CODA: THE GREAT CONFLUENCE
TOMORROW’S BASICS
Third Wave civilization, unlike its predecessor, must (and will) draw on an amazing variety of energy sources—hydro-pen, solar, geothermal, tidal, biomass, lightning discharges, ul-nmately perhaps advanced fusion power, as well as other mergy sources not yet imagined in the 1980’s. (While some nuclear plants will no doubt continue to operate, even if we NiilFcr a succession of disasters worse than Three Mile Island, nuclear will, on the whole, turn out to have been a costly and dangerous digression.)
The transition to the new diverse energy base will be er-rntic in the extreme, with a staccato succession of gluts, short-nj-ics, and lunatic price swings. But the long-term direction •a i ins clear enough—a shift from a civilization based heavily on a single source of energy to one based more securely on many. Ultimately we see a civilization founded once more on Nc-If-sustaining, renewable rather than exhaustible energy lources.
Third Wave civilization will rely on a far more diversified technological base as well, springing from biology, genetics, electronics, materials science, as well as on outer space and iinder-the-sea operations.While some new technologies will require high energy inputs, much Third Wave technology will In- designed to use less, not more, energy. Nor will Third Wave technologies be as massive and ecologically dangerous as those of the past. Many will be small in scale, simple to operate, with the wastes of one industry predesigned for recycling into primary materials for another.
For Third Wave civilization, the most basic raw material of all—and one that can never be exhausted—is information, Including imagination.Through imagination and information, NIinstitutes will be found formany of today’s exhaustible resources—although this substitution, once more, will all too frequently be accompanied by drastic economic swings and lurches.
With information becoming more important than ever before, the new civilization will restructure education, redefine scientific research and, above all, reorganize the media of communication. Today’s mass media, both print and electronic, are wholly inadequate to cope with the communications load and to provide the requisite cultural variety for survival. Instead of being culturally dominated by a few mass media, Third Wave civilization will rest on inter-active, de-massified media, feeding extremely diverse and often highly personalized imagery into and out of the mind-stream of the society.
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