Spaceship Earth

The first time I heard the term Spaceship Earth, it made an engaging and compelling picture in my mind. All the colours of humanity hurtling through black space, inextricably linked together like the crew on board The Starship Enterprise, with one life-support system, one deflector shield and one warp engine. Unfortunately, this Spaceship Earth, has to do without a captain, like Jean Luc Picard, or Kirk even, in his less heady macho moments, as our moral center.

And so we scramble, each person, each group doing as we please. Fighting amongst ourselves to be right and powerful rather then to be good and decent. To accumulate more than our other crew mates while depleting the spaceship its limited resources.

As we are finding out, our Spaceship Earth is is having some problems with its environmental control and it is running out of fuel for its propulsion. How do we warp 9 into the the future now? It's a good thing that, like on Star Trek, that technology & brains are on hand to provide us with tools and ideas to help us out of our more-than-one-hour-per-episode predicaments.

This current episode's dilemma is Climate Change and the rapidly depleting stock of carbon fuels which, while give us all the comforts of life, also heat up the planet.

And as fate would have it, a bright spark on the crew manifest of Spaceship Earth, called Buckminister Fuller, had come up a simple concept that would not only increase our fuel supply, by cutting down the waste of it's distribution but also give us the time to find ways to replace the atmopshpere-heating carbon fuels with cleaner & cooler fuels.

He had different way of looking at the landmasses of the planet. One that link all of them (except Antartica) together. He called this the Dymaxion map. And if we were all linked by land, the so too could our energy grids. Forming a single World Energy Grid.

But the concept was so radical that the Captain Prime ministers, Presidents and CEOs of Spaceship Earth could not take it seriously. After all, for so many years, the Captain Comdrades of the USSR department were fighting the Captain Presidents of the USA department. How could they coorporate to save their Spaceship Earth, as Bucky's (as he was affectionately known) plan required?
But today, after the communist department has disbanded, we must ask ourselves, how can we not coorporate?

There is an ongoing project called GENI (Global Energy Network Institute) which has taken it upon itself to see that Bucky's plan is made known to all the departments on Spaceship Earth and working toward making the plan work.

This is what it says on it's website:

Two decades
ago, the late R. Buckminster Fuller
proposed interconnecting regional power
systems into a single continuous global electrical
energy grid • While this vision is still years away, tech-
nological advances have made the linking of international and
inter regional energy networks practicable today • Transmission
lines allow utilities to level the peaks and valleys of demand. This is
accomplished between East-West time zones, as well as North-South
seasonal variations in demand • The origin of the energy grid initiative
emerged as the highest priority of the World Game™. Its stated purpose
is “to make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible
time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or the
disadvantage of anyone.” Research reveals that these major benefits will
result from expanding electrical networks • Increase in everyone’s stan-
dard of living • Reduction of fossil fuel demand and the resultant pollu-
tion • Relief of the population explosion • Reduction of world hunger
• Enhancement of world trade • Promotion of international
cooperation and peace • The purpose of GENI, Global
Energy Network Institute, is to educate all people,
especially world leaders, to the potential
benefits of this global
solution •