Fuller—architect, engineer, inventor, philosopher, author, cartographer, geometrician, futurist, teacher, and poet—established a reputation as one of the most original thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. He conceived of man as a passenger in a cosmic spaceship—a passenger whose only wealth consists in energy and information. Energy has two phases—associative (as atomic and molecule structures) and dissociative (as radiation)—and, according to the first law of thermodynamics, the energy of the universe cannot be decreased. Information, on the other hand, is negatively entropic; as knowledge, technology, “know-how,” it constantly increases. Research engenders research, and each technological advance multiplies the productive wealth of the world community. Consequently, “Spaceship Earth” is a regenerative system whose energy is progressively turned to human advantage and whose wealth increases by geometric increments.
Fuller’s book Nine Chains to the Moon (1938) is an outline of his general technological strategy for maximizing the social applications of energy resources. He further developed this and other themes in such works as No More Secondhand God (1962), Utopia or Oblivion (1969), Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), Earth, Inc. (1973), and Critical Path (1981).