the capital cost per kilowatt of the reactor (including the cost of the salts and fertile material, i.e., of all the necessary working fluids except the cost of the fissionable fuel proper) are the same as those for the TVA reactor in Table 2. Recent preliminary design studies of several reactor types carried out by the manufacturers or other especially qualified organizations indicate that the capital costs drop below $100/kw for plants a few times larger than the TVA unit. Since we wish to look a little into the future, we shall assume that the cost of the molten-salt breeder has also been brought to this value by size scaling, or by the use of cheaper materials than INOR-8, or simply by design improvement and evolution. Then, corresponding to the two nuclear columns of Table 2, we obtain the hypothetical results shown

of the International Council of Scientific Unions, 1957-present (President 195760); Council on Foreign Relations, 1964-present; American Miscellaneous Society 1955-present; National Academy of Sciences, 1957-present (Member of Council, 1962-65, Chairman, Section of Geophysics, 1963-66); American Philosophical Society, 1958-present; American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1958-present; Naval Research Advisory Committee, 1959-present; United States National Commission for UNESCO, 1958-64 (Vice-Chairman, 1961-64); Agency for International Development, Research Advisory Committee, 1962-present; President's Committee on the National Medal of Science, 1963-present; Education Commission of the Government of India, 1964-66; Scientific Advisory Panel to the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives, 1959-present.

Honors.-Agassiz Medal of National Academy of Sciences; Albatross Medal of Swedish Royal Society of Science and Letters; Order of Sitara-i-Imtiaz of the Government of Pakistan; Pomona College, Sc. D.; Harvard University, A.M.; Carleton College, Sc. D.

TESTIMONY OF PROF. ROGER REVELLE, RICHARD SALTONSTALL PROFESSOR OF POPULATION POLICY, AND DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR POPULATION STUDIES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Mr. REVELLE. I am glad I am here, sir; I didn't think I was going to make it. Northeast Airlines was even later than usual this morning coming down from Boston.

Senator MUSKIE. Technology is falling behind.

Mr. REVELLE. That is right, it is a marvelous example of how technology doesn't work about as often as it does.

I have a brief summary which contains some of the things I want to talk about and with your permission, sir, I will submit this for the record and then talk more or less from it.

Senator MUSKIE. Fine. It will be included in the record.

Mr. REVELLE. I am very grateful for the opportunity to appear before this committee to discuss the need for development within the Congress of new ways to examine the future impact of technology in the United States and in our world society.

I don't think you can separate the world as a whole from the United States any more, and in particular these questions of technology which have so rapidly become worldwide questions.

Your proposal, Senator Muskie, to create a Senate Select Committee on Technology and Human Environment is clearly appropriate and timely. It coincides with a new development in human thought and action and that is the development of attempts to forecast the future.

This is in some way becoming a new science because it is possible on the basis of scientific knowledge to make predictions about the technology that may flow from that knowledge, and, therefore, to some extent, to make predicitions about the shape of the future world.

As we approach the year 2000 our interest in the future is becoming greater than it has been for the last thousand years. The only time in the history of western man when people were as interested in the future as they are today was in the last decades of the 10th century just before the year 1000.

At that time, everybody in Europe was convinced that the world was going to come to an end on January 1, A.D. 1000, and they were trying to get ready for it.

The end of the world is probably not going to happen on the stroke of midnight, December 31, 1999. We don't really expect to have a new Jerusalem popping into existence shortly after that date. Nevertheless, we do live in a world of such rapid change, so many

will get him reelected, of course the first duty of every politician being to get himself reelected otherwise his effectiveness tends to be lost. And the bureaucracy in general also tends to think only in very short timespans.

It seems to me one of the major problems, therefore, of our Government is to find ways of thinking over longer time horizons and I think it is very gratifying that you and your committee have taken up this matter seriously.

Senator MUSKIE. It is 4 years to my next election, of course. [Laughter.]

Mr. REVELLE. This, of course, is one of the great advantages of the Senate as a deliberative body, you have a little time to turn around. Senator MUSKIE. A little time to deliberate. [Laughter.]

Mr. REVELLE. Today I would like to talk about three things primarily. One is the uses and the problems of technology;

Second, the need for many kinds of specialists to work together in developing these uses and attacking these problems, and particularly the need for social scientists and technologists to work together;

Third, the ways in which the proposed select committee can utilize the abilities of social and natural scientists and engineers in our universities and research institutions.

We all know we live in an age of science and technology, which is in many ways almost an age of miracles. But in recent years we have come to realize that technical developments usually create new problems in the very process of solving old ones.

What is not so generally appreciated is that in the modern world the realistic answer to a problem created by technology will itself usually be in part a technological one. To solve the problem we must not abandon our technology but use more of it. One way to state this proposition is that once men start down the technological road they cannot turn back. This is in accordance with the conventional wisdom of our race. Once man has bitten into the fruit of the tree of knowledge, there can be no return to Eden.

To change the metaphor, ever since men began to modify their lives by using technology they have found themselves in a series of technological traps.

The first clear-cut example of such a technological trap was the invention of agriculture, about 8,000 years ago probably by some bright woman in the hills of what is now Iraq or Iran, who noticed that when seeds fell off a plant she was gathering, the same kind of plant grew up in the spring, and she decided to try to see if by planting these seeds she could get plants to grow up where she wanted them.

Prior to that time, men were very scarce animals; there were probably more lions than there were men. They made their living by hunting and food gathering. This may have been a rather happy Edenlike existence, but it resulted in very high infant and child mortalities. Probably, to keep the race going, the average woman had to give birth to all the children she was capable of having.

As soon as agriculture was invented and human beings could have a more assured food supply, the population grew for a while, so fast that it was quite impossible to go back to the simple life of hunting and gathering. It became necessary for men and women to work for their living, earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. For

8,000 years human beings were condemned to the hard and brutalizing toil of hand agriculture, simply to keep their families going.

It wasn't until very recently that we have been able to climb out of this technological trap. We have done it, of course, by a series of developments in agricultural technology, almost technological miracles. These have changed farming from harsh and continuously demanding labor to an industry in which only 6 percent of our people are able to grow more than enough food for all the rest of us in the United States, and hardly get their hands dirty in the process. Pretty much the same thing is true in Western Europe.

But today as their technology has burgeoned and multiplied we have gotten ourselves caught in a set of new traps. At least in many cases, it seems to me, the way to extricate ourselves is through still further technological changes. And some of these changes will be rather large and we are liable to be frightened even to think about them.

For example, metropolitan air pollution could be eliminated if we had the capital, the courage, and the skill to make two basic technological changes. One of these would be the substitution of automobiles powered by electrical batteries or fuel cells for the present automobiles driven by internal combustion engines. The reason why this seems like the most realistic way to solve the problem of air pollution resulting from automobiles is that internal combustion engines by their very nature combine atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen into nitrogen oxide, just because of the high temperatures of combustion. This looks like the kind of physical chemistry which is very hard to get around by anything that you can do to an internal combustion engine except abandon it, not use it.

Another change would be to eliminate sulfur dioxide fumes from coal burning in metropolitan air by the generation of electric power near coal mines, so-called mine mouth generation, and the transportation of electric energy to metropolitan areas by high-voltage, directcurrent transmission lines. Both of these technologies are quite feasible, of course.

The Swedes have been using long-distance, direct-voltage transmis sion for 20 years. So far we haven't had the courage and the capital to do that in this country.

Other alternatives are, of course, possible. Conceivably we might be able to keep most of the automobiles out of our cities by the development of high speed, convenient mass transportation systems. But I myself feel this would require a real technological miracle, and is very unlikely to happen. We may be able to break through the atmospheric inversion layers that press down stagnant air on our cities, if we can learn enough about the weather, and how to change it.

An unforeseen development could occur which would make it possible to remove nitrogen oxides from automobile exhausts. As far as power generation is concerned we may be able to eliminate sulfur compounds from our coal and oil before burning them, or to filter out sulfur dioxide from the flue gases. We could almost certainly substitute atomic energy for sulfur-containing coal, and fuel oil in metropolitan electric power-generating plants.

Whatever the solution, however, it is likely to be at least in part a technical one involving technological invention and change, and we can be even more certain that these new technical developments will