available to them. International participation would also ease the obtaining of international agreements, including frequency assignments in synchronous orbit positions, and provide assurance of the peaceful nature of the SPS, the adherence to environmental standards, and the availability of generated power on a global scale. Furthermore, international involvement in the SPS development program should assure that the SPS will not be controlled by any one industrial organization, sector of industry, or even one country. To derive the maximum benefits from a global SPS system, policies will have to be adopted which will be acceptable to other countries and lead to the formation of the most appropriate international SPS organization. The international organizational structure should be developed to contain, channel, and control the SPS technologies while they are being developed so that the societal issues could be addressed in parallel with the technology and not be spliced in later. As the effects of SPS technologies will extend past national frontiers, decisions regarding their development should not be left exclusively to national jurisdiction but made part of "transnational affairs." The benefits of the SPS should be available on a global basis and increase the opportunities for developing countries to take an active part in the utilization of energy sources available beyond the biosphere. To arrive at a "planetary bargain"^ will require that the SPS concept advance the interests of all nations, and a political consensus be formed through widespread realization that humanity is in a dangerous passage together on a world of finite resources, ultimate weapons, and unmet requirements. The SPS may require that new means be developed to manage pluralism from a global perspective. Broad initiatives and declarations of principle will require some sense of participation by all who will be affected by the operation of the SPS. But the SPS may be developed and eventually managed by those countries which have the most concern with energy supplies, the best technical capabilities, and the required capital resources. What will be required is to establish a consensus regarding the future course of SPS development. To achieve a consensus, a body such as the U.N. Committee for Peaceful Uses of Outer Space may keep the SPS program under review—not to tell individual nations what to do, but to tell the collectivity of nations what they had better bargain collectively about doing together. The SPS concept, therefore, could provide not only an impetus for peaceful cooperation among nations, but help humanity face the challenges posed by the inevitable transition to renewable sources of energy. It may be a step to allowing human imagination to utilize the potential of space and its rich resources for improving the human condition and point towards a new direction for the evolution of the human species. 1J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, I nd i ana, 1964. 2M. K. Hubbert, "Energy Resource," Nat. Acad. Sci. Pub. No. 100D: 91, Washington, D. C., 1962. 3L. P. Gaucher, "Energy Sources of the Future for the United States," Solar Energy, Vol. 9, p. 119, 1965- ^P. E. Glaser, "Power from the Sun: Its Future," Science, Vol. 162, p. 857.
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