R. Buckminster Fuller

Copyright Michael D. Robbins 2005

Astro-Rayological Interpretation & Charts
Quotes
Biography
Images and Physiognomic Interpretation

to Volume 3 Table of Contents

  R. Buckminster Fuller - Inventor, Engineer, Futurist

July 12, 1895, Milton, MA. No time of birth given. Speculatively, perhaps near 8:13 PM, EST; alternatively, LMR quotes date from him in a letter, “time unknown, perhaps morning.” Rectified from this note.) Died of a heart attack on July 1, 1983, while at the hospital visiting his ailing wife, Los Angeles, CA. (Check progressions for most likely chart)


(Speculative Ascendant, Taurus; Speculative MC, Aquarius; Sun conjunct Jupiter in with Mercury also in Cancer; Moon and NN in Pisces; Venus in Virgo; Mars in Leo; Saturn in and Uranus in Scorpio; Neptune conjunct Pluto in Gemini)


(Speculative Ascendant, Aquarius; Speculative MC, Sagittarius;  Sun conjunct Jupiter in with Mercury also in Cancer; Moon and NN in Pisces; Venus in Virgo; Mars in Leo; Saturn in and Uranus in Scorpio; Neptune conjunct Pluto in Gemini).

Fuller was a practical genius, manifesting (Cancer) the new forms and patterns (seventh ray). Like Benjamin Franklin, he seems to have been a member of the Master R.’s department—characterized by an extremely facile and inventive intelligence. The third and fifth rays were also prominent. The possible Aquarius Ascendant makes sense, as it places the ruling planet Uranus in the ninth house of higher inspiration from the abstract mind—the Mind of God, and the Sun/Jupiter conjunction in the practical sixth house, where the possibilities of the material world are so much considered.

A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.

A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.

By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties.

Dictators never invent their own opportunities.

Don't fight forces, use them.

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.

God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.

Gold and silver from the dead turn often into lead.

Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.

How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.

I look for what needs to be done. After all, that's how the universe designs itself.

I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.

If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.

If you are the master be sometimes blind, if you are the servant be sometimes deaf.

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

Love is metaphysical gravity.

Man knows so much and does so little.

Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.

My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.

Now there is one outstanding important fact regarding spaceship earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

Out of my general world-pattern-trend studies there now comes strong evidence that nothing is going to be quite so surprising and abrupt in the future history of man as the forward evolution in the educational process.

Parents are usually more careful to bestow knowledge on their children rather than virtue, the art of speaking well rather than doing well; but their manners should be of the greatest concern.

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

Rashness is the faithful, but unhappy parent of misfortune.

Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.

Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.

The earth is like a spaceship that didn't come with an operating manual.

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

The most important thing about Spaceship Earth - an instruction book didn't come with it.

The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.

Thou mayest as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. Too much overcharges Nature, and turns more into disease than nourishment. 'Tis thought and digestion which makes books serviceable, and give health and vigor to the mind.

To expose a 4.2 trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last one-hundred years will be a tall order of business.

Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.

Truth is a tendency.

War is the ultimate tool of politics.

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

You can never learn less, you can only learn more.

Tension is the great integrity.
[On his belief that “tensegrity” gives coherence to the structure of the universe.]

I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.
On geodesic domes, Time 10 Jun 64

“Our power is in our ability to decide.

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

“I have spent most of my life unlearning things that were proved not to be true

“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

Real wealth is ideas plus energy.

There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes

“None of the world's problems will have a solution until the world's individuals become thoroughly self-educated.

Controlled time is our true wealth.

“Man knows so much and does so little.

You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive.

“No man can prove upon awakening that he is the man who he thinks went to bed the night before, or that anything that he recollects is anything other than a convincing dream.

“If the success or failure of this Planet, and of Human Beings, depended on how I am and what I do; How would I be? What would I do?

War is obsolete

A problem adequately stated is a problem well on its way to being solved.

Rashness is the faithful, but unhappy parent of misfortune.

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.

Buckminster Fuller

In the U.S. postage stamp commemorating Buckminster Fuller and his contributions to architecture and science, some of his inventions are visible. Most notably, his head is shaped after one of his geodesic domes. Other elements, such as futuristic cars, other craft and radar dishes are also present.Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American visionary, designer, architect, and inventor.

Throughout his life, Fuller was concerned with the question of whether humanity has a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how. Considering himself an average individual without special monetary means or academic degree, he chose to devote his life to this question, trying to find out what an individual like him could do to improve humanity's condition that large organizations, governments, or private enterprises inherently could not do.

Pursuing this lifelong experiment, Fuller wrote twenty-eight books, coining and popularizing terms such as "spaceship earth", ephemeralization, and synergetics. He also made a large number of inventions, mostly in the fields of design and architecture, the best-known of which is the geodesic dome.

Late in his life, after working on his concepts for several decades, Fuller had achieved considerable public visibility. He traveled the world giving lectures, and received numerous honorary doctorates. Most of his inventions, however, never made it into production, and he was strongly criticized in most of the fields that he tried to influence (such as architecture), or simply dismissed as a hopeless utopian. Fuller's proponents, on the other hand, claim that his work has not yet received the attention that it deserves.

Fuller was born on July 12, 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews. The Fuller family in particular produced noted New England non-conformists. Buckminster Fuller's father died when the boy was 12. Spending his youth on a farm on an island off the coast of Maine, he was a boy with a natural propensity for design and for making things. He often made things from materials he brought home from the woods, and he even sometimes made his own tools. Notably, he experimented with designing a new apparatus for the human-powered propulsion of small boats. Years later he decided that this sort of experience had provided him not only an interest in design, but a habit of being fully familiar and knowledgeable about the materials that his ambitious later projects would require for actualization. Indeed, Fuller earned a machinist's certification, and he also knew how to fabricate using the press brake, stretch press, and other tools and equipment relied upon in the sheet-metal trade.

Fuller was sent to Milton Academy, in Massachusetts. Afterwards, he began studying at Harvard but was expelled from the university twice: firstly, for entertaining an entire dance troupe; and secondly, for his "irresponsibility and lack of interest." By his own appraisal, he was a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment. Later in life, Fuller received a Sc.D. from Bates College in 1969.

Between his sessions at Harvard, he worked for a time in Canada as a mechanic in a textile mill, and later as a laborer working 12 hours a day in the meat-packing industry. He married in 1917, and he also served in the U.S. Navy in World War I. In the Navy he was employed as an aboard-ship radio operator, as an editor of a publication, and as a crash-boat commander. After discharge, he again worked for a period in the meat-packing business, where he acquired management experience. In the early 1920s he and his father-in-law developed the Stockade Building System for producing light-weight, weatherproof, and fireproof housing — though ultimately the company failed.

In 1927 at the age of 32, bankrupt and jobless, living in inferior housing in Chicago, Illinois, he saw his beloved young daughter Alexandra die of pneumonia in winter. He felt responsible, and this drove him to drink and the verge of suicide. At the last moment he decided instead to embark on "an experiment, to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."

Fuller accepted a position at a small college in North Carolina, Black Mountain College. There, with the support of a group of professors and students, he began work on the project that would make him famous and revolutionize the field of engineering, the geodesic dome. Using lightweight plastics in the simple form of a tetrahedron (a triangular pyramid) he created a small dome. He had designed the first building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. The U.S. government recognized the importance of the discovery and employed him to make small domes for the army. Within a few years there were thousands of these domes around the world.

For the next half-century Buckminster Fuller contributed a wide range of ideas, designs and inventions to the world, particularly in the areas of practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation. He documented his life, philosophy and ideas scrupulously in a daily diary and in 28 publications. Fuller financed some of his experiments with inherited family money, sometimes augmented by funds invested by his professional collaborators, one example being the Dymaxion Car project.

His international recognition was established by the success of his huge geodesic domes in the 1950s. Fuller taught at Southern Illinois University Carbondale from 1959–1970 (Assistant Professor 1959–68, full Professor in 1968) in the School of Art and Design. Working as a designer, scientist, developer, and writer, for many years he also lectured all over the world on design. In 1965 Fuller inaugurated the World Design Science Decade (1965 to 1975) at the meeting of the International Union of Architects in Paris. This was (in his own words) devoted to applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity.

Fuller believed human societies would soon be relying mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar- and wind-derived electricity. He hoped for an age of "omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity." He regarded information as "negative entropic".

Fuller was ultimately to be awarded 25 US patents and many honorary doctorates. On January 16, 1970 Fuller received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects and also received numerous other awards.

He died at the age of 88, a guru of the design, architecture, and 'alternative' communities. His wife was comatose and dying of cancer and while visiting her in the hospital he exclaimed at one point: "She is squeezing my hand!". He then stood up, suffered a massive heart attack and died an hour later. His wife died 36 hours later. He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston, Massachusetts.

Buckminster Fuller strove to inspire humanity to take a comprehensive view of the finite world we live in and the infinite possibilities for an ever-increasing standard of living within it. Deploring waste, he advocated a principle that he termed "ephemeralization" — which in essence (according to Stewart Brand) Fuller coined to mean "doing more with less." Wealth can be increased by recycling resources into newer, higher value products whose more technically sophisticated design requires less material. In practice, it has often meant miniaturization, for example, as when table-model calculating machines were succeeded over time by smaller ones, until the calculator of today fits in one's hand. Fuller also introduced synergetics, which explores holistic engineering structures in nature (long before the term synergy became popular).

Fuller was one of the first to propagate a systemic worldview (see 'Operating manual for Spaceship Earth', 'Synergetics') and explored principles of energy and material efficiency in the fields of architecture, engineering and design. Viewing petroleum from the standpoint of its replacement cost out of our current energy "budget" (essentially the incoming solar flux), he declared that it had cost nature "over a million dollars" per U.S. gallon ($300,000/L) to produce. From this point of view its use as a transportation fuel by people commuting to work represents a huge net loss compared to their earnings.

He dedicated himself to advancing the success and fulfillment of humanity and lived by a set of self-disciplines; he was deeply concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet was profoundly optimistic about humanity's prospects. Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the "technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life", his analysis of the condition of "Spaceship Earth" led him to conclude that at a certain point in the 1970's humanity had crossed an unprecedented watershed.

What might otherwise sound like an article of faith in some spiritual or philosophical system had for Fuller become an objective fact — that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of key recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had reached a critical level, such that competition for necessities was no longer necessary. Cooperation had became the optimum survival strategy. "Selfishness", he declared, "is unnecessary and...unrationalizable...War is obsolete..."

By considering historical comparisons like the fact that even relatively poor people today are able to travel at speeds and with a degree of comfort which were unobtainable at any price in earlier times, and that illnesses that were fatal even to kings in the past can now be cured with affordable drugs, he concluded that everyone alive today can potentially live like a "billionaire." Hence he described the human race as "four billion billionaires."

In the 2000 tour for the hit musical Godspell by Stephen Schwartz, Fuller is one of the seven philosophers in the show's Prologue and Tower of Babel songs, with the words, "Man is a complex of patterns, of processes."

Besides important comprehensiveness of thought and his philosophical concepts, Fuller's most lasting insights may be geometric. He claimed that the natural analytic geometry of the universe was based on arrays of tetrahedra. He developed this in several ways, from the close-packing of spheres and the number of compressive or tensile members required to stabilize an object in space. Some deep confirming results were that the strongest possible homogeneous truss is cyclically tetrahedral.

Fuller was most famous for his geodesic domes, which can be seen as part of military radar stations, civic buildings, and exhibition attractions. Their construction is based on extending some basic principles to build simple tensegrity structures (tetrahedron, octahedron, and the closest packing of spheres). Built in this way they are extremely lightweight and stable. The patent for geodesic domes was awarded in 1954, part of Fuller's decades-long efforts to explore nature's constructing principles to find design solutions.

Previously, Fuller had designed and built prototypes of what he hoped would be a safer, aerodynamic Dymaxion car ("Dymaxion" is contracted from DYnamic MAXimum tensION). To this end he experimented with a radical new approach. He worked with professional colleagues over a period of three years, beginning in 1932. Based on a design idea Fuller had derived from designs of aircraft, the three prototype cars were all quite different from anything on the market. For one thing, each of these vehicles had three, not four, wheels — with two (the drive wheels) in front, and the third, rear wheel being the one that was steered. The engine was located in the rear. Both the chassis and the body were original designs. The aerodynamic, somewhat tear-shaped body (which in one of the prototypes was about 18 feet long), was large enough to seat 11 people. It somehow resembled a melding of a light aircraft (without wings) and a Volkswagen van of 1950s vintage. The car was essentially a mini-bus in each of its three trial incarnations, and its concept long predated the Volkswagen Type 2 mini-bus conceived in 1947 by Ben Pon.

Despite its length, and due to its three-wheel design, the Dymaxion Car turned on a small radius and parked in a tight space quite nicely. The prototypes were efficient in fuel consumption for their day. Fuller poured a great deal of his own money (inherited from his mother) into the project, in addition to the funds put in by one of his professional collaborators. An industrial investor was also keenly interested in the unprecedented concept. Fuller anticipated the car could travel on an open highway safely at up to about 100 miles per hour (160 km/h); however, due to some concept oversights, the prototypes proved to be unruly over the speed of 50 mph (80 km/h), and difficult to steer properly. Research came to an end after one of the prototypes was involved in a collision resulting in a fatality.

In 1943, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser asked Fuller to develop a prototype for a smaller car, and Fuller designed a five-seater; the car never went into the development or production stages.

Another of Fuller's ideas was the alternative-projection Dymaxion map. This was designed to show the Earth's continents with minimum distortion when projected or printed on a flat surface.

Fuller's energy-efficient and low-cost Dymaxion houses garnered much interest, but have never gone into production. Here the term "Dymaxion" is used in effect to signify a "radically strong and light tensegrity structure". One of Fuller's Dymaxion Houses is on display as a permanent exhibit at The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan. Designed and developed in the mid 1940s, this prototype is a round structure (not a dome) shaped something like the flattened "bell" of certain jellyfish. It has several other innovative features, including revolving dresser drawers, and a fine-mist shower that reduces water consumption. According to Fuller biographer Steve Crooks, the house was designed to be delivered in two cylindrical packages, with interior color panels available at local dealers' premises. A circular structure at the top of the house was designed to rotate around a central mast to take advantage of natural winds for cooling and air circulation.

The American Pavilion of Expo 67, by R. Buckminster Fuller, now the Biosphère, on Île Sainte-Hélène, Montreal. Fuller developed the geodesic dome in the 1940s in line with his "synergetic" thinking.Conceived nearly two decades before, and developed in Wichita, Kansas, the house was designed to be lightweight and adapted to windy climes. It was to be inexpensive to produce and purchase, and easily assembled. It was to be produced using factories, trained workers, and technologies that had produced World War II aircraft. "Ultramodern"-looking, it was structured of metal and sheathed in polished aluminum, and the basic model enclosed 1000 square feet (90 m²) of floor area. Due to high-level publicity, there were very many orders in the early Post-War years; however, the company that Fuller and others had formed to produce the houses failed due to internal management problems.

Buckminster Fuller made a radical commitment to understanding, discovery, and research. He wanted to be a trailblazer, which is a risky role in any field. His life and his work therefore constituted a kind of noble gamble.

Certainly, a number of Fuller's projects did not meet success in terms of commitment from industry or acceptance by a broad public. However, many geodesic domes have been built and are in use. According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute Web site, the largest geodesic-dome structures (listed in descending order from largest diameter) are: /

Fuller's development of the dome and his roles as a philosopher and as a gadfly within the design and architectural communities left an important legacy. He introduced a number of concepts, and if every one wasn't entirely new, we can still say that he honed each one well.

Thousands of geodesic domes have been built, but they are not an everyday sight in most places. Contrary to initial hopes, in practice most of the smaller owner-built geodesic structures proved to have drawbacks (discussed in the Wikipedia section on geodesic domes); plus, as a home, many people have been put off by the domes' unconventional appearance.

So, while an envisioned widespread and common adoption of geodesic domes is yet to materialize, Fuller's ideas, teachings, and attitude to life and creativity, in combination, have prodded designers and engineers. What Fuller accomplished, in this sense, was to make professionals and students think "outside the box"; to question convention. Fuller was followed (historically) by other designers and architects (for example, Norman Foster — especially his "Armadillo" project — and Steve Baer) willing to explore the possibilities of new geometries in the design of buildings, not based on the conventional rectangles. The English writer, playwright, and philosopher John Dryden wrote something quite relevant to the pioneering forays of Fuller still to be brought to full result: "We must beat the iron while it is hot, but we may polish it at leisure."

He experimented with polyphasic sleep.

A new allotrope of carbon (fullerene) and a particular molecule of that allotrope (buckminsterfullerene or buckyballs) have been named after him.
On July 12, 2004 the United States Post Office released a new commemorative stamp honoring Buckminster Fuller on the 50th anniversary of his patent for the geodesic dome and on the occasion of his 109th birthday.

Fuller documented his life every 15 minutes from 1915 to 1983, leaving behind 270 feet / 80 m worth of journals. He called this the Dymaxion Chronofile. This is said to be the most documented human life in history.

"If somebody kept a very accurate record of a human being, going through the era from the Gay’90’s, from a very different kind of world through the turn of the century — as far into the twentieth century as you might live. I decided to make myself a good case history of such a human being and it meant that I could not be judge of what was valid to put in or not. I must put everything in, so I started a very rigorous record." [1][2]

Buckminster and John Denver were very close friends and the song "What One Man Can Do" on John's 1982 album "Seasons of the Heart" was written on the occasion of R. Buckminster's 85th birthday. John dedicated this song to him.

World-around is a term coined by Fuller to replace worldwide. The general belief in a flat Earth died out in the Middle Ages, so using wide is an anachronism when referring to the surface of the Earth — a spheroidal surface has area and encloses a volume, but has no width. Fuller held that unthinking use of obsolete scientific ideas detracts from and misleads intuition. The terms sunsight and sunclipse are other neologisms, according to Allegra Fuller Snyder collectively coined by the Fuller family, replacing sunrise and sunset in order to overturn the geocentric bias of most pre-Copernican celestial mechanics.

Fuller also coined the phrase Spaceship Earth, and coined the term (but did not invent) tensegrity.

Born: 12 July 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts, USA
Died: 1 July 1983 in Los Angeles, California, USA

R Buckminster Fuller was referred to as an architect, inventor, scientist, engineer, mathematician, educator, philosopher, poet, speaker, author, consultant, economist, futurist, transcendentalist, designer. Twice expelled from Harvard University, he received 47 honorary doctorates in the arts, science, engineering and the humanities. He examined a vectorial system of geometry, energetic-synergetic geometry, based on the tetrahedron which provides maximum strength with minimum structure.

Fuller spent a few summers in the late forties and early fifties teaching at the Black Mountain College. He was research professor at Carbondale, Southern Illinois University, from 1959 to 1968. In 1968 he became a university professor and retired in 1975. He was awarded 25 U.S. patents; authored 28 books; received dozens of major architectural and design awards including, among many others, the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects and the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects created work which found itself into the permanent collections of museums around the world circled the globe 57 times, reaching millions through his public lectures and interviews.

Buckminster Fuller is best known for the invention of the geodesic dome –the lightest, strongest, and most cost-effective structure ever devised. The geodesic dome is a breakthrough in shelter, not only in cost-effectiveness, but in ease of construction. Today over 300,000 domes dot the globe. Plastic and fiberglass "radomes" house delicate radar equipment along the Arctic perimeter, and "radome" weather stations withstand winds up to 180 mph. Corrugated metal domes have given shelter to families in Africa, at a cost of $350 per dome. The U.S. Marine Corps hailed the geodesic dome as "the first basic improvement in mobile military shelter in 2,600 years". The world’s largest aluminum clear-span structure is a geodesic dome which houses the "Spruce Goose" at Long Beach Harbor. Fuller is most famous for his 20-story dome housing the U.S. Pavilion at Montreal’s Expo ’67. Later, he documented the feasibility of a dome two miles in diameter that would enclose mid-town Manhattan in a temperature-controlled environment, and pay for itself within ten years from the savings of snow-removal costs.

Fuller originated the term "Spaceship Earth". His Dymaxion™ Map was awarded the first patent for a cartographic system and was the first to show continents on a flat surface without visible distortion, appearing as a one-world island in a one-world ocean. His World Game® utilizes a large-scale Dymaxion Map for displaying world resources, and allows players to strategize solutions to global problems, matching human needs with resources. His Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs was created to serve as an information bank for the World Game.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Fuller gained a formidable reputation as an early researcher of renewable energy sources. Drawing upon US Navy experiences, Fuller developed tensegrity structures, notably the Geodesic Dome (minimalist structures that actually get stronger as they get larger). He also discovered the science of Synergetics, which explores holistic engineering structures in nature (long before the term synergy became popular). Famous Geodesic Domes include The EPCOT Center at Florida's Walt Disney World and the US Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World's Fair.

Fuller believed that any true social or political revolution must arise from and encompass design revolution insights, and not just be based upon shallow political rhetoric. Beginning in the 1930s initiatives like the Dymaxion World Map (which gives more accurate representations than traditional maps), the Global Energy Network grid and World Game geostrategic scenarios were promoted by the State of the World Forum and futurists including Robert Anton Wilson, Barbara Marx Hubbard and Marshall Savage.

Books like Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969) and Critical Path (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982) captured a wide audience. These books (and many others) featured systems theory principles, laying the groundwork for Alvin Toffler, Tom Peters, John Naisbitt and Peter Senge. The Spaceship Earth meme became popular with the awakening of Gaia-consciousness, and the Overview Effect experienced by astronauts and cosmonauts.

Fuller's twenty-eight books explore how 100% of humanity could have high living standards - have sold over a million copies. His efforts were recognised by over fifty honorary degrees in the sciences and humanities, and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Since Fuller's death in 1983, a diverse network has continued to research and apply Buckminster Fuller's work to diverse areas. This network generates new scenarios and options for humanity's survival in the Cosmos.