¶ Spaceship Earth
← Spaceship Earth | Spaceship Earth →
Index Entry
Once upon a time and aboard a spaceship there were almost four billion passengers, each so small and the ship so large that the passengers wandering about on its spherical deck, pulled feetward toward its center of gravity, could see only about one two-millionth of the ship’s total deck surface at any one time. Usually they were all told, only a millionth of it in their entire lifetime. As a consequence they did not realize that the only locally irregular surface on which they walked did not stretch away as a plane to infinity and was in fact a finite or closed spherical surface system.
That spaceship had been given the name ‘Earth’ by its passengers, this name being descriptive of its hard-packed dust, dirt, and rock-surfaced deck stretching away surrounded by water seemingly to infinity. So impressed have the passengers been with that stationary, egocentric, two-dimensional concept that they have for long, and as yet, begin their children’s education with plane geometry-- its surfaces and lines-- stretching away to infinity. . . .
Three-quarters of Spaceship Earth’s surface is covered with water and only about half of the dry one-quarter is both
