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closer to what might be called ZPPG, that is, Zero Population and Produc- tivity Growth, than anyone could have conceived ten or twenty years ago, It is a fundamental principle of futurology that all projections are wrong, including mine, and certain events, of course, could postpone the coming of the spaceship earth and could lead to a longer period of productivity growth, though not per- haps of population growth, I have been able to think of only three changes, all of whicb seem to have rather low probability, that could drastically change the picture, These are artificial life, as a result of the developments of molecular biology; artificial intelligence, as a result of (he development of computers--or even a breakthrough on the under- standing of natural intelligence and human learning; and the gravity shield (a subslance or process tbat would block the force of gravity), which would drastically change the whole power picture, None of these, however, seems at all probable in the next 50 or 100 years, with the possible exception of the first. THE IMAGE of the future outlined here is bound to have a profound effect on the evaluation function of all kinds of decision makers. an effect that will increase as we move further into the future, It implies a high value on modesty rather than grandeur. There is no room for "great societies" in the spaceship. It implies conservation ism to the point of conservatism rather than expan- sionism. ft implies a high value on taking things easy, on conflict man- agement. There is no place in the spaceship for men on white horses and very little room for horsing around, We cannot afford to have war, revolution, or dialectical pro- cesses, Everything must be directed toward the preservation of precar- ious order rather than experimenta- tion with new forms, We have to stress equality rather than lncentives, simply in order to minimize uncer- tainty and conflict. It is important to realize that the case for equality may not rest at all on the concepts of social justice, Equality, indeed, denies at least one principle of social justice-that distribution should be in rough proportion to desert-for under an equalitarian regime the deserving get less than they deserve and the undeserving get more, as- suming at least something like a normal distribution of deservingness, Nevertheless, there may be a case for equality that rests not at all on social justice but on the sheer de- mand of the system for stability, A just society that provided incentives for virtue might simply prove to be too unstable, If all this sounds rather depress- ing, it is intended to be, Economists have never been very cheerful about the stationary state, and a perma- nent, planetwide stationary state, from which there seemed to be no possible means of escape, might be a very depressing prospect indeed, What is even more depressing is that a stationary state (ZPPG ) might not even be stable. simply because of the intensification of con- flicts within it. In the progressive state, conflicts can be resolved fairly easily by prog- ress itself. The poor can get richer without the rich getting poorer. In the stationary state, if the poor are to get richer, then the rich must get poorer, and what is even more frightening, if the rich are to get richer, they can only do so by in- creasing their exploitation of the poor, and since the rich may be the most powerful, they may have strong incentives to do this. Thus, the banished specter of exploitation, which progress made obsolete, is re- introduced into the world, The dialectical processes to which a sta- tionary state would be exposed would thereby become much more acute and might easily destroy the state's precarious equilibrium, in war, revolution, social upheaval, the decay of all legitimacies, and a Hobbesian nightmare of retrogres- sion in the war of all against all. As Adam Smith said prophetically, the declining state is melancholy, The ultimate question of whether a stationary state would be bearable, or even stable, depends a great deal on the human capacity for social invention. One might even have an optimistic image of the present period of human expansion as a kind of adolescence of the human race, in which man has to devote a large proportion of his energy and infor- mation to sheer physical growth, Hence, we could regard the station- ary state as a kind of maturity in which physical growth is no longer necessary and in which, therefore, t 2699 human energies can be devoted to qualitative growth - knowledge, spirit, art, and love, One might even romantically regard the twenty-first century as symbolizing the achieve- ment of this maturity, Fortunately for us, we have to leave most of these problems to our descendants, All we can really do is to wish them well, to leave them a little elbow room, and to guide our current evaluation functions somewhere to- ward the minimax of being on the safe side, Kenneth E. Boulding, Professor of Economics Qnd Program Director of the Program of Research on General Social and Economic Dynamics, Insti- tute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado. ~ ECOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY The chief reason for the sharp in- crease in environmental stress in tbe United States is the sweeping trans- formation in production technology in the postwar period, Productive activities with imense environmental impacts /urve displaced activities with less serious environmental im- pacts; the growth pattern has been counter-ecological. This conclusion is easily misconstrued to mean that tec~nology is therefore, per se, eco- logically hanofuL That this interpre- tation is unwarranted can be seen from the following examples, Consider the simple transforma- tion of the present ecologically faulty relationship among soil, agricultural crops, the human population, and sewage, Suppose that the sewage, instead of being introduced into sur- face waters as it is now, whether directly or following treatment, is Instead transported from urban col- lection systems by pipeline to agri- cultural are,as, where-after appro- pnate stenllza.lIon,erocedures-it is Incorporated Into the soiL Such a pipeline would literally reincorpo- rate the urban population into the soil's ecological cycle, It would re- store the integrity of that cycle and incidentally remove the need for inorganic nitrogen fertilizer-which also strains the aquatic cycle. Hence, the urban population would no longer be external to the soil cycle 3