ABSTRACT

I have no claims to priority in the use of the metaphor spaceship earth, though I think I did think it up independently, and it was a metaphor so appropriate to its time that it would have been very surprising if somebody had not thought it up. It is still a very good metaphor, but as with all metaphors, one has to be careful with it. When a metaphor parades as a model, it can sometimes be very dangerous and misleading, particularly as metaphors are so much more convincing than models and are much more apt to change people’s images of the world. The spaceship metaphor stresses the earth’s smallness, crowdedness, and limited resources; the need for avoiding destructive conflict; and the necessity for a sense of world community with a very heterogeneous crew. On these grounds the metaphor is certainly as good today as it was in the 1960s. One of the paradoxes, indeed, is that we seem to be more theoretically aware of the spaceship earth model than we were in the 1960s, with the Club of Rome reports, the energy crisis, and the United Nations population conference. But this theoretical awareness does not seem to have penetrated down to the level of political consciousness in the life and awareness of the ordinary human being. It seems to be very hard to organize a long-run crisis. Certainly the ordinary American today has very little sense of crisis. Every time he turns a switch, the lights go on; every time he pulls up to a gas station, there is gas for his car. The problems of the 1970s—inflation, the arms race, rising crime rates, battered children, tax revolts, and so on—are far more political and sociological than they are related to the long-run problems of a society nonsustainable in terms of energy, materials, and pollution.