Believing in scientific progress

In the 1940s, Buckminster Fuller predicted that humanity's constant addition of new knowledge to physical resources would permit every individual and industry to do much more with the same amount of resources. He showed that technology was increasing life-supporting production at a rate much greater than that of population increase. He predicted that by 1970 humanity would reach a level at which every human being could be adequately supported while using only the resources available on Earth. But he also attached a key condition to the realization of this scenario: that humanity must concentrate on life-supporting production rather than on the manufacture of destructive weapons.