Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller (July 12, 1895 - July 1, 1983) was an American visionary, designer, architect, and inventor. He was also a professor at Southern Illinois University and a prolific writer.

Philosophy and worldview

Buckminster Fuller was arguably among the most original thinkers of this or any other age. Deploring waste, he explored and 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).

Related Topics:
Waste - Ephemeralization - Stewart Brand - Synergetics - Synergy

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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" (essential the incoming solar flux), he declared that it had cost nature "over a million dollars" per US 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.

Related Topics:
Systemic - Worldview - Operating manual for Spaceship Earth - Synergetics - Energy - Material efficiency - Architecture - Engineering - Design - Petroleum - Solar flux

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Having dedicated himself to advancing the success and fulfillment of humanity, 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.

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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..."

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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."

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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 homogenous truss is cyclically tetrahedral, and all solids constructed of regular polygons, except the icosahedron, have a volume that is an integral number of unit-tetrahedrons.

Related Topics:
Analytic geometry - Tetrahedra - Truss - Regular polygons - Icosahedron

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