Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth is a short book by R. Buckminster Fuller, first published in 1969, following an address with a similar title given to the 50th annual convention of the American Planners Association in the Shoreham Hotel, Washington D.C., on 16 October 1967.[1]
The book relates Earth to a spaceship flying through space. Noting the lack of any user manual to help Earthians steward this ship, Fuller offers some reflections, prognostications, and guidance, based on contemporary concepts of linked relationships, that may help in the understanding, management, preservation, and sustainment of this ship. The spaceship has a finite amount of resources and cannot be resupplied.
Chapters
Comprehensive propensities
Origins of specialization
Comprehensively commanded automation
Spaceship Earth
General systems theory
Synergy
Integral functions
The regenerative landscape
Main themes
History
Fuller describes two epochs within modern and contemporary history.
The first epoch was one run by Great Pirates or "great outlaws." The source of their power is that they are the only masters of global information in a time where people are focused locally. They were aware that resources weren't evenly distributed around the world, so that items which are abundant in one area are scarce in another. This gives rise to trade which the Great Pirates exploit for their own advantage. They established sea-trade routes to connect previously isolated populations throughout the globe. As these people took to the sea they left the local, regional laws of their original communities and entered a transitional space where they invented their own laws based on their interests in retaining special access to the Earth's dispersed resources and to gaining power through trade. The Great Pirates had a special ability to comprehend and activate a wide range of skills and knowledges required to generalize, translate, navigate, and integrate existing systems.
Fuller posits that these Great Pirates established governments in various areas and supported leaders who will defend their trade routes. By providing the leaders with special access to global resources, the Great Pirates controlled regional politicians, military, and leaders; these puppets leaders served the role of facilitating the Great Pirates' work, and in exchange for providing the Great Pirates with special privileges the Great Pirates would reward them with a cut of their profits. This historical era found a vast increase in the circulation and advancements of tools, goods, and services.
Power struggles for waterways ensue, requiring people such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo to design better defenses for the Great Pirates. As engineers become involved with the Great Pirates many new concepts appear, but the main one was of the Navy. As the size of the people in the Great Pirates' employment grow, training becomes a necessity, and the beginnings of schools and colleges ensue. Monarchs are encouraged to develop civil service systems to provide secure but specialized employment for their brightest subjects, which prevents them from competing with the Great Pirates in their lucrative global trading. Thus the Great Pirates guarded the advantages that their unique global perspective revealed.
This previous epoch set in place the current system of political organization rooted in the concept of sovereign nations which control the planet's natural resources and distribution networks. Fuller describes this as an outdated and illogical structure. This structure is based on colonization, imposing servility on anyone born outside of the borders of the privileged nations, and installing "identity classification" based on race, birth-nation, and citizenship as a status quo, and encouraging competitive ideologies based on politics, science, and religion.
Fuller describes that these separate sovereign nations with their competitive identities led to World War I and continued through World War II. World War I emerged from the struggle between the 'out-pirates' (electronic and chemical warfare) and the 'in-pirates' (electromagnetics). This change from the visible to the invisible forced the Great Pirates to rely on experts, which causes the end of the Great Pirates (who previously had been the only ones that were truly multi-disciplined). The public is unaware that Great Pirates had been ruling the earth, and the role falls back to kings and politicians, though the frameworks of trade, rating and accounting remain. Fuller declares that the Great Pirates society became extinct as a result of advances in industrial production and technology. Yet the systems that they had created were not altered. National leaders assumed the role of the Great Pirates, without having the necessary skills and experiences of a generalized world view. By default they reinforced the outdated systems of sovereignty.
In the current era, Fuller predicts that "planners, architects, and engineers take the initiative".
Education
Specializations
One of the strategies used by the Great Pirates to control individuals by disconnecting them from comprehending the whole picture was the concept of specializations. Schools, colleges, and intellectual associations encourage individuals to devote themselves to a specialization at a young age. Fuller describes that "specialization is... only a fancy form of slavery wherein the 'expert' is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially and culturally preferred, ergo, highly secure, lifelong position."[2] Specializations were used as a way to fragment society by dividing individuals into only having one place in society, and to discourage them from understanding how their job relates to other disciplines and feeds into the larger picture. This form of control is used to limit one's experience, knowledge, focus, viewpoint, and network within only one segment, subservient to their specific organized societies. Specialists are discouraged from comprehension; Wide-ranging ambitions that span across larger networks, and are controlled by their superiors. Specialization is described as a loss of general adaptability, and leads to extinction.
Life fellowship
Since many jobs will be replaced by automation, and sustain life does not need to be dictated by labor, humans are free to be engaged in other pursuits. To realize potential wealth each person who is or becomes unemployed should be provided with a life fellowship in research and development, or just simply experience and experiments. Fuller states that for every 100,000 fellowships given out one person will come up with something so valuable that it will pay for the remaining 99,999 fellowships.
Economics
The economic accounting systems that are most widely in use only measure physical matter, which is only actually one quality of wealth.
Access to vital resources
Fuller critiques the prevalence of poverty throughout the entire publication. He states that one of the qualities that make humans unique is their inventiveness. Human inventiveness is driven by curiosity, desire to communicate, adaptability, resourcefulness, and intellectual capabilities. Poverty injures all of Earth's population, by limiting a large percentage of the population's ability to realize their potential and engage in the furthering and betterment of the world's population. So far many of the solutions activated have been short-sighted and superficial, aimed at removing poverty from view.
It is also an outdated concept that tries to dictate which people are allowed to live the fullest lifespan possible.
Wealth
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it is only ever transformed. Thus the concept that energy is "spent" and that the universe could run out of energy is outdated. There is a finite amount of energy available to us that lives within a closed system where it cannot be expended with. The concepts of "spending" energy and of entropy are used to support outdated systems of thought which believe that in order for one group of lifeforms to survive, others must be made extinct.
Fuller argues instead that "Wealth is the product of the progressive mastery of matter by the mind."[3] Wealth is rather better defined as the potential that one has to survive.
There is enough wealth in the world to satisfy all of the world's needs.
Industry
Contemporary industry requires the coordination of international networks and access to global resources.
Technology
Defines tools as either craft tools that can be invented by one man, such as bows and arrows, and industrial tools that cannot be produced by one man, such as the S.S. Queen Mary. Finds language to be the first industrial tool. States that craft tools were used to create industrial tools.
Automation
The new technology of the computer allows the computer to specialize and allow humans to overcome their former roles, as specialists and laborers, and gain freedom to focus instead on their special abilities to comprehend and invent.
Fuller acknowledges that one of the largest critiques against automation comes from humans themselves, who fear the loss of their livelihoods, and thus their lives. This issue is easily solved through universal basic income.
Communication
Humans are uniquely driven by the desire to communicate. New technologies will enhance our ability to develop and strengthen connections.
Ecology
One of the keys to survival of the human species involves further understanding of how to sustain life through managing energy in sustainable ways. The idea of the Earth as a spaceship alludes to it as a mechanical vehicle that requires maintenance, and that if we do not keep it in good order it will cease to function. Fuller critiques the pollution of air, water, and information as counter to survival.
Fossil fuels
Throughout this book Fuller heavily critiques the continued use of fossil fuels. Our scientific understanding of the planet Earth has taught us that not only is the continued use of fossil fuels unsustainable, it is self-destructive as well. Additionally, Fuller refers to fossil fuels as our savings account; if we burn through the finite amount available rather than reserving it, our energy potential will only become bankrupt.
He encourages instead the harvesting of regenerative sources, specifically the Sun's radiation and Moon's gravity via wind, solar, and water tools. Fuller states that we "must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from the powers of wind, tide, water, and the direct Sun radiation energy".
Systems theory
It is not possible to identify the whole of the system through only analyzing its parts.
Synergy
Fuller describes synergy as the "behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any sub-assembly of the systems' parts."[4]
Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion", "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".
The Dymaxion House was developed by inventor and architect Buckminster Fuller to address several perceived shortcomings with existing homebuilding techniques. Fuller designed several versions of the house at different times—all of them factory manufactured kits, assembled on site, intended to be suitable for any site or environment and to use resources efficiently. A key design consideration was ease of shipment and assembly.
Ecological economics, bioeconomics, ecolonomy, eco-economics, or ecol-econ is both a transdisciplinary and an interdisciplinary field of academic research addressing the interdependence and coevolution of human economies and natural ecosystems, both intertemporally and spatially. By treating the economy as a subsystem of Earth's larger ecosystem, and by emphasizing the preservation of natural capital, the field of ecological economics is differentiated from environmental economics, which is the mainstream economic analysis of the environment. One survey of German economists found that ecological and environmental economics are different schools of economic thought, with ecological economists emphasizing strong sustainability and rejecting the proposition that physical (human-made) capital can substitute for natural capital.
The Dymaxion map or Fuller map is a projection of a world map onto the surface of an icosahedron, which can be unfolded and flattened to two dimensions. The flat map is heavily interrupted in order to preserve shapes and sizes.
World Game, sometimes called the World Peace Game, is an educational simulation developed by Buckminster Fuller in 1961 to help create solutions to overpopulation and the uneven distribution of global resources. This alternative to war games uses Fuller's Dymaxion map and requires a group of players to cooperatively solve a set of metaphorical scenarios, thus challenging the dominant nation-state perspective with a more holistic "total world" view. The idea was to "make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone," thus increasing the quality of life for all people.
James Tennant Baldwin, often known as Jay Baldwin or J. Baldwin, was an American industrial designer and writer. Baldwin was a student of Buckminster Fuller; Baldwin's work was inspired by Fuller's principles and, in the case of some of Baldwin's published writings, he popularized and interpreted Fuller's ideas and achievements. In his own right, Baldwin was a figure in American designers' efforts to incorporate solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources. In his career, being a fabricator was as important as being a designer. Baldwin was noted as the inventor of the "Pillow Dome", a design that combines Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome with panels of inflated ETFE plastic panels.
Productive forces, productive powers, or forces of production is a central idea in Marxism and historical materialism.
R. Buckminster Fuller coined the term design science revolution to describe his proposed scientific and socio-economic revolution accomplished by shifting from "weaponry to livingry" through the application of what he called comprehensive anticipatory design science. His World Design Science Decade, proposed to the International Union of Architects in 1961, was an attempt to catalyze the revolution.
Spaceship Earth is a worldview encouraging everyone on Earth to act as a harmonious crew working toward the greater good.
Spaceship Earth is a dark ride attraction at the Epcot theme park at the Walt Disney World in Bay Lake, Florida. The geodesic sphere in which the attraction is housed has served as the symbolic structure of Epcot since the park opened in 1982.
A steady-state economy is an economy made up of a constant stock of physical wealth (capital) and a constant population size. In effect, such an economy does not grow in the course of time. The term usually refers to the national economy of a particular country, but it is also applicable to the economic system of a city, a region, or the entire world. Early in the history of economic thought, classical economist Adam Smith of the 18th century developed the concept of a stationary state of an economy: Smith believed that any national economy in the world would sooner or later settle in a final state of stationarity.
Medard Gabel is the executive director of the non-profit research and development organization EarthGame. He also leads BigPictureSmallWorld and the Global Solutions Lab. He is the former executive director of the World Game Institute and director of The Cornucopia Project and the Regeneration Project at Rodale Press. He has done work for Tanzania on regenerative agriculture, as well as work in Costa Rica, Spain, The Netherlands, Japan, China, Malaysia and elsewhere. He has written six books on world food and energy problems and solutions, the U.S. food system, multinational corporations, and strategic planning.
Critical Path is a book written by US author and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller with the assistance of Kiyoshi Kuromiya. First published in 1981, it is alongside Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth one of Fuller's best-known works. Vast in its scope, it describes Fuller's own vision of the development of human civilization, economic history, and his highly original economic ideology based, amongst other things, on his detailed description of why scarcity of resources need no longer be a decisive factor in global politics.
The Regeneration refers to people of all ages who share a common interest in renewable resources, recycling and other means of sustaining the earth's natural environment.
Nine Chains to the Moon is a book by R. Buckminster Fuller, first published in 1938. The title refers to the observation that, when the book was written, the world population of humans, if stood one atop another, could form chains that would reach back and forth between Earth and the Moon nine times.
Ecological design or ecodesign is an approach to designing products and services that gives special consideration to the environmental impacts of a product over its entire lifecycle. Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan define it as "any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes." Ecological design can also be defined as the process of integrating environmental considerations into design and development with the aim of reducing environmental impacts of products through their life cycle.
Synergetics is the empirical study of systems in transformation, with an emphasis on whole system behaviors unpredicted by the behavior of any components in isolation. R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) named and pioneered the field. His two-volume work Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, in collaboration with E. J. Applewhite, distills of a lifetime of research into book form.
The Geoscope was a proposal by Buckminster Fuller around 1960 to create a 200-foot-diameter (61 m) globe that would be covered in colored lights so that it could function as a large spherical display. It was envisioned that the Geoscope would be connected to computers which would allow it to display both historical and current data, and enable people to visualize large scale patterns around the world. Several projects by his students to build a "miniature Earth", starting with a 20-foot version at Cornell University in 1952, were precursors of the Geoscope proposal. Before proposing the Geoscope, Fuller had invented the Dymaxion map, a novel map projection for the whole Earth.
A spome is any hypothetical system closed with respect to matter and open with respect to energy capable of sustaining human life indefinitely. The term was coined in 1966 by Isaac Asimov in a paper entitled "There’s No Place Like Spome", published in Atmosphere in Space Cabins and Closed Environments and originally presented as a paper to the American Chemical Society on September 13, 1965. Asimov himself declared his coined word to be uneuphonious, and defined it as being a portmanteau of the two words "space home".
The Great Acceleration is the dramatic, continuous and roughly simultaneous surge across a large range of measures of human activity, first recorded in the mid-20th century and continuing to this day. Within the concept of the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene, these measures are specifically those of humanity's impact on Earth's geology and its ecosystems. In the concept, the Great Acceleration can be variously classified as the only age of the epoch to date, one of many ages of the epoch – depending on the epoch's proposed start date – or a defining feature of the epoch that is thus not an age, as well as other classifications.
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