Entry submiited to Metro newspaper for competition to win publication on the front cover. See attached Word document for desired layout, text to be used in editorial as follows
'OPERATING MANUAL FOR SPACESHIP EARTH'
How many of you today on your commute or taking a coffee reading this Metro cover would have conceived that such a document might exist or anyone would have written such a guide?
Not many I suspect. If such a guide existed then you might think it would be secret or a spoof. Neither is the case as this is an essay written in 1963 and published in 1969 by Richard Buckminster Fuller, known affectionately as 'Bucky Fuller', this essay was one amongst many other scientific and philosophical works written during the 20th century by a true genius whose like we see so rarely and whose legacy becomes recognised only once they have gone. Seems to be the way of humanity, knowledge is hard come by but we are slow to react even once the facts are common knowledge.
Do we change our cultures based on science? Very slowly and not without dispute based upon the traditional held up by intuition based on 'feelings' and superstition and irrational beliefs and customs. For the most part in academia the 'irrational' is irrelevant but not so for majorities in this world.
We have potentially created our ultimate destruction through the economic model of financial profit. It has become the face of the potentially most dangerous trait we have, competition. Our Forefathers in academia were wise it seems not to elevate its status to a science. As a paradigm money has served us well and undoubtedly has led to some of the greatest achievements of mankind to date yet is causing the suffering and death of huge numbers
of humanity, not to mention the natural world. Species of flora and fauna are becoming extinct at an alarming rate whilst human population is still increasing to unprecedented levels.
Money (no longer backed by anything of substance - FIAT currency) is in itself endangered but we maintain it because we are afraid of a world without it. A 'drug' pedalled for its own sake, not for the greater good and there are many in the world making this observation. Like any drug it feels good at the time and we know it will lead to ruin but we just want more. Sometimes an addict pulls himself pulls himself back from the brink, sometimes not. We really are better than this but it is the reality that we are engaged in.
Back to 'Bucky’ Fuller. He understood the Earth's place within the cosmos and how it is fuelled - energy supplied by the Sun and the Moon - our basic life giving and sustaining forces and almost never ending sustenance for several billion years at least if we can navigate our way out of our current problems. Until we really comprehend this and grow up out of and beyond our petty squabblings, primarily centred on our fixation with burning fossil fuels and producing trash as a by-product leading to trash as a direct way to making money, and have some intelligence to look at the reality of our dilemma we truly are doomed.
On a universal scale does any of our financial debt and obsession with creating more have the least bearing on anything apart from our demise?
"Our differences are far less than our similarities" (Carl Sagan) - I'm certain Buckminster Fuller would have agreed.
We don't have too much time left to make our future along with those of many other species on planet Earth, a possibility let alone a reality if we are to be brutally honest. In simple evolutionary terms we're a disaster. We've managed to destroy more of our home world than we've created. The tide is turning thanks to technology and an evermore connected world but we need to come together as a whole to realise this.
Jacque Fresco at 95 is a living testament to the wonders of the scientific world and the huge strides that mankind has made in understanding despite world wars, ignorance, denial and the blind competition. He's an inventor and a social engineer. He's the curator of the world movement known as The Venus Project. Despite his age he continues to travel the globe to spread the word of a world based on a humane use of science and technology to benefit all people. He's a beneficiary of the 'The Buckminster Fuller Challenge'. He's out their campaigning for your children’s survival in a world of science and technology to be harnessed for the common good.
As a species in the emergent we have to be able to embrace change and the requirement to move to the next paradigm in our evolutionary course. Our destiny is in developing a synergistic relationship between ourselves and our environment and harnessing the energy provided by the Sun and the Moon. We ignore this at our own peril and spaceship planet Earth will carry on its trajectory through our solar system without us.
'Take the initiative. 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.' Richard Buckminster Fuller - Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
Some of Buckminster Fuller's last words of wisdom from ‘Cosmography’ published in 1992
'The dark ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This Dark Ages prison has no steel bars, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation.'
'Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.'
Please think about this and the pointlessness and waste in what you do in your lives if all you do is to maintain tradition and the ways of the past. We are mere passengers on 'Spaceship Earth'. We can destroy everything that is living now but not the planet. It is a choice, one of information and education through scientific discovery and not politics or greed or superstition. I urge anyone of you that has understood one word of one concept that I have explained to look to people like Richard Buckminster Fuller and Jacque Fresco as having the answers to your children’s and their children's future in a world of sustainability, scientific endeavour and creativity for the common prosperity and the individual’s fulfilment. We are in our emergent and without significant change in the way we conduct our affairs we can look forward to a dysfunctional society caused by economic decline through inability to pay national and individual debts along with climate change, ocean acidification and related depletion of natural and farmed resources.
We have a future. Bucky saw it, I see it, a 95 year old social engineer and inventor sees it too. I really hope you can. It will be fun and fulfilling but it's up to us to make it our future on our spaceship fuelled by solar radiation and gravity well in to the future. This can be reality and not a dream of Utopia. A resource based economy will enable us to realise it.
Buckminster Fuller Institute
http://www.bfi.org/
The Venus Project
http://thevenusproject.com/