Spaceship Earth

extie-dasilva (67)in #space • 6 years ago

SPACESHIP EARTH

On December 24 1968, Apollo 8 was well into its mission to become the first manned object to orbit the moon. As it completed its circuit around our neighbouring celestial body, astronaut William Anders was ready with his camera. Looking out of one of the craft's windows, he and the other astronauts witnessed a sight that no human eyes had beheld before; the Earth, rising over the horizon of the moon much like the sun rises on Earth. The picture he took, officially titled AS8-14-2383 by NASA but known to the public by the more poetic name 'Earthrise', is one of the most famous in the history of space exploration.

It provided a visual representation of a concept that had been introduced two years earlier by the economist Kenneth Boulding. At a lecture given in 1965, Boulding introduced the concept of 'Spaceship Earth', a metaphor that challenged the notion that nature's bounty was endless; that we were all, rather, occupants dependent on a "tiny, sphere, closed, limited, crowded, and hurtling through space to unknown destinations".

Four years after Boulding introduced the metaphor, Buckminster Fuller's book 'Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth', expanded on the concept of Earth as a closed system, a spaceship so well-designed for the inhabitants that had rode on it for the past two million years, most of them were not even aware they were on a spaceship.

The concept of Spaceship Earth has also been used to get corporate managers to make their business practices more ecological. The environmentalist and writer, Paul Hawken, put on such an event for a large company that specialised in agricultural chemicals. A challenge was laid down, which was to design, within two hours, a spacehip that could keep a crew alive, healthy and happy for a century. When a colleague suggested that there should be equitable distribution of resources, this idea was at first shot down by the Vice President. "That's Communism, socialism-it has nothing to do with ecology or the environment".

But, as the team's got on with designing their imaginary spaceship, attitudes changed. Consumerism was rejected. Instead of bringing along pre-made entertainment like DVDS, the winning teams decided it would be better to bring along people who could create entertainment: artists, musicians, storytellers, and other creative types. It was decided that the spaceship would require a good variety of weeds as well as useful seeds, for that would help bring minerals to the surface of soils and help enrich it. Even though the company's number one product was a pesticide, for the purposes of this experiment, the winning team embraced their sworn enemy and decided the spaceship would need fungi, bacteria and insects.

Paul Hawken reported that "essentially, the winning team created a diverse ecosystem within which a socially just and equitable society practiced organic agriculture and designed all objects for disassembly, reuse and recycling. When the participants were asked if it was fair that 20 percent of the passengers received 80 percent of the fruits, vegetables and medicines produced onboard, all of them, including the Vice President who had been disgusted with the idea of equity, shouted the idea down".

In 1980, the spacecraft Voyager 1 passed Saturn and became the furthest-travelled craft humanity had ever built. Carl Sagan suggested that the craft should take a picture of the Earth from this vantage point. He did not think the photo would have much scientific value, as from this far-off perspective the Earth would be too small for the craft's cameras to make out any detail. However, he believed that the photo could be a meaningful perspective on our place in the universe.

From a vantage point beyond Saturn, the earth did indeed appear tiny, no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. The image became known as the 'Pale Blue Dot', and it inspired these moving words, composed in 1994 by Sagan:

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us....every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam...To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known".