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March 29, 2006
Dymaxion
Dymaxion map, Buckminster Fuller, 1946
"I’ve often heard people say, ’I wonder what it would be like to be on board a spaceship," and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts.
I know you are paying attention, but I’m sure you don’t immediately agree and say, "Yes, that’s right, I am an astronaut." I’m sure that you don’t really sense yourself to be aboard a fantastically real spaceship - our spherical Spaceship Earth. . . .
Our little Spaceship Earth is right now travelling at sixty thousand miles an hour around the 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. . . .
We now are learning more intimately about our Spaceship Earth and its radiation supply ship Sun on the one hand, and on the other, its Moon, acting as the Earth’s gravitationally pulsing "alternator" - which together constitute the prime generator and regenerator of our life supporting system. . . .
We could burn up the Spaceship Earth itself to provide energy, but that would give us very little future. Our space vehicle is similar to a human child - it is an increasing aggregate of physical and metaphysical processes - in contradistinction to a withering, decomposing corpse. . . .
Since synergy is the only word in our language meaning behavior of wholes unpredicted by behavior of their parts, it is clear that society does not think there are behaviors of whole systems unpredicted by their separate parts . . . [yet] there is nothing about an electron alone that forecasts the proton, nor is there anything about the Earth or the Moon that forecasts the co-existence of the Sun. The solar system is synergetic - unpredicted by its separate parts. But the interplay of Sun as supply ship of Earth and the Moon’s gravitationally produced tidal pulsations on Earth all interact to produce the biosphere’s chemical conditions which permit but do not cause the regeneration of life on Spaceship Earth. This is all synergetic. There is nothing about the gases given off respiratorily by Earth’s green vegetation that predicts that those gases will be essential to the life support of all mammals aboard Spaceship Earth, and nothing about the mammals that predicts that the gases which they give off respiratorily are essential to the support of the vegetation aboard our Spaceship Earth. Universe is synergetic. Life is synergetic."
- excerpts from Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth, by Winifred G Barton
Solar Eclipse path of totality crosses Side, Turkey at 5:55 am, March 29, 2006
webcast
Posted by Neal at March 29, 2006 11:44 AM | Category: Mother Earth
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