means of
short-cutting the normal or "natural" processes in sociology as it has
already short-cutted the normal or "natural" process in human
transportation and communication.

As long as human beings accept the normal, traditional, "natural"
principles of association and group action, humanity will continue on
the tread-mill of civilization with its long established cycles of
beginning, expansion, exploitation, maturity, conflict, decline and
extermination.

This aspect of planetary sociology may be illustrated by the rise and
decline of total membership in the human family. We know that Roman
civilization passed through a completed cycle of population expansion to
an optimum, followed by a catastrophic population decline. Western
civilization has been experiencing a population expansion or explosion
that can be measured with a moderate degree of statistical accuracy.
Planetary human population doubled from 500 million in 1650 to 1000
million in 1850. Between 1850 and 1950 population more than doubled
(from 1000 million to 2,500 million). In 1975 the human population of
the earth is close to 3,700 million.

An essential aspect of world government will be a population program
designed to adjust social structure and planning to the means of
production and to make generally available to all humans and, where
possible, all living things, the results of invention, discovery and
experience with affluence, general security and wide variations of
vocational and avocational choice. In practice such a program would
include the planned utilization and conservation of nature and the
conscious improvement of society by society.

Social planning at the planetary level could deal chiefly with large
national or regional groupings, more or less divergent in viewpoint but
conscious of the necessity for bringing local and regional groups
together in order to secure common agreement and to take part in
directed joint actions. Such efforts must aim at sufficient cohesion to
provide for normal social function at all levels; sufficient
permissiveness to allow for a measure of self-determination at all
levels; sufficient authority to carry on production and distribution at
all levels, and sufficient libertarianism to tolerate discussion and
opposition at all levels, with a maximum degree of self sufficiency and
self-determination at all levels.

Nowhere is the need for social planning more in evidence than in the
sphere of human popul