Buckminster Fuller, "Spaceship Earth”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FULLER: And having been a visitor here very many times I've had a great chance to see life changing-- the pattern, lifestyles changing very greatly-- but the environment itself changing tremendously. The year that I entered Harvard, the subway was completed and opened from Boston to Cambridge. And up to this time been really very-- well, MIT could get over of Boston quite rapidly. But MIT-- much of it had been in Boston in those days.

Because when I was young I felt the great change was taking place that had not been experienced by my father, my grandfather, all the family records that I had-- I thought it might be a good idea to keep some record of a little individual born in the Victorian period and who is coming over in some kind of new world. And so I have kept just such records. And I have really, really large archives. And they're down in Philadelphia right now.

But by virtue of having them I'm able to look at records, they're changing things, and get a sense of rates of change and have some sense of what may be unfolding for humanity on our planet. I think it great fun. I was seven when the first automobile came into Boston. I was eight when the Wright brothers' first flew. I was brought up as inherently impossible for man to fly. Those were impressionistic years up to eight years of age.

And wireless-- how crazy can you get? Even though Marconi had invented the wireless the year that I was born, we don't have an SOS till I'm 12 years of age. And so these were very extraordinary, and that was things that were suddenly becoming, and many things that I've been told would never happen were beginning to happen. I was told man and never got to the North Pole, never got to the South Pole. And when I was 14 they did get to the North Pole. When I was 16, got to the South Pole.

So there's something that was happening here that all the world had not expected that's all. That's all I'm trying to get at. So I felt really very intuitive to this necessity to keep some kind of record of the transition. I'm sure it's only because I'd did start doing that years ago that you've invited me to be here tonight. Because I have been able to keep some track and been able to make some pregnostications that have come true.

But I don't think there's ever been a moment our humans on our planet-- by humans have really come to know so much about our planet and about the local universe, where humans have ever been in such perilous we really are today. I think we're absolutely on the brink of either doing away with ourselves. And all of this then relates to-- I wonder if it'd be possible for me to have a chair brought out. I should have asked for it in advance. I have podia-phobia. I don't normally get behind these things.

[LAUGHTER]

I think I'll think better if I'm sitting down. Because I operate entirely what I call thinking out loud. Thank you very much. At the age of 32 in 1927-- which is the year that Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic-- which is suddenly a great change again, that human beings not only were now flying, but they would be able to cross great oceans. At the age of 32 then I decided to really make an experiment with the rest of my life-- trying to find out what, if anything, a little penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity, the great nations and great corporations inherently could not do.

So I was just fairly simply, think about this-- luckily I'd been in the regular United States Navy and I'd had some commands. And so I could think about the fact that 3/4 of earth is water and the Navy was concerned with that 3/4 the world is water. Out of the 1/4 that is dry land, about half it is covered with ice, rocks, deserts. So then only about 1/8 of the surface of earth but propitious for life support. And that 1/8 is invited up into well over 100 nations, at the time I decided to do my experiment.

So a 100 nations dividing up 1/8-- each one of them tending to look out for its own. It was so much pioneering of humanity got it so far. She continually found herself being attacked by others. People in America had a little more luck because they were further away from the others. Anyway, quite clearly those nations were thinking about their fraction of the 1/8 of the surface of the Earth. And the great corporations were operating under the protection of the various nations. And they had to make profits at a short period of time or they go out of business. At least that's the way they thought.

So they were inherently shortsighted. And so there was nothing-- and nobody was thinking about our total planet as a ship-- a spaceship. Incredibly designed, and onboard of it all these humans. And by this time a radial accumulated knowledge, great identification of resources. So I said there's nothing to stop me as little individual thinking about then, this total Spaceship Earth. I gave it that name after a while and it became popular.

And nothing to stop me then of seeing about how to employ the total knowledge of the total resources to take care of all humanity-- paying absolutely no attention to any kind of divisions of the human beings, but trying to look at it as all humans. I wondered why the universe to have humans on board in the universe and have them on board this little particular planet. I found that the more I studied human beings in contradistinction to other organisms, the more I was convinced we had some very important function to fulfill here in the universe. And the universe had no supercargos-- that everything that was in the universe was essential to the integrity of the regeneration of universe.

So the function-- I'll come down to it very rapidly-- differentiating between humans and other organisms. I said all the other living organisms have some built in integral equipment in the organism itself that gives it special advantage in some special environment, whether kind of snout on a dog to be able to dig from the ground, or some little vine that just could grow up the Amazon-- and do it very beautifully. Or birds flying in the sky with beautiful wings, but when non-flying unable to disencumber themselves of their wings because they're integral, if walking is a difficult matter for the bird.

So I said humans then, don't have these built in special equipments. A lot of people identify brain with humans, but there are many creatures have brains. And I've found that if you want to think about it in your own direct experience-- brains are always and only coordinating the information of the senses, without which we are utterly unaware of universe. So they're coordinating the special cases. This one smells a little different than that one.

So we have packages of these special case experiences which brains are able to store and retrieve memory of. I've found humans have a special capability that are not manifest by any other creature, which I call minds. Because I heard mind and brain inter-exchanged, but I'm now differentiating clearly-- brains is physical equipment for coordinating the senses. And mind-- from time to time-- had the capability to discover relationships existing between special cases that were not manifest by any of the special cases, considered only by themselves.

As for instance, the long extraordinary case of human beings being excited by the night sky, all seemingly fixed eyes, recognizable constellations. In contradistinction to which they were one, two, three from time to time, lights that appeared a little bit brighter than the others. And you could see them moving against things, but tonight they're in different position from yesterday. So quite clearly, they were moving around-- What later on we begin to call the planets.

And these were so intriguing to humanity that they made all kinds of speculations. They kept records out of them as best they could in relation to their periods as seasons and other experiences. And they gave them names of gods. But not until human beings have calculated capability, which is really very, very recent as far as humanity in general goes-- which came along with the positioning of numbers and the ability then to multiply and divide.

If you ever tried doing your calculations in Roman numerals, you find how difficult it is. In fact, you can't get anywhere at all. So not until then these Arabic numerals came in and the cipher itself, and they got publication in northern Africa in 1200.

Then it took 300 years for it to get into Italy and southern Germany, the point where Copernicus, as a human being, has calculated capability. And with calculating capability and taking the data regarding what we knew of these planets and the sun in the sky was that we're one of those planets going around the sun. The sun was not going around us.

I want to really stress how very, very recent is that event because I find today, though it was 500 years ago, we're really not-- and everybody knows about it-- we have done very little to get ourselves actually celebrating, reacting in terms of it.

For instance, I had a great honor of being invited to speak to the MIT Faculty Club back in the early '50s. And the dean of architecture at that time was-- said to me that he found that the Architecture Department was never being asked to give any Faculty Club talks because MIT felt that it's so really MIT that the Architecture Department was sort of a department of liaison with idiots.

[LAUGHTER]

So they were not really taken very seriously. So he complained to the other deans about it. And they said, all right, you'll have the next faculty lecture. And so the dean asked me to give the talk. And because I knew about his saying about the fact that the family liaison was idiots, I said to the Faculty Club when I stood up I was very surprised to be asked to speak to them because they were all so ignorant. And they looked very surprised, and I had to make good in a hurry.

[LAUGHTER]

And I said, of any of you present who do not see the sun going down in the evening, please show your hands. There were no hands. I said you've had 500 years. You've known the sun is not going down for 500 years. What are you doing in your educational system about coordinating your senses with your information?

[LAUGHTER]

I think it's very ignorant to persist in this manner. Keep on saying you're very practical to say sunrise and sunset. Seems to be rather good poetry, but you keep continually standing your kids off with misinformation.

[LAUGHTER]

Now, that is enough of that particular episode, but I--

[LAUGHTER]

Coming back now to trying to identify humans. And I said we have this phenomena mind, and we have this matter then of planets. The idea suddenly that we're one of the planets going around the sun. And this is enormously intrigued others. And we have Tycho Brahe getting better instruments, being a man of great means, and making some better observations. He needs a mathematician, getting Kepler. And Kepler then discovering that all these different planets were a different distance from the sun, all different sizes, all going around at different rates.

So while they're all on the same team, seem to be very disorderly. But being a mathematician, he said, I know one thing in common, which is they're going around the sun, at least that. I could, as a mathematician, give them something else in common. I might be able to find radium with two knowns. So he said, I'm going to give them a known. He said, I'm going to give them so many days. As I remember, it was 21 days.

And giving them exactly 21 days, right to the second, he knew where each one was in respect to the sun or the stars. He'd know the distances from the sun. By this time, he discovered the moving in elliptical arcs. So he then had the radius from the sun or the stars and then a different radius-- a little different radius at the end of the 21 days. And he knew actually then.

He was able to make a diagram of each one of these new radius and the elliptical arc. And having these pictures now of triangles-- long, thin triangles-- he said, I have all the data. I might as well calculate these areas. Well, there doesn't seem to be any sort of triangles in the sky. Might as well do that.

And if you were Kepler and then make this calculation and discover they were not similar, but they were exactly the same, think of it-- the astonishment of a human being that hidden in this great soup of this disorder was an elegant mathematical coordination. Because obviously it was coordinated to come out exactly the same-- all of them.

So that you then have to think in a way that you and I have never have, and no other human being has ever had to think before. Because he doesn't tell you this in his diary, but supposing they were touching each other, he might understand how they might move like gears to coordinate. But they were millions of miles apart. Millions of miles apart, and human beings had no idea of anything operating in millions of miles apart in a tension and absolutely invisible-- some kind of invisible tendon operating it.

Think of it. Think of the intellectual challenge that really was. But he was familiar, as a human being, that if you swing a weight around your head, it stays in orbit. If you let go, it goes off in a line. Also he has familiar, if you wanted to make an ellipse, you have to use two restraints instead of one restraint.

So he had to assume somehow or other-- because he had found them moving elliptically-- that there was some kind of restraints of tensions operating over millions of miles. And the fact that the planets bunched from time to time may then possibly pull on-- the bunch could pull on the one, as well as the sun. And he made those kind of ordinary discoveries.

Now, here we have suddenly some interrelationship existing between that does not manifest in any one of those. Nothing-- not any one planet that said there could be strings to another planet, as you'll get out of what I'm talking about it. Because there was a group behaving this way that humanity never paid attention. And finally when a team behaving a little differently from all the rest of the universe, it finally discovers some relationship going on there.

We go on from there to Galileo measuring the rate of falling bodies, acceleration of the rate of falling, and getting the mathematics of that. And we have Isaac Newton tremendously eager to understand what this extraordinary, invisible tension was that Kepler had now discovered. And have Isaac Newton then finally being able to work out the fact that the interrelationship, the interattractiveness, was varying as a second power, mathematical distances apart, but the inverse ratio of it. That is, if you halve the distance between the two, you increase to one-, two-, four-fold. If you doubled the distance apart, it went down one quarter of it before.

Suddenly, we then have a human mind able to discover the mathematical relationship-- which, firstly was hypothetical. But then as it's tested, and tested, and tested back, astronomers are always explaining the interaction of these celestial bodies-- whatever bodies you're studying.

So this rapidly became what we call a mathematical generalization-- a scientific generalization-- and found no exceptions whatsoever. And it could only be expressed mathematically. So suddenly we find the human mind having a capability from time to time to discover a relationship existing between which can only be expressed mathematically. It's a highly intellectual matter, and we have then-- I said brain dealing in the special cases. And then the special cases were always temporal-- had beginnings and endings.

And what we have suddenly-- the human mind discovering these principles. And as I say, if they qualify as a generalized principle, it means they have no exceptions. And that which has no exceptions must be inherently eternal. Nothing to say that one of these generalizations may not someday prove to have exceptions. But as far as we know, there is a family of them today which we have no exception. Therefore, up to the time we find the exception, it must be considered as inherently eternal.

And that's very different. The human brain then asking for beginnings and endings of the universe, and the human mind having capability to discover that which is eternal.

I became very intrigued then by the idea of what we call behaviors of whole systems like the planetary systems, solar system, in which the behavior of the whole is not explained by behavior of any of the powers considered only separately. We call that synergetic.

So then I began to think about the universe in those kinds of terms and saying, how many of these generalized principles have we discovered? As we discover one, we don't know we're going to discover it, but suddenly we have it. Nor do we know whether it's going to be the last one that would ever be discovered. We don't know how many there are.

But there is an increasing inventory There's a principle of leverages, the mathematics of that. And as Galileo showed, you didn't have to have a compression lever and compression fulcrum. You could have a tension fulcrum. You could have pulleys, and falls counting out the same mathematics. So they are beautiful mathematical laws which are generalizations that human beings could use objectively as special cases.

That then gave me an odd feeling that humans had a very different kind of function in the universe. Because we didn't know any other phenomena that had access to these extraordinary generalized principles. Because when you and I use the word design, we immediately would infer an intellectual sorting and deliberate arrangement. In other words, the word design seems to involve a complex of that which is to be sorted and to be arranged.

And the best we can see, then, these human minds have been discovering these generalized principles. And I said, what is very impressive about them is not only are they being eternalized-- they're all concurrently operative-- but none of them has ever been found to contradict any of the others, and several of them are augmentative.

So in sum totally, a fine human mind apparently being admitted to some of the great design of the universe itself. I said, we must be very important if we have kind of access. Therefore, we are now trying to understand why we're bound to this planet and, we're thinking, bound to the universe itself.

I also want you to think about the extraordinary change in the phenomena concept of universe just in my day. When I was 28, Hubble discovered another galaxy. Pretty extraordinary. And we called it galaxy because we had our galactic Milky Way, our galactic system. And so there's another galaxy. And today, we know of 2 billion galaxies.

So this will give you an idea of the rate of expansion of what you and I have to consider as universe. But you spontaneously today think about the universe as vastly greater than anything I had to think about as. Universe And this will give you, again, a sense of the great, incredible acceleration of knowing that's taking place with humanity itself.

Now, thinking about that, this function of humans in the universe, I also said, one of the things that's very impressive is that human beings are all born, always born, naked, absolutely helpless for months, beautiful equipment but absolutely ignorant because no experience. So that we're deliberately born that way, even though as our eyes are designed, our brain's designed with a quadrillion atoms in coordinates, and you and I can communicate. That's all a priori.

And so it's extraordinarily dumb that we take it tremendously for granted. And it's only very recently we begin to really take some kind of cognizance so the fact that this is such incredible technology that we don't even call it technology, because it's way beyond the kind of grasp that humans so far have of technology and the kind of principles we've employed up to date.

Now-- thinking now, from this point on, I'm trying to identify why humans are in the universe and what we might be able to do about carrying on abetting what nature, our universe-- why does the universe have us here, and trying to abet the realization of that function. In view of the fact we are always born naked, helpless, and ignorant, and the relatively short time we know of our being on board here-- for about 3 million years.

It is amazing to me how human beings then being born naked, helpless, ignorant, but hungry, thirsty, curious, driven to make moves. Hungry, trying out this. And somebody eats a berry, and they die. For then 1,000 years, that tribe said nobody can eat berries. And then suddenly it discovered there's some berries you can eat, some you couldn't.

And nature didn't have any operating manual. She could perfectly well have had green safe to eat and red dangerous to eat if she wanted to. But she didn't do it that way. She deliberately forced us to learn by trial and error. That seemed to be a deliberate part of the design.

So that we've had to make an incredible number of mistakes in those 3 million years or more. And we've gotten now to a point where we have discovered so many-- 150,000 nuances of experience, which is so unique that they require their own words, and we've agreed on those words. It's amazing matter we've agreed that much, because agreements are very different.

So I found that here we have an enormous facility of communication with one another. And we suddenly have come to a point where we did get that communication. And we then began to accumulate information very, very rapidly. And I felt that all of this had to do with all of us being born in this sort of group womb of permitted ignorance, with an enormous amount of resources by which we could, by trial and error, learn something about why we're here in the universe.

And to me, then, is the most absolutely important thing about us is our minds. Clearly, our muscle is nothing. We can't compete with a donkey. And we mean to get to thinking about the energies in our universe that makes for a rather quick summary of two things.

As we know, during my lifetime and just in this century, we began to discover that chemical elements have unique frequencies when incandescent in an arc frame which could be detected by the spectroscope. And we have now, using the light coming from the 2 billion galaxies, we've been able to take that light and run it through a spectroscope. And on one of our planets, little human beings have an inventory of the relative abundance of all the chemical elements present within 11 and 1/2 billion light years around us.

The human mind can has that kind of scope and capability. But a muscle? Nothing. And yet muscle and cunning are still in control of human affairs. So this is right why we are in great peril. Because we're here quite clearly for our minds, and minds are not in control.

Now, I would come back to some things that hit me very hard and are of great significance. For instance, in the Navy, where I had been commander of a ship, and I had been so taught that I could take over the job of my senior. I could take over the ship, or I could take over the fleet if necessary. The whole training was that way, all leading up to a moment of contact and destruction.

I wondered how and why all this extraordinary technology, beautiful science had been reduced as to work to destruction. And this brought me, then, to the discovery of the fact that for up to 1500, we'd been really thinking about all the universe as a flat universe, even though there were individuals who were quite sure our world was a sphere. But that was anything but popular. The general way of thinking about it was having a flat Earth.

The Ptolemaic map, going back really 3,000 years, was fitting. It took in all of Europe, North Africa, and Asia in sort of a rectangular form. Then came to the wilderness and went on to infinity. But it was a flat world.

Now, this is true of all the great empires-- of Charlemagne, the Roman Empire, you want anyone-- Genghis Khan-- all of those empires were these flat empires going to infinity. And if you didn't like the way things are, there are an infinite number of gods and an infinite number of chances that you'd come out all right if you prayed. So it was worth praying.

And we have suddenly Magellan and discovering we're on a spherical earth. And we have the most powerful people of these times, and learned that what we call the control of the world wealth was by virtue of the controlling of the great waterways.

I'm going to-- I'd like to extend that a little, because you are MIT. And we have the archaeologically the city-state being discovered over and over again-- in great walled cities. Mycenae in Greece is a good example of it. There's a beautiful, fertile valley, great rung around the mountains. In the middle is a great high hill. And then on that high hill, you could see all the passes coming into it, and you could look at all the great fertile fields and command the whole show.

And then you have, by building great walls around the top of that hill, and then walls going down to the well, you had a very safe citadel. When you saw an enemy coming, you then took all the foods from the valley and brought them inside the walls if you could. What you couldn't bring in, you'd do what they call a scorch. You burn them up.

So when the enemy came in, all the local people had all their food inside, and they had all their water. The people who came were already hungry, and they could undergo 30 days without food without getting very, very weak. And then when they get good and weak, you can go out and decimate them. And this is why the city-state was a very successful intervention for thousands of years.

In the meantime, human beings began to build-- well, 3/4 of Earth is covered in water. Going from just dugouts and rafts, and to suddenly getting to ribbed ships. And the ribbed ships got bigger and bigger, and got to the point of about the time of Mycenae, or even Crete. And the Island of Crete, there's no fortification, because this is the headquarters of the water people. There's bigger and bigger boats.

And we have then the Myceneans going in their big boats up to Troy. And Troy, commandingly the traffic from Asia into Europe-- it was an extraordinarily important point-- complete with a walled city. So they have all their food inside. When the enemy comes, they expect the people outside to starve.

But suddenly, there were these great ships. They could go off and get more supplies, continually brings supplies up. This is what we call a line of supply. And then Troy fell. And then, from this point on, history begins that where the great and powerful people control, and the biggest control is from controlling great lines of supply.

This shows up very much when you get to Italy, where you see all those beautiful, fertile valleys with lovely castellos commanding the valleys. But there's one city in Italy that's very different-- Venice. And no walls whatsoever because they're water people. And the water people then took their ships all around Italy and brought up lines of supply, and they starved all the people out of the castellos. This was a great change over in the fundamentals of humanity.

So we have suddenly Magellan going around the world. And those who control the great lines of supply between Europe and Asia, who has enormous resources, great wealth had already been developed to bring that wealth to Europe and cash in on it. Enormous ambitions to do that.

These ambitions are operated under the names of different countries like France and Portugal, but they're really great, powerful individuals. Queen Elizabeth I founds the East India Company in 1600, about 3/4 of a century after Magellan gets around. It was a private enterprise with some of her private friends, and she was able to protect it with her empire's capability.

There's enormous battles. And by the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, suddenly British empire is it. And it's said to be the first empire on which the sun never set. In order to carry on and develop that empire, they also developed, then, the East India Company College in England, which is still there. The campus is still operating-- very beautiful campus.

And on that campus in 1800, writing just before Trafalgar-- five years before and five years after, two different books-- you have Thomas Malthus, who is a professor of economics at the East India Company College. And he is the first individual in history to have total vital statistics from around a closed system earth, because the East India Company contacts all these servants all around the world picking up the critical information.

So suddenly, he has this incredible information, and he's able to write 1800, and then 1810 to confirm it. And quite clearly, humanity was multiplying itself at a geometrical rate, producing life support only at an arithmetical rate. And quite clearly, the majority of humanity's designed to be a failure. Pray all you want. It won't do any good. This isn't as it is anymore.

So this is very formidable piece of information for those who are in the know. But there was a general illiteracy. It was not a popular piece of knowledge at all as the information of those who were in powerful positions making very critical decisions for humanity.

We have then, 35 years later, Darwin promulgating his theory of evolution and suggesting that survival only of the fittest is the fundamental cause of it. Then we have the economists saying, all right. We like that. But Darwin said, I did not develop this in economics. I did not mean it. But the economists said, well, it fits our case perfectly.

Then we have Karl Marx in English saying he now accepts Malthus as pure science, as a closed system. It's a closed system-- hard fact. And we have Darwin, survival only of the fittest. So Karl Marx said quite clearly, the worker is fittest survive because he knows how to handle the tools to make all the products, how to grow the seeds and things. These other people are parasites.

The other people said, we're obviously not parasites. We're at the top of the heap because the workers are so dull, we need some really bright people around here. Make some kind of long distance, visionary speculations.

So we have then, since that time, a closed system Earth instead of a flat Earth. Rather, suddenly instead of being a dichotomy of different kind of religions, we have the socialist and the viewpoint and the out and out enterprise. There's various degrees between the two, but we have since that time on our planet, the great ideologies saying you may not like our system personally, but we're convinced we have the fairest, most logical, most ingenious way of coping with vessel inadequacy of life support. But because there are those who disagree diametrically on how to cope, it can only be resolved by trial of arms. Which system is fittest to survive?

And that's the reason, for instance, that Russia and the United States for the last 30 years have been appropriating over $200 billion a year-- sum total now over $6 trillion-- have been appropriating, so buying the highest capability of humanity and focus it on how to destroy most accurately, most effectively, at greater and greater distances, swifter and swifter.

This seems like an incredibly poor investment of all that we've really learned, then, right?

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

FULLER: That's where it's gone.

AUDIENCE: [APPLAUSE]

FULLER: I'm worried about time. I'm trying to think how to get everything I really need to get to in the shortest numbers of minutes.

Anyway, what I had begun to experience-- as I said, here I am in Cambridge as a little boy, and I'm suddenly having this wireless come in, suddenly the airplanes coming in. I said, I really feel something.

And what was really coming in was from what I call a visible reality. Reality, when I was young, was everything you could see, smell, touch, and hear. That's reality. And they said, if you're a sane man, and you're healthy, you knew just what you're doing. Suddenly, this is upset very much by Freud and Mesmer discovering a great many things we didn't know, but we're still doing them anyway.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

FULLER: But when I was young, it was really exactly what I sad. You knew just what you're doing if you can smell it, touch it, see it, and hear it, can't you?

Now, I realized something was coming in which I call an invisible reality. Because suddenly, when I was three years of age, electrons were discovered. It didn't make any newspaper. Nobody knew that's going to be anything. And suddenly there were these alloys. And we're suddenly bringing, by really accident-- all the great alloy discoveries by metallurgists have been really accidental up to the time of the space program after World War II.

And so we had, them, alloys. And an alloy-- I'll just give you in terms of aluminum, which is very dramatically clear. Aluminum is where we learned to refine electrolytically only in the '90s, but we don't really use it for anything but a souvenir, as ashtrays, and things like that up to the 1930s when it goes in the airplane for first time. And the aluminum, and what we use as the obvious property giving the greatest clue to the strength of material, is the ability to go here and not be pulled apart. And so we call it a tensile strength per square inch or whatever section we want.

And so the tensile strength of pure aluminum is 18,000 pounds per square inch. We learned then, accidentally-- a little copper got into and so forth-- and it got up suddenly to double that strength of 36,000. Then during World War II, the Japanese brought in another alloy that got up to 72,000 pounds per square inch. So I could have three rods of aluminum here, one inch in diameter, say three feet long, all the way the same. No scientists can look at them, tell any difference whatsoever, and this one is double of this, and this is double again.

Now, here was something coming into World War I that I, being a regular line officer, became tremendously aware of. And up to this time, everybody knew that spies could see the size of the ships they were building. It took a long time to build a ship. You could take, then, the total cubage of the weight of that water, that cubage of water was all the ship could weigh, everything had on board.

But suddenly, I saw in World War I that a ship is coming at you and has the same tonnage as your ship, has the same number of guns, the same size guns. But yet, this you don't know, and it's coming at you, that its metal is much stronger in the front, and it can fire much further away. And this became the most highly classified secret information in World War I, was the alloys.

And suddenly we had an invisible reality. And the public couldn't tell about it. It's very easy to keep a secret in complete ignorancy and no way to understand. So one ship went to the bottom, of they couldn't tell anything about it. And so it is very easy keeping that kind of secret.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

FULLER: So I became fascinated, then, in World War I to realize that we're beginning to do more with the same and more with less. And I could see it was coming in many different ways. In electronics-- Malthaus didn't know. He assumed if you had a message to go across the Atlantic, you had to send a ship. It was going to take 40, 50 days. He didn't know I had a little piece of apparatus. that I could do it at 186,000 miles a second.

I said, how many things did Malthaus leave out? So I began to keep lists of it. By 1917, really late 1917, I'd become really excited to realize there was something going on in humanity which had me intuitively curious anyway, where we're doing more with less invisibly. And might be someday that you do so much with so little, it might be possible that Malthaus was wrong. It might be enough for everybody if we did it enough of it.

This was a terribly challenging idea as a kid to really get in to see it could be true. I came out of the Navy and went into the building world. I stayed in that building world for five years, and I found it thousands of years behind the arts of the environment controlling of the sea and the sky.

I just wanted to point out, too, how you talk about how much-- you know exactly what a Boeing 747 weighs, loaded-- three tons-- and her rate of climb, how many people she can carry. You know everything she can do out of every pound of material you put in, every ounce of materials, every erg of energy, every second of time. But you ask if you people what buildings weigh, they don't know what the buildings weigh.

If you don't know what buildings weigh, you certainly don't have any way to ratio performance or just want to get an idea of the building world on the land being thousands of years behind that of the sea and the sky. We know exactly what you're getting out of every ounce. You have to know.

So I became excited to realize that it was in the building world that we're really behind, because there was something called priorities in relation to the military. If these heads of state, then, are going to have to protect themselves against other states, they're going to defend themselves. There's not enough to go around. They've been told that. Then they leave things to the military to defend them.

The military will say, well, all right. We now know that there are these chemical elements. And there's so much mercury, and there's so much helium. And they do something absolutely unique that nothing else could do. Who has access to these absolutely unique, high performance materials? Who has access to the unique, very high performance of special instruments and tools, production tools made by well-trained brains?

Obviously, then, you have priority of access to the high performance capabilities. The military had that. This meant then that if you have priority, you have to have anti-priority. Who has to make do with the low performance or no performance at all? It was obviously the home front. There's not enough for people anyway. Let the poor devils get on the best they can.

So human beings being human beings and trying to make the best of life, did get up in architecture that was, to them, at least attractive out of the make do. Where we have then the bigger heavier, the thicker the wall, more secure. That idea went out in architecture along with the Maginot Line.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

FULLER: And right up to then, you consoled yourself that way. The bigger, and heavier, and higher the walls, the more secure. We used to have all the advertisement when I was young about a great insurance company with, Safe as the Rock of Gibraltar. They don't use that advertisement anymore. No.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

FULLER: Now, what excited me in 1927-- I'd been in this building world and found that no scientists ever had even been asked to look at the plumbing. Just think of it. No scientist has ever done anything about the plumbing. You have beautiful courses here on frictions in pipes and things like that, but nobody is redesigning the plumbing.

Here we have the human beings, every one of you, several times a day taking this beautiful sun evaporation, water getting in the sky and coming down and absolutely pure to us. And we take that beautiful water, and we use four and five gallons several times a day to get rid of a pint of yellow.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

FULLER: How much sense does that make?

And they'd just say, the home front was absolutely thousands of years behind the art of the sea and the sky.

So in 1927, the American Institute of Architects, as they do today, had their journal. And in their journal, they published buildings they thought well of. And they had a single family dwelling in Illinois in 1927 which they thought was optimum for under the conditions of 1927.

I took that total floor area, total cubage, total number of windows and lumens of light that could get in, everything it had equipment to do, listed all the performance capabilities. And I took its total weight, including the pipes out to the mains. It came out 150 tons.

Then having to match the same cubage, same floor area, every performance capability of the single family dwelling, Illinois, but using the most advanced aircraft design of the time, it came out only three tons. So I said, three tons against 150.

If we really began, instead of waiting, which was going on in those days. I saw after the military developed something, then suddenly it became obsolete. They had to take the weapon, and people who were all tooled up to produce this kind of equipment, then look around the home front for some outlets. This is how the process of the refrigeration which it had in the navy for 25 years suddenly came up on the land in the '20s, and suddenly you didn't have to have ice in your box there.

And so I saw there's fallout that came very secondarily, very laggardly, maybe a quarter of a century, maybe half a century later, came into the home front and began to change the standard of living. In the terms of which, yes, in my day, we've gone from less than 1% of humanity to 56% of humanity enjoying a higher standard of living today than was known or expected by any potentate when I was born. And during that time, we've doubled the population-- so actually have 112-folded the number being benefited by advanced technology. But all this was a very slow feedback from the preoccupation with how to kill.

So I said, supposing we didn't wait for that, but looked at the home front right away. I was indicated by this three tons against 150 that maybe we could really get doing so much with so little, we could really demonstrate to humanity there really is enough to go around.

So that was 52 years ago, and I have engaged in that direction ever since. Then and now that brought me across into geodesic structures, where I could do very much more with very much less. There are now over 200,000 of them somewhere around the world. They're in remote places where the very highest kind of performance is required, where other kinds of structures just would not do, whether they're ringing in the DEW line with radios or the experimental station over the South Pole, or whether radar on top of Mount Fuji able to withstand the most extraordinary hurricanes and gales, snow loads. So delicate that microwaves can go through, yet so light that one helicopter took it up there and fastened it in place like a great bird landing.

So I've had enough experience in the logistics of environment controlling. And due to the factor also, I've been counting on, since 1927, what I call the World Game. Instead of the navy game of World War games where the people in the land were not concerned, but the Navy was concerned because 3/4 of this is water. And then who's going to get control of the line of supply? That's the whole the story.

And how many resources are there around the world? Whole training of the navy was to learn those things. And now I said, I'm going to play a game called World Game not World War Game, where I look at the sum total and see how I can use it, if possible, to make all humanity a success. It seemed to be indicated as implicit in this trending of doing more with less.

Now, so I've kept all kinds of curves. I kept the curves of the rate of increase of the tensile strengths in the steals, and then got into the aluminum. I found that I could predict the aluminum curve would follow it. And it did, et cetera, et cetera. And by keeping enough track of all the total data, I've been able then to be able to say certain things back.

10 years ago, I was able then, by actually, design, able to say it is now incontrovertibly evidencable in engineering that we within 10 years have a design revolution where using only proven technology, using only metals already mined that are recirculating, it's perfectly feasible within 10 years to have all humanity living at a higher standard of living than any humans have ever known before-- on a sustainable basis.

Because during that same 10 years, we can phase out forever all further use of fossil fuels and atomic energy. We can live entirely on our energy income.