Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, by Bucky Fuller

Here are my notes from this excellent work.

• Humanity often ingeniously invents solutions to special-case experiences. For instance, a shipwreck victim uses a floating piano-top as a life preserver. However, this is not to say that we should utilize piano-tops as the best solution to staying afloat in this type of situation. His analogy exemplifies how we are "accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem." (p. 9)

• As children, our natural propensity was to think from whole to parts, and then because of social pressures (such as from our educational system), we came to have narrow, short-sighted specializations ... and to let politicians solve our big problems. (p. 10) "...we have disregarded all children's significantly spontaneous and comprehensive curiosity and in our formal education have deliberately instituted processes leading only to narrow specialization." (p. 14)

• "Society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking." (p. 13)

• "Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together. One of humanity's prime drives is to understand and be understood." (p. 13)

• The "Great Pirates" prospered because of their comprehensive capability, and held their power by assigning specialist roles to intelligent people who might otherwise also see the big picture and therefore have equal power. Examples are Da Vinci and Michaelangelo.

• The second law of thermodynamics, entropy, involves things moving from a more organized, concentrated state to a more disorganized, dispersed state. Many scientists thought this showed that the universe was in a state of continuous depletion, and that there were not enough resources to support everyone's needs. His belief is that "science now finds there can be ample for all, but only if the sovereign fences are completely removed." (p. 38)

• Extinction is the result of overspecialization; he gives two examples, birds and horses. (pp. 39-41)

• Politicians assume either you or I will survive, not both, which is the major reason for war.

• "Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were aboard a ship." (p. 50)

• "There is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it. ... Thus ... we are learning how we safely can anticipate the consequences of an increasing number of alternative ways of extending our satisfactory survival and growth---both physical and metaphysical. ... The designed omission ... has forced man to discover retrospectively just what his most important forward capabilities are. His intellect had to discover itself. ... Objective deployment of those generalized principles in rearranging the physical resources of environment seems to be leading to humanity's eventually total success and readiness to cope with far vaster problems of universe." (pp. 52-55)

• He compares us to a bird just hatched, whose egg supplied just enough life-supporting nutriment to allow it to develop to that point. He urges us to reemploy our innate drive for comprehensive understanding. "Becoming deliberately expansive instead of contractive, we ask, 'How do we think in terms of wholes'?" (p. 59)

• He advocates using general systems analysis in attacking the big problems we now have. He explains how synergy allows us to continually do more with less.

• He talks about pollution---both of the environment and of the mind---as the largest human survival problem. He relates how we often say "but it costs too much". (p. 78) Usually the result of looking at these problems is under-budgeted solutions. However, how many times have we seen budgets for weaponry exceed what we previously thought we cannot afford? "Thus under lethal emergencies vast new magnitudes of wealth come mysteriously into effective operation." (p. 79) He makes the point that investing in new technologies is quickly repaid by increased productivity, and then makes the point that our accounting systems do not really know what wealth is. (pp. 79-83)

• Fuller then defines wealth: "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." (p. 85) He adds that the only way to increase our wealth is by "our successfully impounding more of the Sun's radiant energy aboard our spaceship". (p. 86) Burning up fossil fuels or radioactive materials is ignorant, lethal, and irresponsible.

• Scientists formerly thought that entropy was causing the continuing disorganization of all things. He makes the point that energy is not really lost, but just transformed---such as into increased metaphysical know-how. "We then see that the part of our wealth which is physical energy is conserved. It cannot be exhausted, cannot be spent, which means exhausted. We realize that the word 'spending' is now scientifically meaningless and therefore obsolete." (p. 91)

• He continues with explaining how energy is transformed. "From this moment of comprehending energy circuits, and thenceforth, man's really important function in universe was his intellection, which taught him to intercept and redirect local energy patternings in universe and thus to reorganize and shunt those flow patterns so that they would impinge on levers to increase humanity's capabilities to do the manifold tasks leading directly and indirectly toward humanity's forward metabolic regeneration." ... "Freeing his time for its more effective exploratory investment is to give man increased wealth." (p. 92)

• Continuing on about wealth, he states "The know-how can only increase... everytime we use our wealth it increases... Whereas entropy is increasing disorder evoked by dispersion of energy, wealth locally is increased order---that is to say, the increasingly orderly concentration of physical power in our ever-expanding locally explored and comprehended universe by the metaphysical capability of man..." (p. 93) However, "economic accounting systems are unrealistically identifying wealth only as matter and are entering know-how on the books only as salary liabilities"... (p. 94) "All our formal accounting is anti-synergetic, depreciative, and entropic mortgagization, meaning death by inversally compounding interest. Wealth as anti-entropy developes compound interest through synergy, which growth is as yet entirely unaccounted anywhere around Earth in any of its political economic systems." (p. 95) For instance, in the 20^th century, humanity has increased from 1 to 44% being able to survive at a previously unseen standard of living.

• He reiterates that it is only under threat of annihilation by enemies, and perhaps in aerospace, that we invest in technologies to significantly change the course of humanity. (I personally believe that this is changing. For example, I believe that the Internet is a potentially huge increase in wealth, because it is providing ever-increasing numbers of people with large amounts of information, allowing us to become more self-educated and also to have more time to explore our intense interests.)

• He contends that "the highest priority need of the world society at the present moment is a realistic economic accounting system which will rectify, for instance, such nonsense as the fact that a top toolmaker in India, the highest paid of all craftsmen, gets only as much per month for his work in India as he could earn per day for the same amount of work if he were employed in Detroit, Michigan". (p. 107) He also admits that the Indian culture teaches that suffering (which may be produced by poverty) is necessary to enter heaven.

• He relates that world wars have produced unexpected increases in wealth.

• He finishes by saying that what we should all be doing is to think clearly. He proposes using our wealth for fellowships that allow people to develop their mental and intuitive capabilities. Again, he urges us not to use fossil and atomic fuels to sustain life, which is in essence burning up our ship to survive. He advocates, as in other publications, that we would be better off renting than owning many tools (lawnmowers and rototillers come to my mind as good examples). We can eliminate the barriers of sovereign nations and work together in a design-science revolution, which will ever-increasingly improve everyone's wealth---which is "sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives". (reiterated, from p. 85) He thinks that the computer will help to answer major questions/issues that keep groups separated into nations and political groups. In short, cooperate, don't compete!