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 original edition (ISBN 0-525-47433-1) is now out of print, although partial/complete copies of the text may be found on the internet, both hard-bound and paperback. However, a new paperback edition (July 15, 2008) is now available (ISBN 3-037-78126-2), (ISBN 978-3037781265).
The book relates Earth to a spaceship flying through space. The spaceship has a finite amount of resources and cannot be resupplied.
Fuller would later partner with the Walt Disney Company to consult on an attraction at EPCOT Center called Spaceship Earth, which opened with the park in 1982.
Famous quotes containing the words operating, manual, spaceship and/or earth:
“Many people operate under the assumption that since parenting is a natural adult function, we should instinctively know how to do it—and do it well. The truth is, effective parenting requires study and practice like any other skilled profession. Who would even consider turning an untrained surgeon loose in an operating room? Yet we “operate” on our children every day.”
—Louise Hart (20th century)
“Criticism is infested with the cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit to imitate the sayers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“As we begin to comprehend that the earth itself is a kind of manned spaceship hurtling through the infinity of space—it will seem increasingly absurd that we have not better organized the life of the human family.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“Under the one word “house” are included the schoolhouse, the almshouse, the jail, the tavern, the dwellinghouse; and the meanest shed or cave in which men live contains elements of all these. But nowhere on the earth stands the entire and perfect house.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)