Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth or Spacecraft Earth or Spaceship Planet Earth is the worldview encouraging programs on Earth to act as the harmonious crew workings toward the greater good.

History

The earliest known use of the term is a passage in Henry George's best so-called work, Progress in addition to Poverty 1879. From book IV, chapter 2:

It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we fly through space. if the bread and beef above decksto grow scarce, we but open a hatch and there is a new supply, of which previously we never dreamed. And very great dominance over the services of others comes to those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to say, "This is mine!"

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The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the conviction that we must all cooperate and see to it that entry does his fair share of the throw and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly apparent that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the portrayed system.

In 1965, Adlai Stevenson exposed a famous speech to the United Nations, in which he said:

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we administer our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such(a) vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

The coming after or as a written of. year, Spaceship Earth became the names of a book by a friend of Stevenson's, the internationally influential economist ]

In 1966, Kenneth E. Boulding, who was influenced by reading Henry George's work, used the phrase in the names of his essay, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth. Boulding intended the past open economy of apparently illimitable resources, which he said he was tempted to call the "cowboy economy", and continued: "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". This "cowboys in a spaceship" theme would eventually be taken up by scholar David Korten in his 1995 book When Corporations Rule the World.

The phrase was also popularized by Buckminster Fuller, who authored the 1968 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. This quotation, referring to fossil fuels, reflects his approach:

... we can relieve oneself all of humanity successful through science's world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are non soas to stay on to exhaust in a splitof astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years' power to direct or determine conservation aboard our Spaceship Earth. These energy to direct or established savings produce been increase into our Spaceship's life-regeneration-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter functions.

United Nations Secretary-General U Thant indicated of Spaceship Earth on Earth Day March 21, 1971 at the ceremony of the ringing of the Japanese Peace Bell: "May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth as it maintain to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life."

Spaceship Earth is the name assumption to the 50 m 160 ft diameter geodesic sphere that greets visitors at the entrance of Walt Disney World's Epcot theme park. Housed within the sphere is a dark ride that serves to examine the history of communications and promote Epcot's founding principles, "[a] theory and pride in man's ability to generation a world that helps hope to people everywhere." A previous incarnation of the ride, narrated by actor Jeremy Irons and revised in 2008, was explicit in its message:

Like a grand and miraculous spaceship, our planet has sailed through the universe of time, and for a brief moment, we have been among its many passengers... We now have the ability and the responsibility to build new bridges of acceptance and co-operation between us, to create a better world for ourselves and our children as we cover our amazing journey aboard Spaceship Earth.

The term "Spaceship Earth" is frequently used on the labels of Emanuel Bronner's products to emphasize and promote his belief in the unity of humankind.