Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth is a metaphor which suggests that the earth is a small, vulnerable craft in space.

Adlai Stevenson used the metaphor in his presidential campaign speeches during the 1950s, but it is not clear who originated it. Perhaps R. Buckminster Fuller was most responsible for popularizing it; he wrote a book entitled Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and was described by one biographer as the ship's "pilot." Fuller was impressed by how negligible the craft was in the infinity of the universe, how fast it was flying, and how well it had been "designed" to support life.

Fuller took the metaphor further, noting that what interested him about the earth was "that it is a mechanical vehicle, just as is an automobile." He noted that people are quick to service their automobiles and keep them in running condition but that "we have not been seeing our Spaceship Earth as an integrally-designed machine which to be persistently successful must be comprehended and serviced in total." He did observe one difference between the spaceship and a car: there is no owner's manual for the earth. The lack of operating instructions was significant to Fuller because it has forced humans to use their intellect; but he also maintained that "designed into this Spaceship Earth's total wealth was a big safety factor" which allowed the support system to survive human ignorance until that intellect was sufficiently developed. It was Fuller's lifelong quest to persuade humans to use their intellect and become good pilots and mechanics for Spaceship Earth. He was an optimist, and believed that humans are all astronauts—"always have been, and so long as we exist, always will be"—and as such can learn the mechanics of the system well enough to operate the vehicle satisfactorily.

Political scientist Barbara Ward borrowed the phrase from Fuller to claim that "planet earth, on its journey through infinity, has acquired the intimacy, the fellowship, and the vulnerability of a spaceship." She claimed this image to be "the most rational way of considering the whole human race today." Humans must begin to see humanity "as the ship's crew of a single spaceship on which all of us, with a remarkable combination of security and vulnerability, are making our pilgrimage through infinity." Ward used the metaphor to argue for the reality of global community: "This is how we have to think of ourselves. We are a ship's company on a small ship. Rational behavior is the condition of survival." The rational behavior she advocated was building the institutions, the laws, the habits, and the traditions needed to get along together in the world.

Nigel Calder appreciated the value of the spaceship metaphor and described it in more specific terms: "Whether its watchkeepers were microbes or dinosaurs, the Earth system of rocks, air, water and life worked like the life-support system of a manned spacecraft." He went on to suggest that "the gas and water tanks of Spaceship Earth are the air and the oceans" and that "the sun is the spaceship's main power supply." Calder used the metaphor as an introduction to a detailed consideration of what he describes as a new "Earth-system science," moving from there to a depiction of the globe as a total system.

Kenneth Boulding , an economist, has made essentially the same point, describing an inevitable transition from a "cowboy economy" where support systems are open with no linkage between inputs and outputs, to a "spaceman" economy where "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 which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy."

The purpose of the spaceship metaphor is to persuade people that the earth has limits and that humans must respect those limits. It provides a modern, new-age image of a small, comprehensible system, which many people can understand. In that sense, the metaphor helps people understand their relationship to the environment by depicting a system, as Ward notes, that is small enough to be vulnerable and needs to be cared for if it is to sustain life.

But the image can also be delusive, even specious, with negative implications not generally recognized. A spaceship is an artifact, a structure of human creation. Some have argued that depicting the earth as such is seductive, but borders on the arrogant by implying, as Fuller seems to, that humans can completely "control" the operations of the earth. Furthermore, spaceships are commonly thought of as small and crowded, with a life-support system devoted exclusively to human inhabitants. Since humans are using more and more of the planet's resources for their own benefit, and the pressure of an increasing human population is extinguishing other life-forms, some environmentalists argue that the spaceship metaphor should be used with caution.

See also Environmental ethics; Green politics

[Gerald L. Young Ph.D. ]

RESOURCES

BOOKS

Boulding, K. "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth" and "Spaceship Earth Revisited." In Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology and Ethics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993.

Calder, N. Spaceship Earth. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991.

Fuller, R. B. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969.

Ward, B. Spaceship Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966.