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Change is everywhere manifest. The time span of change relative to human lives is the critical factor. Many within transportation are anxious to turn transportation toward controlled acceleration. Some seek new ways of marketing transportation, rather than selling a single mode or method of moving men and cargoes from here to there. A new activity complex calls for new transport design. One may not deal with transportation as an activity isolated from its changing environment. When the significance of transportation's role is recognized, it can surely be referred to as the Fifth Estate. Transportation is today well launched into an era of progressive renaissance. The twin investment of capital and man-hours must be amortized by wise planning. By bold innovation, new patterns and processes of transportation can be made to fit the new requirements. Transportation's role is service. Perspective can be gained by ideas subject to experiment. Our progress must be judged by how well contemporary society is motivated by its leaders to achieve goals which make all men participants in the multiplicity of advances. The decades ahead require a transportation renaissance. Resurgence has already begun. A Fifth Estate is emerging.

In this article, the author assumes that Western civilization (found in Western and Eastern Europe, North America, the USSR, and Muslim societies) has been dominant in the world, and he explores the positive and negative effects of this civilizational penetration on Hindu, Sinic and Nipponic traditions. Approaching the investigation from a cosmological perspective, he argues that civilizations are in incessant interaction – lending, borrowing, sending, receiving, imposing and submitting as people, things and ideas move in space and time. The consequences of interaction are twofold: (1) it gives rise to similarities in deep structures and ideologies of otherwise dissimilar civilizations; (2) it could mitigate the dominance of one civilization across time. Applied to Western penetration, this analysis suggests that during a period of expansion, the dominant civilization transmits its central themes to civilizations unable to resist penetration through isolation (the Sinic case) or through economic-military countermeasures (the Nipponic case). (Hindu civilization is a class apart, since its extraordinary richness enables it to both absorb and modify external influences.) As the dominant civilization becomes overextended, it enters a period of contraction marked by some openness to civilizations in the expansion mode. This process is iterative. The author concludes that Western European and North American aspects of Western civilization (the inner West) are in contraction while Islam, East European and Soviet forms are expanding, and the remaining civilizations are occidentalizing. Thus, the inner West, which is basically dominance-oriented and exploitative in the expansion mode, may now be ready to enter a dialogue with less aggressive cosmologies, with potentially important consequences for global civilization.