Spaceship Earth, Always Has Been: An Earth Day Special (Video Narration Inside) (April 2023)
Myth’s Note: Yes, there’s a video narration for today’s publication - here’s the YouTube hyperlink: “Spaceship Earth, Always Has Been: An Earth Day Special”.
Very rarely do I ever share my voice – the last time I did so as Myth was through a provocative line of questioning directed to Robert Evans years ago during his r/collapse AMA on Discord.
Please forgive me for my truly awful video and sound editing, background noises, and frequent stumbling – this is my first attempt with this type of software (not to mention Youtube), and this attempted narration is around 30 minutes long.
This is not a video essay, just a slightly dressed up narration intended to give everyone something to listen to in the background as they read today’s written publication. That said, please let me know if you’d like me to give this another shot in the future.
Feel free to share my article or video today, and know that any recommendations for improvement are always appreciated. At the very least, now you all know that I have a mind, a sense of humour, and a voice to boot.
And finally, a small thank you to u/xanthotic and u/MBDowd for their review and support!
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Hello everyone, and welcome to Spaceship Earth, Always Has Been: An Earth Day Special.
As today (UTC) is the anniversary of Earth Day, I wanted to explore one of my favourite metaphors for the predicament of humankind: Spaceship Earth. A grand vessel that carries all of its passengers in a shared space, not only in place but also in time - one that depends upon every single one of its inhabitants to work together for the benefit of all lest the ship’s life support systems be lost to denudation and disaster.
As an idea that only came to modern prominence in the 1960s, Spaceship Earth captures the popular imagination of the Space Race – a time in which only the stars themselves were considered to be the limits we face. With all that is happening around us, perhaps it is time again to revive this concept, and what better way to do so than with Earth Day being finally upon us.
Today’s piece is divided into five parts, a summary followed by four quotes from various books and articles, with a little comic provided at each intermission as an incentive and as a narrative in itself. These parts are as follows:
I. Summary – Spaceship Earth, Always Has Been;
II. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Buckminster Fuller (1968);
III. The Coming Economics of Spaceship Earth, Kenneth Boulding (1966);
IV. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Carl Sagan (1994); and
V. Humanity's Coming Of Age On Planet Earth, Adam Frank (2015)
And so, without further ado, please enjoy!
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I. Summary – Spaceship Earth, Always Has Been
First, we’ll start with Buckminster Fuller and Kenneth Boulding – the former being the individual most famously associated with the concept of "Spaceship Earth", while the latter is the academic who actually brought this metaphor to modern prominence.
Buckminster Fuller remarks that our trusty vessel – Spaceship Earth – did not come with an operating manual. This lack of practical instruction required us to use the most of our physical, intellectual, and spiritual skills to explore and exploit our common inheritance - our universal endowment, for all species past, present, and future.
Thankfully, Spaceship Earth was extraordinarily well designed and provisioned when Homo sapiens first emerged as a complex, intelligent, and technologically capable species many thousands of years ago. Fuller, however, warns us that Earth’s bounty ("our cushion for survival") shall not last forever, and that our consequent long-term survival depends upon us – all of us aboard Spaceship Earth – to learn to leave the comforts of the nest and to take control of our future for ourselves. The days of humanity’s childhood, along with its relentless abuse of Nature’s free gifts, are coming to an end.
In the second excerpt, Kenneth Boulding warns us of the terrible situation that we’ve set up for ourselves. He describes the coming economics of Spaceship Earth, where our vessel transitions from a seemingly infinite and endless frontier to plunder (a “cowboy economy”) to the terribly denuded, constrained, and fragile spaceman economy of the future. A place where growth and excess cannot be pursued as a means of prosperity and success any longer. A vessel where we must minimize throughput and impact for any chance of long-term success. A starship where there is no escape from the grim Second Law of Thermodynamics, and a reality where the large energy inputs which we’ve obtained from fossil fuels are strictly temporary.
Boulding further describes how humanity is well into the midst of discovering how our once seemingly endless planet is very much a closed system, save for the consistent but diffuse energy inputs we receive from Sol – our local star. Aboard Spaceship Earth, it is not only a matter of pillaging its once-plentiful resources for some forgotten future and for any chance for an ecological birthright – but a trial of learning how to live with the self-created pollutants that now permeate every deck aboard our vessel.
Whereas Fuller is far more idealistic, daring humanity to embrace its uncertain future on board Spaceship Earth, Boulding openly questions and berates his fellow industrial humanity for their lack of consideration and compassion towards our vessel’s future passengers. He even goes one step further, framing the skeptics among his audience with an assortment of incisive questions: “What has posterity ever done for me?” and “Why should we not maximize the welfare of this generation at the cost of posterity? “Apres nous, le deluge” has been the motto of not insignificant numbers of human societies”. It’s a philosophical understanding of our world that has only reigned supreme for many decades, one only made possible in the Age of Exuberance, but it is not one that will serve us well in the future to come for Spaceship Earth.
The last two sections of today’s piece are quotes from notable astronomers, who may perhaps have the best perspective on our place in the universe.
Third, Carl Sagan reminds us that Spaceship Earth is an extraordinarily minute and insignificant speck in the known universe – a mote of dust that contains all of our greatest virtues and sins, successes and failures, and every accomplishment and catastrophe ever created or condemned by human hands. He also reminds us not only of our unique place in the universe with an extraordinarily optimistic bent, but that the only help – the only rescue we can depend upon – will only come from ourselves, from the only world we’ve ever known. And so, it is up to us to determine whether we will save its remaining passengers yet.
And finally, fourth, we have Adam Frank. As a fellow accomplished astronomer, he notes that perhaps a genuine re-assessment of our role aboard Spaceship Earth is in order. A new perspective that requires us to shed contemporary ideologies and politics, if only for a moment, and to address everyone as they truly are on board Spaceship Earth.
The long-term climatic perspective shows us that our home is an unbelievably ancient vessel, and that it has existed in many different forms before, as a planet riddled by the scars of mass extinctions and geological events. The long view shows us that life upon Spaceship Earth, along with the greater biosphere, co-evolves together – and that both deeply affect one another. Earth is a planet that has long existed without humans, and could very well be transformed into one that can no longer accommodate our continued existence – a fate created by our own hands.
As all four authors have either explained or insinuated, planet Earth is an extraordinarily multifaceted and interconnected litany of complex systems. Not only will our future require the full depths of our talents to navigate, but it will also necessitate that humanity become the symbiotic pilots and equal partners of Spaceship Earth if we are truly to have any prospect of long-term survival.
Industrial humanity may very well not survive the perils of the coming centuries, but we can still leave behind the seeds of success – the lifeboats – for an ecological civilization for the future to come on Spaceship Earth. As Britt Wray explains best, “it is not too late to build the oases of existence we strive for, where we can practise being the kinds of people we want to be for one another, with more compassion for the Earth itself and all its life forms.”
Therefore, the onus is on us to take on this mantle of responsibility for Spaceship Earth, to exercise our abilities to keep its myriad life support systems intact and flourishing – not only for now, but for all those who come after. It is time for us to fully realize and act upon our unique relationship not only in the universe – but with Spaceship Earth itself.
Welcome to Spaceship Earth, always has been.
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II. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Buckminster Fuller (1968)
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 supplying starship. That is the kind of space-distanced pattern we are flying. Our little Spaceship Earth is right now travelling at sixty thousand miles an hour around the sun and is also spinning axially, which, at the latitude of Washington, D. C., adds approximately one thousand miles per hour to our motion. Each minute we both spin at one hundred miles and zip in orbit at one thousand miles. That is a whole lot of spin and zip. When we launch our rocketed space capsules at fifteen thousand miles an hour, that additional acceleration speed we give the rocket to attain its own orbit around our speeding Spaceship Earth is only one-fourth greater than the speed of our big planetary spaceship.
Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship. And our spaceship is so superbly designed as to be able to keep life regenerating on board despite the phenomenon, entropy, by which all local physical systems lose energy. So we have to obtain our biological life-regenerating energy from another spaceship: the sun.
Our sun is flying in company with us, within the vast reaches of the Galactic system, at just the right distance to give us enough radiation to keep us alive, yet not close enough to burn us up. And the whole scheme of Spaceship Earth and its live passengers is so superbly designed that the Van Allen belts, which we didn’t even know we had until yesterday, filter the sun and other star radiation which as it impinges upon our spherical ramparts is so concentrated that if we went nakedly outside the Van Allen belts it would kill us. Our Spaceship Earth’s designed infusion of that radiant energy of the stars is processed in such a way that you and I can carry on safely. You and I can go out and take a sunbath, but are unable to take in enough energy through our skins to keep alive. So part of the invention of the Spaceship Earth and its biological life-sustaining is that the vegetation on the land and the algae in the sea, employing photosynthesis, are designed to impound the life-regenerating energy for us to adequate amount.
[...]
That we are endowed with such intuitive and intellectual capabilities as that of discovering the genes and the R.N.A. and D.N.A. and other fundamental principles governing the fundamental design controls of life systems as well as of nuclear energy and chemical structuring is part of the extraordinary design of the Spaceship Earth, its equipment, passengers, and internal support systems. It is therefore paradoxical but strategically explicable, as we shall see, that up to now we have been mis-using, abusing, and polluting this extraordinary chemical energy-interchanging system for successfully regenerating all life aboard our planetary spaceship.
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 Earth as an integrally-designed machine which to be persistently successful must be comprehended and serviced in total.
Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it. I think it’s very significant that there is no instruction book for successfully operating our ship. In view of the infinite attention to all other details displayed by our ship, it must be taken as deliberate and purposeful that an instruction book was omitted. Lack of instruction has forced us to find that there are two kinds of berries-red berries that will kill us and red berries that will nourish us. And we had to find out ways of telling which-was-which red berry before we ate it or otherwise we would die. So we were forced, because of a lack of an instruction book, to use our intellect, which is our supreme faculty, to devise scientific experimental procedures and to interpret effectively the significance of the experimental findings. Thus, because the instruction manual was missing we are learning how we safely can anticipate the consequences of an increasing number of alternative ways of extending our satisfactory survival and growth-both physical and metaphysical.
[...]
I would say that designed into this Spaceship Earth’s total wealth was a big safety factor which allowed man to be very ignorant for a long time until he had amassed enough experiences from which to extract progressively the system of generalized principles governing the increases of energy managing advantages over environment. The designed omission of the instruction book on how to operate and maintain Spaceship Earth and its complex life-supporting and regenerating systems has forced man to discover retrospectively just what his most important forward capabilities are. His intellect had to discover itself. Intellect in turn had to compound the facts of his experience.
[...]
In organizing our grand strategy we must first discover where we are now; that is, what our present navigational position in the universal scheme of evolution is. 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 with liquid nutriment to develop it to a certain point. But then by design the nutriment is exhausted at just the time when the chick is large enough to be able to locomote on its own legs. And so as the chick pecks at the shell seeking more nutriment it inadvertently breaks open the shell. Stepping forth from its initial sanctuary, the young bird must now forage on its own legs and wings to discover the next phase of its regenerative sustenance.
My own picture of humanity today finds us just about to step out from amongst the pieces of our just one-second-ago broken eggshell. Our innocent, trial-and-error-sustaining nutriment is exhausted. We are faced with an entirely new relationship to the universe. We are going to have to spread our wings of intellect and fly or perish; that is, we must dare immediately to fly by the generalized principles governing universe and not by the ground rules of yesterday’s superstitious and erroneously conditioned reflexes. And as we attempt competent thinking we immediately begin to reemploy our innate drive for comprehensive understanding.
[...]
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III. The Coming Economics of Spaceship Earth, Kenneth Boulding (1966)
[...]
The closed earth of the future requires economic principles which are somewhat different from those of the open earth of the past. For the sake of picturesqueness, I am tempted to call the open economy the "cowboy economy," the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior, which is characteristic of open societies. The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the "spaceman" economy, in which 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 difference between the two types of economy becomes most apparent in the attitude towards consumption. In the cowboy economy, consumption is regarded as a good thing and production likewise; and the success of the economy is measured by the amount of the throughput from the "factors of production," a part of which, at any rate, is extracted from the reservoirs of raw materials and non-economic objects, and another part of which is output into the reservoirs of pollution. If there are infinite reservoirs from which material can be obtained and into which effluvia can be deposited, then the throughput is at least a plausible measure of the success of the economy.
[...]
By contrast, in the spaceman economy, throughput is by no means a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to be minimized rather than maximized. The essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of the human bodies and minds included in the system. In the spaceman economy, what we are primarily concerned with is stock maintenance, and any technological change which results in the maintenance of a given total stock with a lessened throughput (that is, less production and consumption) is clearly a gain. This idea that both production and consumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to economists, who have been obsessed with the income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts.
[...]
It may be said, of course, why worry about all this when the spaceman economy is still a good way off (at least beyond the lifetimes of any now living), so let us eat, drink, spend, extract and pollute, and be as merry as we can, and let posterity worry about the Spaceship Earth. It is always a little hard to find a convincing answer to the man who says, "What has posterity ever done for me?" and the conservationist has always had to fall back on rather vague ethical principles postulating identity of the individual with some human community or society which extends not only back into the past but forward into the future. Unless the individual identifies with some community of this kind, conservation is obviously "irrational." Why should we not maximize the welfare of this generation at the cost of posterity? "Apres nous, le deluge" has been the motto of a not insignificant number of human societies.
The only answer to this, as far as I can see, is to point out that the welfare of the individual depends on the extent to which he can identify himself with others, and that the most satisfactory individual identity is that which identifies not only with a community in space but also with a community extending over time from the past into the future. If this kind of identity is recognized as desirable, then posterity has a voice, even if it does not have a vote; and in a sense, if its voice can influence votes, it has votes too. This whole problem is linked up with the much larger one of the determinants of the morale, legitimacy, and "nerve" of a society, and there is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart.
[...]
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IV. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Carl Sagan (1994)
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
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V. Humanity's Coming Of Age On Planet Earth, Adam Frank (2015)
[...]
As an astronomer, however, I'm used to taking the long view on things. From that perspective, a startlingly different understanding of climate change appears from what I often see people talking about. From the long view — which for climate is the only view that makes sense — it's clear we're looking at climate all wrong.
Ask folks about climate change, and a lot of them will talk about the climate debate. They'll tell you Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, environmentalists and business interests. And even for those who follow the science and understand the problem, the discussion often turns around the idea of saving the Earth. We share pictures of polar bears and shrinking ice flows with each other on Facebook and feel doomed.
All of these perspectives, however, miss an essential point. The long view is all about understanding planets, life and their coupled evolution. From that vantage point, what we're going through now is not a political debate or an attempt to save the planet. Instead we're at the beginning of a fundamental planetary transition, and it's nothing short of humanity's coming of age.
This is something we can't afford to get wrong.
Now, before you think I'm just being grandiose, let me ask you a small question. What would it have been like if you had landed on Earth 3 billion years ago? To be specific, what would you have experienced as you stepped onto a shoreline where mats of early bacterial life were happily basking in the sunshine? The answer is simple. You'd die. "Choke, choke. Gasp, gasp." Dead.
[…]
Right here, on your own planet, you'd immediately asphyxiate. Why? Because 3 billion years ago there was very little oxygen in Earth's atmosphere. The oxygen you're breathing right now is nothing more than a byproduct of this early microbial life. Let that sink in for a moment. Life changed the atmospheric composition of the entire planet.
Sound familiar? That's exactly what we are doing now.
But that's not all. The consequences of this "Great Oxygenation" were long-lasting. An oxygen-rich atmosphere changed everything for the future history of the biosphere. Building oxygen into new biochemical pathways allowed evolution to create ever-richer and more complex organisms, including big-brained critters like us.
So the generation of an oxygen-rich atmosphere was a fundamental transition in the history of the planet — and it was driven by the activity of life. This means life and planets can evolve together. It is a game-changing realization and one with huge implications for what we're missing about the crisis we're facing today.
The Earth has been many planets in the past. It was a water planet before the continents grew. It was a snowball planet when glaciers covered almost all of its surface. It's been a jungle planet so hot that crocodiles lived at the North Pole.
The climate change we are driving now is just one in a long string of the planet's changed climates. Some of the five mass extinctions Earth experienced in the past were even driven by those climate changes. New research hints that the asteroid that hit Earth 65 million years ago wasn't the only cause of the dinosaurs' exit. Instead, climate change was already forcing the thunder lizards off the stage when the asteroid struck.
And what happened after those mass extinctions? Life returned, and it flourished. In fact, we mammals (people and polar bears alike) wouldn't dominate the planet today if it wasn't for that climate-driven mass extinction.
So the long view tells us that Earth and life are going to be just fine. Our climate change crisis is not about saving Earth. That's not the problem.
Instead it's us. We are the problem.
What's at stake is not the planet but this civilization we have built with the planet's resources. What's at stake is this energy intensive, globe-spanning network of 7 billion people who are quite attached to eating every day. It's very unlikely this kind of civilization can survive if we push the climate much harder.
And that is why we're facing a planetary transition. Dealing with climate change doesn't just mean stopping climate change now. It means stopping climate change for as long as human civilization is around. That's the real kicker.
No more ice ages. No more hothouse jungle worlds.
If we are to build a sustainable human civilization, then we consciously become drivers of all future co-evolution between life and the planet. In other words, keeping the planet "habitable" for our kind of civilization means we'll need to become its steward. The large-scale random evolutionary experiments that Earth has been carrying out for the past 4 billion years will, for the most part, be at an end. If human civilization makes it to sustainability, then we will end up creating a very different kind of planet — a new kind of planet — not seen in this solar system before (though potentially one that has appeared elsewhere).
But we can't do this without entering into a partnership with the biosphere, because the biosphere is no helpless child. It's part of a network of immensely powerful, coupled physical systems (oceans, air, ice and land). That means we will only navigate our way across the transition to sustainability by learning to think like a planet.
We will have to learn the rules of life and planets and work with them to create a world where everyone thrives. In a very real sense, we will have to end our childhood as a sentient technological species and take responsibility in the deepest sense of that word.
It's a planetary transition to a new kind of planet — that's what the long view tells us. It's not the stuff of science fiction. It's the only choice facing us in building the long-term version of a global human civilization on a healthy planet.
That's the long view. That's how we grow up.
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If you enjoyed today’s piece, and if you also share my insatiable curiosity for the interdisciplinary aspects of “collapse”, please consider taking a look at some of other written and graphic works (like this piece) at my Substack Page – Myth of Progress. That said, as a proud member of this community, I will always endeavour to publish my work to r/collapse first.