Fossil Fuels are Humanity's "Starter"
Now we have comprehended and peeled off the layers of petals
which disclosed not only that physical energy is conserved but also
that it is ever increasingly deposited as a fossil-fuel savings account
aboard our Spaceship Earth through photosynthesis and
progressive, complex, topsoil fossilization buried ever deeper
within Earth's crust by frost, wind, flood, volcanoes, and earthquake
upheavals. We have thus discovered also that we can make all of
humanity successful through science's world-e...
notesThey are here to get the engine of sustainable energy running, we have to get the engine running before they are exhausted or the car of civilization is dead.
A Logical Process to Understand True Wealth
I have tried out the following intellectual filtering procedure with
both multi-thousand general public audiences and with audiences
of only a hundred or so advanced scholars and have never
experienced disagreement with my progression of residual
conclusions. I proceed as follows: I am going to make a series of
analytical statements to you, and if anyone disagrees with me on
any statement we will discard that statement. Only those of all my
statements which remain 100 per cent unprotected wil... notesIt is not the artificial concept of wealth we have invented, but the resources we use to combat the forces of entropy and survive.
Humanity has Reached the Hatching Point
To begin our position-fixing
aboard our Spaceship Earth we must first acknowledge that the
abundance of immediately consumable, obviously desirable or
utterly essential resources have been sufficient until now to allow us
to carry on despite our ignorance. Being eventually exhaustible and
spoilable, they have been adequate only up to this critical moment.
This cushion-for-error of humanity's survival and growth up to now
was apparently provided just as a bird inside of the egg is provided
wi... notesThinking of our Earth as an egg, we have been living on the yolk so far. We are reaching the point, by burning our fossile fuels off and exceeding the production capacity of our agriculture, where our intellect must launch us into the stars.
Spaceship Earth Didn't Come with Instructions
One of the interesting things to me about our spaceship is that it is
a mechanical vehicle, just as is an automobile. If you own an
automobile, you realize that you must put oil and gas into it, and
you must put water in the radiator and take care of the car as a
whole. You begin to develop quite a little thermodynamic sense.
You know that you're either going to have to keep the machine in
good order or it's going to be in trouble and fail to function. We
have not been seeing our Spaceship Ea... notesIt requires maintenance in order to continue supporting our growing civilization, but we have to discover, through empiricism and experimentation, what that maintenance is.
The Parameters of "Spaceship Earth"
Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter,
which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of
space. Our nearest star — our energy-supplying mother-ship, the
Sun — is ninety-two million miles away, and the nearest star is one
hundred thousand times further away. It takes approximately four
and one third years for light to get to us from the next nearest
energy supply ship star. That is the kind of space-distanced pattern
we are flying. Our little Spa... notesOur place in the cosmos. This is the situation in which we find ourselves.
The Computer is the Solutions to Over-Specialization
Getting ready for the assumed inexorable Armageddon, each
applied science and all of the great scientific specialization
capabilities only toward weaponry, thus developing the ability to
destroy themselves totally with no comprehensively organized
oppositional thinking capability and initiative powerful enough to
co-ordinate and prevent it. Thus by 1946, we were on the swift way
to extinction despite the inauguration of the United Nations, to
which none of the exclusive sovereign prerogatives... notesWith computers taking over the responsibility of specializing in computational and processing tasks, human minds are freed to resume our plasticity or "comprehensivlty" as Buckminster puts it.
Spaceship Earth Has 150 Admirals
Spaceship Earth now has 150 admirals. The five admirals in the
staterooms immediately above the ship's fuel tanks claim that they own
the oil. The admirals with staterooms surrounding the ship's kitchen,
dining rooms, and food refrigerators claim they own all the food. Those
with a stateroom next to a lifeboat claim that they own the lifeboat,
and so forth. They then have an onboard game called balance of trade.
Very shortly the majority of admirals have a deficit balance. All the
while the s... notesAnd they are all working selfishly and plotting against one another while no one is steering the ship.
