A planned, stabilized future for humanity will be assured when the earth is governed much as cities, states, nations and empires have been governed in the past and the present, but with one essential difference.  At no known past time have all human beings been represented in a government authorized to make and enforce world law.  In the absence of law, chaos and armed conflicts have determined the course of human affairs.  Under a recognized world federal government, world law will bring, for the first time, the practical possibility of a law and order determined by and for the human population and charged with the responsibility for establishing and maintaining planetary public policy.

World law will be only one aspect of the new situation that will result from the establishment of a planned, stabilized future for humanity.  Other aspects of the new society will include: 

1.  Shaping the future of nature on and in the planet, with all of its potential riches.

2.  Perhaps also taking a hand in determining the future of other celestial bodies making up our solar system.

3.  Shaping human society, the man-made and man-remade human heritage that plays so vital a role in determining the course of human life—­individual and social.

4.  Shaping and guiding man—­the gregarious, imaginative, venturesome, productive—­destructive, creative animal.

5.  Building up in human society respect (reverence) for being, respect for life with its multitudinous variations of opportunity for individual and social activity.

6.  Arousing interest and dedicating time, thought and energy to the new science and new arts grouped together under the title Futurology.

7.  Having a hand in perpetuating and shaping one segment of our expanding universe in accord with the Cult of Excellence:  good, better, and best ever!  This is an exciting, constructive, long-range project worthy of the attention and devotion of any being, even the most ambitious and omniscient.

8.  Aiming at the Truth—­the workability, improvement and the perfectability of our planet Earth as a recognized, accepted and essential part of our planetary chain and of our Island Universe.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

MAN COULD CHANGE HUMAN NATURE

Man could conserve natural resources; he could remake human society.  But man himself?  There, perhaps, is the root of the problem we are discussing.

Can man change himself?  Can he change human nature?  Could human beings as we know them be transformed sufficiently to live and survive under the life-style that replaces civilization?

In our universe as we know it today, from the least to the greatest, from the most minute to the most extensive, change is one of the basic principles of existence.  Nature changes.  Human society changes.  Changes in nature and in society are paralleled by changes in man himself—­changes in outlooks and purposes, changes in ways of feeling, thinking and acting.