Spaceship Earth -A Galaxy Insight

Now there is one outstanding important fact regarding spaceship earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

R. Buckminster Fuller

With Earth Day 24 hours away, we thought it would be appropriate to honor Buckminster Fuller -one of the key innovators in the 20th century. He is known as a philosopher, thinker, visionary, inventor, architect, engineer, mathematician, poet, cosmologist. As prolific author and an early environmental activist and philosopher,  Fuller devoted his life to creating the operating manual for  "spaceship Earth" by answering the central fundamental question:"Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?"

One of the first futurists and global thinkers, he pursued his lifelong experiment, writing more than thirty books, coining and popularizing terms such as "ephemeralization"—which, according to futurist and Fuller disciple Stewart Brand, author of The Whole Earth Catalog, Fuller coined to mean "doing more with less." Fuller invented the Geodesic dome coined the term synergetics, a "Geometry of Thinking," a metaphoric language for communicating experiences using geometric concepts, long before the term synergy became popular.

Fuller was concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system,  defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the "technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life"

To underscore his concept of "spaceship Earth," Fuller created the Dymaxion Map of the world (above), developed as the first world projection to show the continents on a flat surface without visible distortion, and to show the earth as being essentially one island in one ocean.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

NASA Earth Day Page

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Unraveling the Mysteries of -Clues to Climate Change on Earth?
Arctic Discovery –Ancient Connections & the Global Climate
Stephen Hawking: Climate Change Greatest Threat Facing Planet

Comments

[Christopher Mims]

Greetings, I'm a special projects editor at Scientific American and I'm trying to reach you, only my e-mails are bouncing! Could you get back to me at cmims@sciam.com? Thanks!

Christopher

[CJ Fearnley]

A Symposium related to Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics and Morphology will be held in early November in Providence, RI. The event home page is http://synergeticists.org/snec.announce.meeting.2007.11.html

[br3nt]

"The planet is some kind of organized intelligence. It's very different from
us. It's had 5- or 6-billion years to create a slow moving mind that is
made of oceans, and rivers, and rainforests, and glaciers. It's becoming
aware of us, as we are becoming aware of it, strangely enough.

"Two less likely members of a relationship can hardly be imagined -- the
technological apes and the dreaming planet. And yet, because the life of
each depends on the other, [we have] a feeling towards this immense,
strange, wise, old, neutral, weird thing, and it is trying to figure out why
its dreams are so tormented and why everything is out of balance."
- Terence McKenna

[bitirim]

thank you

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