R. Buckminster Fuller

Original recording 1929; Audio Arts cassette 1974

from Audio Arts Volume 2, Number 1

Transcript

Audio Arts has recorded a number of major events that by their nature are transitory and would otherwise have been lost. One such was the visit to Britain in 1974 of Richard Buckminster Fuller, who gave a two-hour lecture at Art Net in London. Here, in a short extract from that lecture, Fuller demonstrates bis ability to generate inspired thinking as he speaks, whilst exploring relationships between human scale and the wider universe. This unscripted event could be regarded as a lecture/performance.

R. Buckminster Fuller: This is a very extraordinary moment going on in humanity, and I’ve been travelling around the world, just completed the thirty-seventh trip around. I’m not a tourist, this is purely incidental to the way life goes. I am just beginning to feel our planet as really being a sphere. It’s a very big sphere to you and me, but I’m beginning really to have some personal feeling of this as a home. People often ask me where I live, and I say – I don’t mean to be facetious or rude – but I live in a little planet called earth, and that’s what we all do. But it’s interesting now I’ve got to the point where I really feel it as comprehensible. I’ve had it statistically shown, and made many maps of the world, and made drawings of the world time and again, so as actually to begin to feel it pulsing together, and so I am really confident that humanity is now going through a state of transition on our planet which is absolutely unprecedented.

Number one, we have very much more knowledge than we had long, long ago. Human beings having always been born naked, helpless, with no experience, therefore absolutely ignorant, and humanity has had to find its way. Humans are endowed in the first place with hunger so we are sure to take on fuel, and given thirst, so that we carry on the chemical processes and breathe spontaneously. We are given a reproductive urge to reproduce ourselves and we finally get to wherever we’re supposed to get. We’re certainly obviously here for something extremely important. If we take the complexity of the chemistries of human beings, all the principles that they demonstrate as we know in physics and chemistry, there’s nothing quite so complex that we know of in all of the universe, short of the universe itself. We seem to be almost miniature universes and yet, given hunger and reproductive urges, and being born ignorant, man also was given vanity and a way to kid himself along, to excuse himself for making mistakes. That really indicates that nothing could be more important than that we have to find things out ourselves by trial and error. I find, for instance, that personally I have lived through very great change that was not anticipated by anybody when I was young, and as each stage occurs, everybody acts as if they knew that all the time. Right now everybody knows that anybody could go to the moon, that’s a very easy thing to do.

Human beings have, then, this strange way of immediately making themselves rather superior, retrospectively. The point is that I see these characteristics and I am sure that these are put there in many ways to … they would not really carry on, they might become much too discouraged if they didn’t have this self-deceit to some extent. So I found humanity so rationalising. It tends to think of itself as responsible for this whole universe and it looks on the stars and everything as decoration, and the whole show is right here, and what you and I decide the way the next election goes is the way the whole universe is going to go.

I go through an exercise myself very frequently in which I think about what we know about the scale of things and general information through which we find out our little planet is eight thousand miles in diameter, the highest mountain is five miles above sea level, the deepest water five miles below that. Ten miles differential between the outermost points and the innermost points and ten miles in relation to eight thousand: one eight-hundredth. If you make a sphere, a six-foot sphere in polished steel, it would probably be rougher than our actual earth, so when we have photographs being made of coming into the earth through the cloud cover, you can’t make out if there’s a blue of water and there’s a brown of land; there’s no slight suggestion of any altitude or any depth. You and I, human beings, average about – between birth and the total life, take all humans and average out the children – about five feet; there are about five thousand feet to a mile, so it takes a thousand of us laid end to end to make a mile, and it would take ten thousand of us to make the difference between the outermost points and the innermost points. So if that’s invisible, you and I are about one-ten thousandth of invisible on the planet, and that planet is a very small planet, as a planet of the sun, and the sun itself is a rather inferior star.

If you look at Orion’s Belt, which is very familiar to most people in the sky, the brightest star there is the Betelgeuse. The Betelgeuse’s diameter is greater than the orbit of the earth around the sun. That’s a good sized star. So we have this inferior star and it’s one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and human beings are endowed with the capability to discover principles and to develop refraction of light and to make lenses and so forth. We now have developed telescopes and taken photographs of billions of such galaxies. We now know of a billion galaxies of approximately a hundred billion stars each. Now, in that kind of observation, omnidirectional, out of all these stars 99.99 per cent are invisible to the naked eye. A billion times a hundred billion would be the number of stars we now know about. Try to make a billion times a hundred billion points around us, a sphere for instance; you find it will be like having a steel shell and that to have all the atoms in a steel shell around us would be something like the relative plenitude of those stars. I’m thinking about some such big, enormous shell or sphere and trying to find even a planet earth somewhere in there, it would be absolutely impossible; and to try to find you and me – incredible.

I am quite confident that this show does not depend on whether the Conservatives or the Labour party come in, or Republicans or Democrats. I am sure that the universe is absolutely indifferent. In fact, this couldn’t be more nonsense; we really are playing some games on our planet that have nothing to do with the really great big show. So I’ve been terribly excited throughout my life, in trying to find out about any of the clues of what the bigger show might be and how long we happen to be here.