¶ Spaceship Earth
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Index Entry
“In fact, I can think of only one way of expressing the degree to which interdependence and community have become the destiny of modern man. I borrow the comparison from Professor Buckminster Fuller, who, more clearly than most scientists and innovators, has grasped the implications of our revolutionary technology. The most rational way of considering the whole human race today is to see it as the ship’s crew of a single spaceship on which all of us, with a remarkable combination of security and vulnerability, are making our pilgrimage through infinity. Our planet is not much more than the capsule within which we have to live as human beings if we are to survive the vast space voyage upon which we have been engaged for hundreds of millennia-- but without yet noticing our condition. This space voyage is totally precarious. We depend upon a little envelope of soil and a rather larger envelope of atmosphere for life itself. And both can be contaminated and destroyed. Think what could happen if somebody were to get mad or drunk in a submarine and run for the controls. If some member of the human race gets dead drunk on board our spaceship, we are all in trouble. This is how we have to think of ourselves. We are a ship’s company on a small ship. Rational behavior is the condition of survival.”
