Actual satelite photo of earth at night, image courtesy of NASA, click here to see more images

Our Spaceship Earth: The purpose of this section of the site is to provide access to resources and tools that will assist visitors in acquiring a comprehensive understanding and visual grasp of the status of our planet's life support systems. The Dymaxion Map, World Game, and the Design Science Decade represent Fuller's pioneering work in this field and serve as important historical and inspirational reference points.

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What is Spaceship Earth ?

The following definition is from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Spaceship Earth is a world view term usually expressing concern over the use of limited resources available on Earth.

It may have been derived from a passage in Henry George's best known work, Progress and Poverty¹ (1879). From book IV, chapter 2: "It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we sail through space. If the bread and beef above decks seem to grow scarce, we but open a hatch and there is a new supply, of which before we never dreamed. And very great command over the services of others comes to those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to say, 'This is mine!'"

The phrase was also popularized by Buckminster Fuller, who wrote and published a book in 1963 under the title of Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth². This quotation, referring to fossil fuels, reflects his approach: "[W]e can make all of humanity successful through science's world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years' energy conservation aboard our Spaceship Earth. These energy savings have been put into our Spaceship's life-regeneration-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter functions."

In 1966 Kenneth E. Boulding used the phrase in the title of an essay, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth³. Boulding described the past open economy of apparently illimitable resources, which he said he was tempted to call the "cowboy economy", and continued: "The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the 'spaceman' economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system". (David Korten would take up the "cowboys in a spaceship" theme in his 1995 book When Corporations Rule the World.)

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For related content see also:

• RBF World Map
• RBF World Game
• Design Science Decade
• Big Picture - Small World⋅ An excellent collection of short flash animated movies that provide a big picture overview of pressing issues facing humanity produced by Medard Gabel
• World Resources Insitute
• WorldWatch.org ⋅ Independent research for an environmentally sustainable and socially just society
• One Planet Many People⋅ One Planet, Many People: Atlas of Our Changing Environment demonstrates how our growing number of people and their consumption patterns are shrinking our natural resource base. The challenge is, how do we satisfy human needs without compromising the health of ecosystems. One Planet Many People is an additional wake-up call to this need.
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  “Humanity now exceeds the planet's capacity to sustain us.”
  
  The Living Planet Report is the World Wildlife Fund's periodic update on the state of the world's ecosystems - as measured by the Living Planet Index - and the human pressures on them through the consumption of renewable natural resources - as measured by the Ecological Footprint.
• The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA): Living Beyond Our Means: Natural Assets and Human Well-being
  The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) is an international work program designed to meet the needs of decision makers and the public for scientific information concerning the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and options for responding to those changes. The MA was launched by U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan in June 2001 and was completed in March 2005. It will help to meet assessment needs of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Convention to Combat Desertification, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, and the Convention on Migratory Species, as well as needs of other users in the private sector and civil society.
• The UN Millennium Development Goals: The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) -- which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 -- form a blueprint agreed to by all the world's countries and all the world's leading development institutions. They have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world's poorest.
  See also BFI's Design Science Lab