We are all astronauts, and yet we refuse to see the long-term consequences of our actions on our specialized craft. One of the reasons why we are struggling inadequately today is that we reckon our costs on too short-sighted a basis and are later overwhelmed with the unexpected costs brought about by our short-sightedness.
In 1962, the architect Buckminster Fuller envisioned a floating city that would free humanity from its dependence on the Earth. The speculative project consisted of enormous geodesic spheres that would naturally levitate in air warmed by the sun and be anchored to mountaintops.
For all the inventions presented as revolutionary that never really caught on - the Dymaxion house and car, the geodesic dome - as well as the countless pages of eccentrically theoretical writing and even more countless hours of talk, it can be difficult for us now, here in the actual twenty-first century, to pin down the civilizational impact he so earnestly longed to make.
Where the altruistic utopian designs of Buckminster Fuller provided an ideal for the first wave of Silicon Valley pioneers (a group including computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier and Wired editor Kevin Kelly), later entrepreneurs have hewn closer to the principles of brilliant scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla, who believed, as he told Liberty magazine in 1935, that "we suffer the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age."