Buckminster Fuller, excerpt from "Spaceship Earth"
Chapter 4 from "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth"
From: 1969 C.E. To: Unknown
“…In organizing our grand strategy we must first discover where we are now; that is, what our present navigational position in the universal scheme of evolution is. To begin our position-fixing aboard our Spaceship Earth we must first acknowledge that the abundance of immediately consumable, obviously desirable or utterly essential resources have been sufficient until now to allow us to carry on despite our ignorance. Being eventually exhaustible and spoilable, they have been adequate only up to this critical moment. This cushion-for-error of humanity’s survival and growth up to now was apparently provided just as a bird inside of the egg is provided with liquid nutriment to develop it to a certain point. But then by design the nutriment is exhausted at just the time when the chick is large enough to be able to locomote on its own legs. And so as the chick pecks at the shell seeking more nutriment it inadvertently breaks open the shell. Stepping forth from its initial sanctuary, the young bird must now forage on its own legs and wings to discover the next phase of its regenerative sustenance.
My own picture of humanity today finds us just about to step out from amongst the pieces of our just one-second-ago broken eggshell. Our innocent, trial-and-error-sustaining nutriment is exhausted. We are faced with an entirely new relationship to the universe. We are going to have to spread our wings of intellect and fly or perish; that is, we must dare immediately to fly by the generalized principles governing universe and not by the ground rules of yesterday's superstitious and erroneously conditioned reflexes. And as we attempt competent thinking we immediately begin to reemploy our innate drive for comprehensive understanding.
The architects and planners, particularly the planners, though rated as specialists, have a little wider focus than do the other professions. Also as human beings they often battle the narrow views of specialists-in particular, their patrons-the politicians, and the financial and other legal, but no longer comprehensively effective, heirs to the great pirates’-now only ghostly-prerogatives. At least the planners are allowed to look at all of Philadelphia, and not just to peek through a hole at one house or through one door at one room in that house. So I think it’s appropriate that we assume the role of planners and begin to do the largest scale comprehensive thinking of which we are capable. We begin by eschewing the role of specialists who deal only in parts. Becoming deliberately expansive instead of contractive, we ask, “How do we think in terms of wholes ?” If it is true that the bigger the thinking becomes the more lastingly effective it is, we must ask, "How big can we think?”
One of the modern tools of high intellectual advantage is the development of what is called general systems theory. Employing it we begin to think of the largest and most comprehensive systems, and try to do so scientifically. We start by inventorying all the important, known variables that are operative in the problem. But if we don’t really know how big “big” is, we may not start big enough, and are thus likely to leave unknown, but critical, variables outside the system which will continue to plague us. Interaction of the unknown variables inside and outside the arbitrarily chosen limits of the system are probably going to generate misleading or outrightly wrong answers. If we are to be effective, we are going to have to think in both the biggest and most minutely-incisive ways permitted by intellect and by the information thus far won through experience.
Can we think of, and state adequately and incisively, what we mean by universe? For universe is, inferendaily, the biggest system. If we could start with universe, we would automatically avoid leaving out any strategically critical variables. We find no record as yet of man having successfully defined the universe-scientifically and comprehensively-to include the non-simultaneous and only partially over- lapping, micro-macro, always and everywhere transforming, physical and metaphysical, omni-complementary but nonidentical events. Man has failed thus far, as a specialist, to define the microcosmic limits of divisibility of the nucleus of the atom, but, epoch ally, as accomplished by Einstein, has been able to define successfully the physical universe but not the metaphysical universe; nor has he, as yet, defined total universe itself as combining both the physical and metaphysical. The scientist was able to define physical universe by virtue of the experimentally-verified discovery that energy can neither be created nor lost and, therefore, that energy is conserved and is therefore finite. That means it is equatable.
Einstein successfully equated the physical universe as E = MC 2 . His definition was only a hypothetical venture until fission proved it to be true. The physical universe of associative and dissociative energy was found to be a closed, but non-simultaneously occurring, system—its separately occurring events being mathematically measurable; i.e., weigh-able and equatable. But the finite physical universe did not include the metaphysical weightless experiences of universe. All the unweigh-ables, such as any and all our thoughts and all the abstract mathematics, are weightless. The metaphysical aspects of universe have been thought by the physical scientists to defy "closed system’s” analysis. I have found, however, as we shall soon witness, that total universe including both its physical and metaphysical behaviors and aspects are scientifically definable.
Einstein and others have spoken exclusively about the physical department of universe in words which may be integrated and digested as the aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping, nonidentical, but always complementary, omni-transforming, and weigh-able energy events. Eddington defines science as “the earnest attempt to set in order the facts of experience.” Einstein and many other first-rank scientists noted that science is concerned exclusively with “facts of experience.” Holding to the scientists’ experiences as all important, I define universe, including both the physical and metaphysical, as follows: The universe is the aggregate of all of humanity’s consciously-apprehended and communicated experience with the non-simultaneous, nonidentical, and only partially overlapping, always complementary, weigh-able and unweigh-able, ever omni-transforming, event sequences.
Each experience begins and ends-ergo, is finite. Because our apprehending is packaged, both physically and metaphysically, into time increments of alternate awake-ness and asleep-ness as well as into separate finite conceptions such as the discrete energy quanta and the atomic nucleus components of the fundamental physical discontinuity, all experiences are finite. Physical experiments have found no solids, no continuous surfaces or lines-only discontinuous constellations of individual events. An aggregate of finites is finite. Therefore, universe as experientially defined, including both the physical and metaphysical, is finite. It is therefore possible to initiate our general systems formulation at the all inclusive level of universe whereby no strategic variables will be omitted. There is an operational grand strategy of General Systems Analysis that proceeds from here. It is played somewhat like the game of “Twenty Questions,” but G. S. A. is more efficient-that is, is more economical-in reaching its answers. It is the same procedural strategy that is used by the computer to weed out all the wrong answers until only the right answer is left.
Having adequately defined the whole system we may proceed to subdivide progressively. This is accomplished through progressive division into two parts-one of which, by definition, could not contain the answer-and discarding of the sterile part. Each progressively-retained live part is called a “bit” because of its being produced by the progressive binary “yes” or “no” bi-section of the previously residual live part. The magnitude of such weeding operations is determined by the number of successive bits necessary to isolate the answer.
How many "bi-secting bits” does it take to get rid of all the irrelevancies and leave in lucid isolation that specific information you are seeking? We find that the first subdividing of the concept of universe-bit one-is into what we call a system. A system subdivides universe into all the universe outside the system ( macrocosm ) and all the rest of the universe which is inside the system, (microcosm) unth the exception of the minor fraction of universe which constitutes the system itself. The system divides universe not only into macrocosm and microcosm but also coincidentally into typical conceptual and non-conceptual aspects of universe-that is, an overlappingly-as sociable consideration, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, all the non-associable, non-overlappingly-considerable, non-simultaneously-transforming events of non-synchronizable disparate wave frequency rate ranges.
A thought is a system, and is inherently conceptual—though often only dimly and confusedly conceptual at the moment of first awareness of the as yet only vaguely describable thinking activity. Because total universe is non-simultaneous it is not conceptual. Conceptuality is produced by isolation, such as in the instance of one single, static picture held out from a moving-picture films continuity, or scenario. Universe is an evolutionary-process scenario without beginning or end, because the shown part is continually transformed chemically into fresh film and re-exposed to the ever self-reorganizing process of latest thought realizations which must continually introduce new significance into the freshly written description of the ever-transforming events before splicing the film in again for its next projection phase.
Heisenberg’s principle of “indeterminism” which recognized the experimental discovery that the act of measuring always alters that which was being measured turns experience into a continuous and never-repeatable evolutionary scenario. One picture of the scenario about the caterpillar phase does not communicate its transformation into the butterfly phase, etc. The question, “I wonder what is outside the outside-of-universe?” is a request for a single picture description of a scenario of transformations and is an inherently invalid question. It is the same as looking at a dictionary and saying, 'Which word is the dictionary?” It is a meaningless question.
It is characteristic of “all” thinking-of all system’s conceptioning-that all the lines of thought interrelationships must return cyclically upon themselves in a plurality of directions, as do various great circles around spheres. Thus may we inter-relatedly comprehend the constellation-or system-of experiences under consideration. Thus may we comprehend how the special-case economy demonstrated by the particular system considered also discloses the generalized law of energy conservation of physical universe.”
-From “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,” Buckminster Fuller, 1969
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