After the Society’s first conference confirmed my epiphany, I began to envision the Society as the nucleus of a global network of thoughtful people sharing a common interest in exploring the world’s future. Our members constituted a stupendous intellectual resource that could light the way for humanity as it moves into a future filled with extraordinary potential, enormous risks, and mysteries beyond our comprehension.
Our members willingly accepted the challenge of thinking about a subject that most people refuse to think much about at all, and they demonstrated the power of the future to enable people to overcome atavistic grudges and misunderstandings.
But for it to become a truly significant force for peace or anything else, I knew that the Society needed to grow much bigger, and that, I knew, would be difficult since we had so little money. Despite the success of our first conference, our financial situation remained precarious, even desperate. We had no money for development, no money for any emergency that might come up, and no money for the staff needed to coordinate the efforts of our volunteers.
We also could offer nothing but moral support for our chapters, which were now multiplying in number and often had ambitious plans. Talking to chapter leaders, mainly on the telephone, forced me to offer explanations why we could give them no help, and this embarrassing task became something of a strain on me because of the other work I had to do.
On one occasion, Konrad Dannenberg, a member of our Huntsville, Alabama, chapter came to Washington to get support for a conference the chapter was planning. When I went to meet Konrad at the Old Stein, a German restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, I found him sitting in a booth with five other German rocket scientists. They kept silent while Konrad and I discussed the Huntsville chapter, but suddenly I realized that the man I had forced to move aside so I could squeeze into the booth was the infamous Werner von Braun, whose rockets had terrorized Britain during World War II. This was another validation of my epiphany but also another embarrassment: I could offer the Huntsville chapter nothing at all. I could not even afford to travel to their meeting to lend my support.
After the conference, I continued to search for an answer to our money problem, but could find none. So we were forced, again and again, to raise the dues, and that had the effect of discouraging many people from joining, especially young people and people living in poor nations.
My efforts to get support from foundations and philanthropists proved almost completely unavailing, partly because I am a poor salesman but also because I had little time for soliciting funds. Meanwhile, only a couple of my colleagues seemed willing to try to raise funds and they came back virtually empty-handed.