Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth is the name of a pavilion at the Epcot Center at Disney World in Florida. It's called Future World, and it's a golfers dream because at first glance the Disney attraction looks like a giant golf ball, but really it's an eighteen story geodesic sphere that houses an interactive adventure through a time line of humanity. In the end of the tour, the guest uses interactive touch screens to choose how they would like to live in the future, and the journey ends as they get a vision of their potential future self . The Dome shape as well as the name is the genius of a man named Buckminster Fuller.

The concept of planet Earth as a " spaceship" is one that currently permeates a great amount of intellectual thought in society ever since Fuller published the Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in 1963. The concept he had is that Earth was a finite, whole-system planet, one in which the lives of all human beings (or passengers) are interrelated. To Fuller, the earth is a closed system, one in need of repair, and Fuller advocated people understanding that the earth was a closed system of limited resources which he likened it to a Spaceship spinning in circles through frigid space having a warm and fragile cargo of animate life. He was an environmental activist interested in what we now call the "sustainability" of Earth.

Fuller taught that many complex human societies in the past have died out, usually as a result of their growth-associated impacts on ecology. He believed that as the modern industrial society he lived in continued to grow in complexity, it too would collapse unless we humans came to the realization that we are interconnected and cooperate to save ourselves. He believed that if we all worked together as one mind, we could keep our beautiful planet alive and well and drive spaceship earth into the future.