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Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R.…
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Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (original 1969; edition 1969)

by R. Buckminster Fuller

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
785827,969 (3.77)5
This is a classic, published in 1969, first read by me back in 1970 or 1971, when we thought we would soon experience either the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius or, alternately, the Eve of Destruction. Definitely Utopian, still visionary, and in some ways quite wrong, Fuller makes interesting reading even now, 40 years later and 26 years after his death in 1983. One important area in which Fuller has turned out to have been wrong was his prediction that global population would stabilize at the then current 4 billion thanks to world-wide industrialization, which he expected to be complete by 1985. Now almost 7 billion, world population has nearly doubled since he wrote this book and has not yet even peaked.
Another issue that Fuller wasn’t exactly wrong about, but that he didn’t take fully into account, is that of waste; for example, what to do with all the plastic, such as the Texas-sized mat now floating out in the middle of the Pacific ocean, or nuclear waste (though it must be said that he categorized atoms similarly to fossil fuels as non-renewable capital, to be used only sparingly and then only for start-up purposes). He doesn’t mention climate change or global warming except by implication (i.e., if we don’t smarten up soon, we will use up or destroy our life support and enhancement system on this planet). However, Fuller placed great faith in human evolution proceeding in such a way as to result in a favorable outcome for humans on this planet. What has saved us in the past, he said, is our built-in (by evolution) trial and error approach in conjunction with a bank account of energy resources. Meaning, we have evolved in such a way as to enjoy enough breathing space to be able to make errors and then adjust our behavior accordingly and progress.
Some of his prognostications seem uncannily prescient considering the world's current economic crises, for example :
"The constantly put-off or undermet costs and society’s official bumbling of them clearly prove that man does not know at present what wealth is nor how much of whatever it may be is progressively available to him," and "The wisest humans recognized in 1810 only one three-hundredth of 1 per cent of the immediately thereafter 'proven value' of the United States’ share of the world’s wealth-generating potentials. Of course, those wisest of men of the times would have seen little they could afford to do."
R. Buckminster Fuller is still well worth reading, if only to ponder his definitions of democracy and wealth:
"Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgment what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect’s function in universe. . . . .
Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives.”

( )
1 vote Paulagraph | May 25, 2014 |
Showing 8 of 8
Oh, if only we had listened to Fuller. We wouldn't be in such a mess now. ( )
  mykl-s | Feb 25, 2023 |
Five stars for what this book is, a short explanation of the philosophy of technical optimism of R. Buckminster Fuller.
However, Fuller writes in a dense style that is sometimes hard to read.
By the way, this is not an operating manual at all, it focuses more on concepts rather than tactics. Spoiler alert - the key is that we work together and stop creating false differences between people (nations, rich and poor, races). ( )
  futureman | Jun 9, 2022 |
This book is a time capsule that helps us see our intellectual progress since it was published. Actually, it is almost useless. Back then we thought it was great stuff, but only because almost everything else was even worse. One might get excited over the fact that there is a chapter titled General Systems Theory. Actually the chapter is so vague it is almost useless. ( )
  johnclaydon | Oct 20, 2019 |
The name R. Buckminster Fuller brings up images of geodesic domes for most people. I found a paperback 1973 printing of the 1969 book with a properly psychedelic deconstructed sphere/face on the cover. Only after reading the book did I find out we already had a copy (much newer edition) without the cool cover. Fuller's premise is that the earth, like a spaceship, needs to have all its systems working as one, that there has to be a balance between resources and their use. He carries the metaphor through various scientific explanations (most of which were beyond my knowledge) to show why our lives depend on the maintenance of our spaceship. A wonderful premise and metaphor -- seems really a propos as we look at climate change becoming irreversible by 2030. It's also scary that in the time since this was written not many have paid heed. ( )
  Marse | Feb 22, 2019 |
This is a classic, published in 1969, first read by me back in 1970 or 1971, when we thought we would soon experience either the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius or, alternately, the Eve of Destruction. Definitely Utopian, still visionary, and in some ways quite wrong, Fuller makes interesting reading even now, 40 years later and 26 years after his death in 1983. One important area in which Fuller has turned out to have been wrong was his prediction that global population would stabilize at the then current 4 billion thanks to world-wide industrialization, which he expected to be complete by 1985. Now almost 7 billion, world population has nearly doubled since he wrote this book and has not yet even peaked.
Another issue that Fuller wasn’t exactly wrong about, but that he didn’t take fully into account, is that of waste; for example, what to do with all the plastic, such as the Texas-sized mat now floating out in the middle of the Pacific ocean, or nuclear waste (though it must be said that he categorized atoms similarly to fossil fuels as non-renewable capital, to be used only sparingly and then only for start-up purposes). He doesn’t mention climate change or global warming except by implication (i.e., if we don’t smarten up soon, we will use up or destroy our life support and enhancement system on this planet). However, Fuller placed great faith in human evolution proceeding in such a way as to result in a favorable outcome for humans on this planet. What has saved us in the past, he said, is our built-in (by evolution) trial and error approach in conjunction with a bank account of energy resources. Meaning, we have evolved in such a way as to enjoy enough breathing space to be able to make errors and then adjust our behavior accordingly and progress.
Some of his prognostications seem uncannily prescient considering the world's current economic crises, for example :
"The constantly put-off or undermet costs and society’s official bumbling of them clearly prove that man does not know at present what wealth is nor how much of whatever it may be is progressively available to him," and "The wisest humans recognized in 1810 only one three-hundredth of 1 per cent of the immediately thereafter 'proven value' of the United States’ share of the world’s wealth-generating potentials. Of course, those wisest of men of the times would have seen little they could afford to do."
R. Buckminster Fuller is still well worth reading, if only to ponder his definitions of democracy and wealth:
"Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgment what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect’s function in universe. . . . .
Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives.”

( )
1 vote Paulagraph | May 25, 2014 |
What, forty-four years on, is the future of Spaceship Earth? Ol' Bucky does, to his credit, grasp some essential truths about our environmental position. We have limited resources, we consume too much too fast, and we have no organized means of managing them for our future survival. Hence something must be done. This idea rightfully endures.

I must, however, disagree with his future characterization of the earth as a spaceship - that would imply some military hierarchy, international cooperative order, strict roles and assigned positions. With the present international situation, I suspect that those wealthy ones among us live in cruise ships, and some hundred millions of others are living on the giant plastic garbage island in the Pacific, lashed to our pleasure flotilla and shoveling coal into the boilers.

What else does he offer us, besides this memorable, if flawed, image? Some woolly historicism about Great Pirates who control information. Some Alex Jones stuff about banks. Some strange attempts at metaphysics. The idea of a system being greater than the sum of its parts, coining that hideous cliche of inarticulate business majors everywhere, "synergy". Something about specialization, baby chickens, general systems theory, and so on and so on. Idyllic plans for attempting to rewrite human nature. You start to wonder if he's lost it.

I end with Fuller's closing words:

"Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe."

This is supposed to be a final call to action. Fuller may have been a good scientist, creative engineer and a designer, but a manifesto-writer and coherent futurist he is not. ( )
1 vote HadriantheBlind | Apr 7, 2013 |
Gehört eigentlich zur Pflichtlektüre jedes Menschen. Das Buch eröffnet die Welt des eigenen Geistes und zeigt den Weg, wie wir Menschen die offensichtlichen Probleme, durch unser eigenes Handeln hervorgerufen, lösen können.
Einfach ein geniales Buch. ( )
  AndyCarl | Nov 1, 2009 |
I was drawn to this book by its wonderful title and the recognition that I’d collected a number of quotations by its author without really knowing anything about him.

I found this book to be something of a curate’s egg. In places it uses language to develop ideas in a really clear way. In other parts the language and structure of the description seems to make the ideas rather impenetrable. On balance, however, the ideas win through.

(Having found out a little more about R. Buckminster Fuller I have learned both that this is one of his more accessible volumes, and that his other books may well be worth the challenge.)

It is a book with some wonderful ideas, not least the one captured in the title, that the Earth is a spaceship travelling through space escorted by the Moon and following its mother ship, the Sun. Though written in the 1970 this metaphor, or perhaps its simply a realisation, provides a framework which encompasses many of the problems of sustainable living we are currently grappling with.

Equally the book has some very vivid and enlightening imagery with which to entice the reader to see and begin to challenge their current paradigm. It for example begins with a story of Global Pirates which is used to describe the recent history of western civilisation, its creation of empires and the division of the world into those that have and those that have not. In a dozen pages or so it describes our current paradigm for how the world works and some of the key characteristics of our environment and the thinking this has created.

For example our understanding of need and scarcity, the role of nationality, the use of knowledge. I found the description very thought provoking and began questioning many of the assumptions that drive my, and possibly our current behaviour. He outlined the assumptions that there will always be shortages of resources and food, which underpin a view of haves’ and have-not’s and our need to protect what we have, often at much greater cost than sharing what we have.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a fellow speaker Mr. N Ramanathan (Ram) in Iran last year. He asked me
“When you have an idea. Who does it belong to?”
He didn’t expect an answer, nor do I have one, but what is clear is that it doesn’t belong to me It’s the result of a million connections and so must in some way belong to all of them.

This is a thought provoking book, which though in parts challenging, is concise enough to warrant some re-reading. The ideas may shake your understanding and beliefs, which may be one of the most powerful ways of enabling change. ( )
4 vote Steve55 | Jan 18, 2009 |
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