Why Crew Consciousness?
Some 40 years ago, shortly after publishing his book “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”, R. Buckminster Fuller wrote a book called “Utopia or Oblivion”. Fuller suggested that in a few decades (meaning now) humanity would approach a fork in the road: utopia or oblivion. Would humanity be proactive and face the true reality of letting go of the past ways of behavior and energy use and seek a higher level of living and consciousness, or would we blindly travel down a destructive path for Spaceship Earth, continuing with no operating manual or awareness of actually living on a planetary spaceship.
The concept of thinking of Earth as a spaceship transformed my thinking. Contemplating the coming fork in the road made me realize that humanity might be hurtling forward without any deep thinking as to where we were going.
During the last 10 years, I have given hundreds of speeches, spoken on all six inhabited continents and written six books about the future. Two of the books were about the general future and the Shift Age, the age we now live in. Three of the books addressed the future transformations occurring in education, health care and brands and marketing. The keynotes I deliver are about the general future and the future of these professions.
Most of these speeches and books were about how humanity was both creating technology and being shaped by technology in transformative ways. How the old thinking of the Industrial Age and the Information Age had given way to this age of transformation called the Shift Age. In other words I was helping people consider, and contemplate, the wonderful changes rushing toward us.
Using the Fuller metaphor of Utopia or Oblivion I was pointing toward how the disorienting change people were and are feeling was actually creating a new higher level of living and consciousness that would transform our future. The path toward utopia.
Then I started to do the research with Tim Rumage about Climate Change. This work, off and on, took two years and it convinced me that there is a clear and present possibility of oblivion for civilization. So Climate Change, largely created by the human footprint on the planet, is the path toward oblivion.
To alter the out of control trajectory toward this potential cataclysm we must go beyond talk, treaties, agreements, incremental changes and lack of understanding. The only way to do this is by changing our consciousness. We MUST see ourselves as living on a spaceship, on This Spaceship Earth. [Note: in the book we define our use of the phrase This Spaceship Earth – TSE- as the state of the planet today].
There are almost 7.4 billion humans on TSE. Perhaps 7 billion of us are living fully with unaware passenger consciousness. That number needs to fall dramatically, as fast as possible. The spaceship metaphor works perfectly to change consciousness, as all spaceships in our awareness need to either be resupplied or end their journey. There is no other planet that can resupply us in the next few decades, which is the time frame to elevate crew consciousness to minimize the oblivion Fuller referenced.
As a futurist who now sees the horrible future humanity is mindlessly creating, it would be a dereliction of my professional duties as a futurist to not commit as much energy, time, and effort to create crew consciousness about TSE as much as possible. Sure I will continue to speak about the transformative future that is rapidly unfolding. To see it and understand it can be ours only makes the move to better stewardship of TSE more urgent and imperative.
In 2007 in “The Shift Age” I wrote:
– Tools defined the Agricultural Age
– Machines defined the Industrial Age
– Technology defined the Information Age
– Consciousness will define the Shift Age.
At the time I wrote that, my vision was a changing human consciousness due to the technological connectivity we are now experiencing. That this would move us from a “place based” consciousness to a “spatial consciousness”. I now see that the other change in consciousness is crew consciousness. Spatial consciousness is occurring and evolving via our connectedness. Crew consciousness will happen by choice. Acting from crew consciousness is now critical to our civilized future. That is why we have launched thisspaceshipearth.org.
Become TSE crew!
