The Earth is an Energy-Collecting Body

The kinetic intercomplementarity of finite Universe requires that what disassociates here must associate there—and also there. High-pressure con¬ ditions at one point are balanced by low pressures elsewhere. The stars are all radiantly dissipating energy. The Earth, however, is a celestial center where energies from the stars are being collected and photosynthetically combined in an orderly molecular assembly as hydrocarbons, which are consumed by orderly designed species, and then self-multiply to make these biological species grow, undergo transformations, and eventually be buned deeply beneath the Earth's surface. When, after many billions of years, enough orderly-molecule energy has been impounded aboard our spherical space vehicle Earth, the Earth itself will become a radiant star, as the dis¬ cards of other burned-out and dissipated stars are concurrently aggregated in billions of local elsewheres—some trillions of years hence also to become stars.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (1981)

• thermodynamics