanity to hope for the consequences of doing it, they will do it.
But I can't guarantee that the human species will be sane.
And if they are not, then we will probably destroy ourselves.
We will certainly destroy civilization, we may destroy ourselves as a species.
And who is going to fight that? Who is going to lead in the direction?
Well, I hope lots of people.
But I'm sure that among them, among them will be the Humanists.
Because by their very name, they celebrate humanity.
They want humanity to survive.
And they recognize that if they do survive it will be by its own efforts.
Never can we sit back and wait for miracles to save us.
Miracles don't happen.
Sweat happens.
Efforts happens.
Thought happens.
And it's up to us to help.
Have all that happen.
Thank you very much.
Transcribed by Jessica Bittar(jessicabittar).
Synchronized by Filipe Calvario(123Calvario)