Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - R.Buckminster Fuller

It is easy to demonstrate to those who will take the time and the trouble to unbias their thoughts that automation swiftly can multiply the physical energy part of wealth much more rapidly and profusely than can man's muscle and brian-reflexed, manually-controlled production.  On the other hand humans alone can foresee, integrate, and anticipate the new tasks to be done by progressively automated wealth-producing machinery.  To take advantage of the fabulous magnitudes of real wealth waiting to be employed intelligently by humans and unblock automation's postponement by organized labor we must give each human who is or becomes unemployed a life fellowship in research and development or in just simple thinking.  Man must be able to dare to think truthfully and to act accordingly without fear of losing his franchise to live.  The use of mind fellowships will permit humans comprehensively to expand and accelerate scientific exploration and experimental prototype development.  For every 100m000 employed in research and development, or just plain thinking, one probably will make a breakthrough that will more than pay for the other 99,999 fellowships.  Thus, production will no longer be impeded by humans trying to do what machines can do better.  Contrariwise, omni-automated and inanimately powered production will unleash humanity's unique capability - its metaphysical capability.  Historically speaking, these steps will be taken within the next decade.  There is no doubt about it.  But not without much social crisis and consequent educational experience and discovery concerning the nature of our unlimited wealth.  
Through the universal research and development fellowships, we're going to start emancipating humanity from being muscle and reflex machines.  We're going to give everybody a chance to develop their most powerful mental and intuitive faculties.  [...] What we want everybody to do is to think clearly.
We soon will begin to generate wealth so rapidly that we can do very great things.  [...] We have learned that only and exclusively through use of his mind can man inventively employ the generalized principles further to conserve the locally available physical energy of the only universally unlimited supply.  Only thus can man put to orderly advantage the various, local, and otherwise disorderly behaviors of the entropic, physical universe.  Man can and may metaphysically comprehend, anticipate, shunt, and meteringly introduce the evolutionarily organized environment events in the magnitudes and frequencies that best synchronize with the patterns of his successful and metaphysical metabolic regeneration while ever increasing the degrees of humanity's space and time freedoms from yesterday's ignorance sustaining survival procedure chores and their personal time capital wasting.
Now we have comprehended and peeled off the layers of petals which disclosed not only that physical energy is conserved but also that it is ever increasingly deposited as a fossil-fuel savings account aboard our Spaceship Earth through photosynthesis and progressive, complex, topsoil fossilization buried ever deeper within Earth's crust by frost, wind, flood, volcanoes, and earthquake upheavals.  We have thus discovered also that we can make all of humanity successful through science's world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years' energy conservation aboard Spaceship Earth.  These energy savings have been put into our Spaceship's life-regeneratintion-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter functions. 
The fossil fuel deposits of our Spaceship Earth correspond to our automobile's storage battery which must be conserved to turn over our main engine's self-starter.  Thereafter, our "main engine," the life regenerating processes, must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from the powers of wind, tide, water, and the direct Sun radiation energy.  The fossil-fuel savings account has been put aboard Spaceship Earth for the exclusive function of getting the new machinery built with which to support life and humanity at every more effective standards of vital physical energy and reinspiring metaphysical sustenance to be sustained exclusively on our Sun radiation's and Moon pull gravity's tidal, wind, and rainfall generated pulsating and therefore harnessable energies.  The daily income energies are excessively adequate for the operation of our main industrial engines and their automated productions.  The energy expended in one minute of a tropical hurricane equals the combined energy of all the U.S.A and U.S.S.R. nuclear weapons.  Only by understanding this scheme may we continue for all time ahead to enjoy and explore universe as we progressively harness evermore of the celestially generated tidal and storm generated wind, water, and electrical power concentrations.  We cannot afford to expend our fossil fuels faster than we are "recharging our batter," which means precisely the rate at which the fossil fuels are being continually deposited within Earth's spherical crust.
We have discovered that it is highly feasible for all the human passengers aboard Spaceship Earth to enjoy the whole ship without any individual being advanced at the expense of another, provided that we are not so foolish as to burn up our ship and its operating equipment by powering our prime operations exclusively on atomic reactor generated energy.  The too-shortsighted and debilitating exploitation of fossil fuels and atomic energy are similar to running our automobiles only on the self-starters and batteries and as the latter become exhausted replenishing the batteries only by starting the chain reaction consumption of the atoms with which the automobiles are constituted. 
We have discovered also why we were given our intellectual faculties and physical extension facilities.  We have discovered that we have the inherent capability and inferentially the responsibility of making humanity comprehensively and sustainably successful.  We have learned the difference between brain and mind capabilities.  We have learned of the superstitions and inferiority complexes built into all humanity through all of history's yesterdays of slavish survival under conditions of abysmal illiteracy and ignorance wherein only the most ruthless, shrewd, and eventually brutish could sustain existence, and then for no more than a third of its known potential life span.
This all brings us to a realization of the enormous educational task which must be successfully accomplished right now in a hurry in order to convert man's spin-dive toward oblivion into an intellectually mastered power pullout into safe and level flight of physical and metaphysical success, whereafter he may turn his Spaceship Earth's occupancy into a universe exploring advantage.  It if comprehends and reacts effectively, humanity will open an entirely new chapter of the experiences and the thoughts and drives thereby stimulated.
Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or for none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that "unity is plural and at minimum two" - the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron.  You and I are inherently different and complementary.  Together we average as zero - that is, as eternity.    

- - Fuller, Buckminster R, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Ill, 1969.