Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth (or Spacecraft Earth or Spaceship Planet Earth) is a worldview encouraging everyone on Earth to act as a harmonious crew working toward the greater good.

Contents History See also References

Further reading Photo of the Earth taken from Apollo 8, called External links Earthrise (1968).

History

The earliest known use[1] is a passage in Henry George's best known work, Progress and Poverty[2] (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 Epcot's Spaceship Earth services of others comes to those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to say, "This is mine!" Nature timeline

0 — ←Earliest apes Vertebrates ←Earliest mammals George Orwell later paraphrases Henry George – ←Cambrian explosion ←Earliest animals/plants in The Road to Wigan Pier: -1 — Multicellular life ←Sexual reproduction – L -2 — i The world is a raft sailing through f – ←Atmospheric oxygen space with, potentially, plenty of e Photosynthesis provisions for everybody; the idea -3 — ←Earliest oxygen – ←Earliest oxygen that we must all cooperate and see Single-celled life -4 — ←Earliest life to it that everyone does his fair Water share of the work and gets his fair – ←Earth/Solar System -5 — share of the provisions seems so Accelerated expansion blatantly obvious that one would – say that no one could possibly fail -6 — to accept it unless he had some – ←Alpha Centauri corrupt motive for clinging to the -7 — present system. – -8 — Matter-dominated – era In 1965, Adlai Stevenson made a famous speech ←Milky Way spirals to the UN, in which he said: -9 — – -10 — ←Andromeda Galaxy We travel together, passengers on a – little space ship, dependent on its -11 — vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its – ←Omega Centauri security and peace; preserved from -12 — annihilation only by the care, the – work, and, I will say, the love we -13 — Reionization ←Earliest quasar/sbh ←Earliest galaxy give our fragile craft. We cannot Dark Ages ←Earliest stars ←Universe (−13.80) maintain it half fortunate, half (billion years ago) Clickable miserable, half confident, half ( despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.[3]

The following year, Spaceship Earth became the title of a book by a friend of Stevenson's, the internationally influential economist Barbara Ward.

Also in 1966, Kenneth E. Boulding, who was influenced by reading Henry George,[4] used the phrase in the title of an essay, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.[5] 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.)

The phrase was also popularized by Buckminster Fuller, who published a book in 1968 under the title of Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.[6] This quotation, referring to fossil fuels, reflects his approach:

... we 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.

United Nations Secretary-General U Thant spoke of Spaceship Earth on Earth Day March 21, 1971 at the ceremony of the ringing of the Japanese Peace Bell: "May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth as it continues to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life."[7]

Spaceship Earth is the name given to the 50 m (160 ft) diameter geodesic sphere that greets visitors at the entrance of Walt Disney World's Epcot theme park. Housed within the sphere is a dark ride that serves to explore the history of communications and promote Epcot's founding principles, "[a] belief and pride in man's ability to shape a world that offers hope to people everywhere."[8] A previous incarnation of the ride, narrated by actor Jeremy Irons and revised in 2008, was explicit in its message:

Like a grand and miraculous spaceship, our planet has sailed through the universe of time, and for a brief moment, we have been among its many passengers... We now have the ability and the responsibility to build new bridges of acceptance and co-operation between us, to create a better world for ourselves and our children as we continue our amazing journey aboard Spaceship Earth.[9]

The term "Spaceship Earth" is frequently used on the labels of Emanuel Bronner's products to emphasize and promote his belief in the unity of humankind.

Clickable Location of Earth (view • discuss)

Planet Earth Solar System Gould Belt Orion Arm Milky Way Local Group

Virgo SCl Laniakea SCl Observable Universe

See also Collective intelligence Earth phase Earth's orbit Environmental protection Gaia hypothesis Global catastrophic risk Global citizenship Humankind Mass collaboration Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen Overview effect Planetary boundaries Sharing economy Spaceship Earth (Epcot) Spaceship Earth (simple wiki) Sustainability The Zeitgeist Movement World community World peace

References 1. Kalen, San (2010). "Ecology Comes of Age: NEPA'S Lost Mandate" (http://scholarship.law.duk e.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=delpf). DUKE Environmental Law & Policy Forum. 21:113 (Fall). Retrieved March 5, 2016. 2. The text on wikisource differs from versions available here (http://www.econlib.org/library/YPD Books/George/grgPP20.html#Book%20IV,%20Chapter%202) and here (http://www.schalkenba ch.org/library/george.henry/pp042.html) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/2005090904270 5/http://www.schalkenbach.org/library/george.henry/pp042.html) September 9, 2005, at the Wayback Machine. 3. Speech to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, July 9, 1965 (http://www.bartleby.com/73/477.html) 4. King, J. E. "Economic Exiles". Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 5. Boulding, Kenneth E. (1966). "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth" (https://web.arc hive.org/web/20070203191826/http://dieoff.org/page160.htm). Archived from the original (http:// dieoff.org/page160.htm) on February 3, 2007. Retrieved September 7, 2007. 6. Fuller, Buckminster (1963). Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (https://web.archive.org/web/ 20100717141812/http://bfi.org/about-bucky/resources/books/operating-manual-spaceship-eart h). New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. ISBN 0-525-47433-1. Archived from the original (http://www.bfi. org/about-bucky/resources/books/operating-manual-spaceship-earth) on July 17, 2010. The quotation is from Section 8: The regenerative landscape (http://www.bfi.org/about-bucky/resour ces/books/operating-manual-spaceship-earth/chapter-8-regenerative-landscape) Archived (http s://web.archive.org/web/20100823122401/http://www.bfi.org/about-bucky/resources/books/oper ating-manual-spaceship-earth/chapter-8-regenerative-landscape) August 23, 2010, at the Wayback Machine. 7. Lawrence, Lee; John McConnell (July 3, 1999). "Earth Day: Past, Present, Future" (http://www. wowzone.com/mc-lee.htm). Wish Only Well. Retrieved September 7, 2007. 8. Korkis, Jim. "WDW Chronicles: 1982 Opening of Epcot Center" (http://allears.net/ae/issue678.h tm). Retrieved January 4, 2015. 9. Irons, Jeremy. "SE Script - Irons Version" (http://www.intercot.com/edc/SpaceshipEarth/spscript. html). Retrieved January 4, 2015.