Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth - a term usually expressing concern over the ue of limited resources available on earth and the behavior of everyone on it to act as a harmonious crew working toward the greater good.

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R. Buckminster Fuller

The book relates Earth to a spaceship flying through space, we are all astronauts. The sun as our energy supplier, the spaceship has a finite amount of resources and can not be resupplied. The idea of the earth is as a mechanical vehicle that requires maintenance, and that if you do not keep it in good order it will cease to function.

Chapter 4

"Our spaceship is so superbly designed as to be able to keep life regenerating on board despite the phenomenon, entropy, by which all local physical systems lose energy. So we have to obtain our biological life - regenerating energy from another spaceship the sun."

"One of the interesting things to me about our spaceship is that it is a mechanical vehicle, just as an automobile. You must put oil and gas into it, and you must put water in the radiator and take care of the car as a whole. You know that you're either going to have to keep the machine in good order or it's going to be in trouble and fail to function."

"Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it. I think it's very significant that there is no instruction book for successfully operating our ship. "

"Thus, because the instruction manual was missing we are learning how we safely can anticipate the consequences of an increasing number of alternative ways of extending our satisfactory survival and growth both physical and metaphysical."