Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
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| Author | Buckminster Fuller |
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Publication date
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1968 |
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Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth is a short book by R. Buckminster Fuller, first published in 1968, following an address with a similar title given to the 50th annual convention of the American Planners Association in the Shoreham Hotel, Washington D.C., on 16 October 1967.
The book relates Earth to a spaceship flying through space. The spaceship has a finite amount of resources and cannot be resupplied.
Describes how people perceive his prognostications, and the conclusion that fairly reasonable forecasts can be made of approx 25 years.
The idea that specialization is society's vehicle, but perhaps unnatural.
The concept of the Great Pirate also emerges as the first peoples to undertake sea vessels and first sea traders.
The Great Pirate concept is explained in depth, and the source of their power is that they are the only masters of global information in a time where people are focused locally. Specifically, the Great Pirates are aware that resources are not evenly distributed around the world, so that items which are abundant in one area are scarce in another. This gives rise to trade which the Great Pirates exploit for their own advantage.
Power struggles for waterways ensue, requiring people like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo to design better defenses for the Great Pirates. The Pirates establish governments in various areas and support leaders who will defend their trade routes.
As engineers become involved with the Great Pirates many new concepts appear, but the main one was of the Navy. As the size of the people in the Great Pirates' employment grow, training becomes a necessity, and the beginnings of schools and colleges ensue. Monarchs are encouraged to develop civil service systems to provide secure but specialized employment for their brightest subjects, which prevents them from competing with the Great Pirates in their lucrative global trading. Thus the Great Pirates guarded the advantages that their unique global perspective revealed.
World War I emerges as the struggle between the 'out-pirates' (electronic and chemical warfare) and the 'in-pirates' (electromagnetics). This change from the visible to the invisible forced the Great Pirates to rely on experts, which causes the end of the Great Pirates (who previously had been the only ones that were truly multi-disciplined).
The public is unaware that Great Pirates have been ruling the earth, and the role falls back to kings and politicians, though the frameworks of trade, rating and accounting remain.
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