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:
“Go on then in doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword; shew that reformation is more practicable by operating on the mind than on the body of man.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“If the accumulated wealth of the past generations is thus tainted,—no matter how much of it is offered to us,—we must begin to consider if it were not the nobler part to renounce it, and to put ourselves in primary relations with the soil and nature, and abstaining from whatever is dishonest and unclean, to take each of us bravely his part, with his own hands, in the manual labor of the world.”
—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)
“In days gone by, we were afraid of dying in dishonor or a state of sin. Nowadays, we are afraid of dying fools. Now the fact is that there is no Extreme Unction to absolve us of foolishness. We endure it here on earth as subjective eternity.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)