Spaceship Earth

Spaceship Earth is a term usually expressing concern over the use of limited resources available on and the behavior of everyone on it to act as a harmonious crew working toward the greater good.

It may have been derived from a passage in best known work, . From book IV, chapter 2:

It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we sail through space. If the bread and beef above decks seem to grow scarce, we but open a hatch and there is a new supply, of which before we never dreamed. And very great command over the services of others comes to those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to say, "This is mine!"

In 1965 a speech to the UN in which he said "We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil". The following year, Spaceship Earth became the title of a book by a friend of Stevenson's, the internationally influential economist

Also in used the phrase in the title of an essay, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth Boulding described the past open of apparently illimitable resources, which he said he was tempted to call the "cowboy economy", and continued: "The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the 'spaceman' economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system". ( would take up the "cowboys in a spaceship" theme in his

The phrase was also popularized by , who wrote and published a book in under the title of This quotation, referring to reflects his approach: "...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 our Spaceship Earth. These energy savings have been put into our Spaceship's life-regeneration-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter functions."

spoke of Spaceship Earth on , the ceremony of the ringing of the "May there only be peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth as it continues to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life."