R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER (Bucky) was the inventor of the geodesic dome (patent #2,682, 235 in 1954) among other great inventions. He designed a way of building a dome with extremely less material & spanning greater distances than was previously possible.

The following is an edited summary on R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER taken from the book
INVENTIONS
THE PATENTED WORKS of
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
ISBN 0-312-43477-4

"My task was not to preach about God, but to serve God in silence about God."

In 1927 Bucky Fuller was a total failure, a college dropout, penniless, unable to support his wife and newborn daughter, a man on the verge of suicide. Standing on the edge of Lake Michigan, he underwent a profound religious experience that was to shape the course of his activity for the next fifty years. Committing "ego-cide," he turned away from efforts aimed only at his own personal advantage and dedicated his life to doing what needed to be done for the advantage of all humanity. By not preaching to mankind but by investing solutions to mankind's problems--solutions that could be implemented in concrete artifacts that would change the way people lived rather than their opinions--Fuller entered on a half-century experiment (which he nicknamed "Guinea Pig B"). He chose to see what "the little man," the single individual, could do alone--without the backing of big business, governments, or religious establishments--to help solve the problems that confront humanity today.

At his death, a few days before his eighty-eighth birthday, R. Buckminster Fuller was perhaps the best known American thinker alive. Sometimes called "the planet's friendly genius," Bucky gained renown as an inventor and designer of the Dymaxion House, the Dymaxion Car, the Dymaxion Map, the creator of the geodesic dome, the man who coined the term "Spaceship Earth" and organized the World Game, the mathematician who discovered Synergetics, and as a dogged individualist whose genius has been felt through the world for over half a century. 

All humans have always been born naked, completely helpless for months, beautifully equipped but with no experience, therefore absolutely ignorant. This is a very important design fact. I do not look at such a human start as constituting a careless or change oversight in the cosmic conceptioning of the intellectual integrity governing the Universe. The initial ignorance of humans was by deliberate cosmic (divine) design. 

We know that before humans are born forth, naked from their mothers' wombs, their protoplasmic cells are chromosomally (DNA ­ RNA) programmed to produce each human in incredibly successful regenerative detail. 

If we study both the overall integrated system and the detail-design features of our own system and its intimacy with our brain's nervous system--we realize what miraculously complex yet eminently successful anticipatory-design-science phenomena are the humans and the cosmic totality of our complex supportive environment. 

If I accidentally scratch-cut myself when I am 3, nature goes instantly to work and repairs the cut. I don't know, even now at 88, how to repair my own cell-structured tissue, and I certainly didn't know how at 3 years of age. We are magnificently successful products of design in a Universe the complexity and intricacy of whose design integrity utterly transcends human comprehension, let alone popularly acceptable descriptions of "divine design." 

Therefore the fact that we are designed to be born naked, helpless, and ignorant is, I feel, a very important matter. We must pay attention to that. We are also designed to be very hungry and to be continually rehungered and rethirst and multiplying curious. Therefore we are quite clearly designed to be inexorably driven to learn only by trial and error how to get on in life. As a consequence of the design, we have had to make an incredible number of mistakes, that being the only way we can find out "what's what" and a little bit about "why," and an even more meager bit regarding "how" we can take advantage of what we have learned from our mistakes. 

Suppose a hypothetical 3-billion-B.C. "you" being enormously hungry, ate some invitingly succulent red berries and was poisoned. The tribe concluded, "Berries are poisonous. People can't eat berries." And for the next thousand years, that tribe did not do so. Then along came somebody who showed then that they could safely eat blueberries. 

At any rate it took a long, long time for humanity to get to the point where it was inventing words with which to integrate and thereby share the lessons individually learned from error-inducing experiences. Humans could help one another by trail and error. Most often "know-it-all" ego blocked the process. 

After inventing spoken words, humanity took a long time more to invent writing, with which both the remote-from-local-community and the dead gave the remote-from-one-another beings information about their remote-in-time-and-space error-discovering and truth-uncovering experience. Thus does evolution continually compound the wisdom accruing to error-making and ­discovering experiences, the self-admission of which alone can uncover that which is true.

Informed by the senses, the brains of all creatures unthinkingly reflex in pursuing only the sensorial obvious and attractive wilderness trails, waterways, and mountain passes along which may exist fallen-leaves-hidden pitfalls. 

This fact made possible the effectiveness of the pitfall trap--falling into the pit at 90 degrees to the 180 degrees line of sight spontaneously followed in pursuit of the obvious. This straightaway reflexing is frequently employed by nature to give humans an opportunity to learn that which humanity needs to learn if humanity is ever to attain the capability to perform its cosmically assigned, spontaneous, intellectually responsible functioning. If ego is surmounted, mind may discover and comprehend the significance of the negative event and may thereby discover the principles leading not only to escape from the entrapment but discovery of what is truly worthwhile pursuing, but only as a consequence of the mind's exclusive capability to discover and employ not just one principle but the synergistically interoperative significance of all the human mind's thus-far-discovered principles. 

Something very big has been going on in my particular generation's lifetime where all the fundamental conditions of humanity are changing at a ever-accelerating acceleration rate. 

When I was young, not only were 95 percent of human beings illiterate but their speech patterns were also atrociously difficult to understand. 

Humanity has been coming out of a group womb of permitted ignorance made possible only by the existence of an enormous cushion of natural physical resources with which to learn only by trial and error, thus to become somewhat educated about how and why humans happen to be here on this planet. Despite a doubling of world population during my lifetime, humanity has at the same time gone from 95 percent illiterate to 60 percent literate. 

Until I was 28 we Earthians knew only about our Milky Way galaxy. In 1923 Hubble discovered two billion more of them. That explosively accelerated rate of expansion of our astronomical-information-acquisitioning typifies the rate of popular increase of both scientifically general and technically special information during my lifetime. 

We are living in a new evolutionary movement in which the human is being individually educated to do the free-standing human's own thinking, and each is thereby separately becoming extraordinarily well informed. We have reached a threshold moment where the individual human beings are in what I consider to be a "final examination" as to whether they, individually, as a cosmic invention, are to graduate successfully into their mature cosmic functioning or, failing, are to be classified as "imperfects" and "discontinued items" on this planet and anywhere else in Universe. 

We are at a human examination point at which it is critically necessary for each of us individually to have some self-discovered, logically reasonable, experience-engendered idea of how and why we are here on this little planet in this star system and galaxy, amongst the billions of approximately equally star populated galaxies of Universe. I assume it is because human minds were designed with the capability to discover from time to time the only-mathematically-satiable principles governing the eternal interrelationships existing between various extraordinary phenomena---a capability possessed by no known phenomenon other than humans. 

Human intellect (mind) has gradually discovered a number of these extraordinary, generalized, non-sensorial-apprehensible eternal principles. We human beings have been given access to at least some of the design laws of the Universe. 

As far as I know, we humans haven't thought or talked very much about how and why we are here as either a desirable or necessary function of Universe. We have talked a great deal about the great mystery of being here. But the majority of our public talking centers on the egotistical assumption that human politics and the wealthy are running the Universe, that the macrocosmic spectaculars are an accessory amusement of our all-important selfish preoccupations, and that Universe's microcosmic invisibles are exclusively for corporate stockholders' money-making exploitation---though always individually discovered or invented but only industrially developed, funded exclusively by the research departments of great corporations as initially funded by humanity's production rights are transferred to prime corporations. 

In our immediate need to discover more about ourselves we also note that what is common to all human beings in all history is their ceaseless confrontation by problems, problems, problems. We humans are manifestly here for problem-solving and, if we are any good at problem-solving, we don't come to utopia, we come to more difficult problems to solve. That apparently is what we're here for, so I therefore conclude that we humans are here for local information-gathering and local problem-solving with our minds having access to the design principles of the Universe and---I repeat---thereby finally discover that we are most probably here for local information-gathering and local-Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. 

If our very logically and experientially supported working assumption is right, that is a very extraordinarily important kind of function for which we humans were designed ultimately to fulfill. It is clearly within the premises of the divine. 

When in 1927 I started the experiment to discover what a little individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity, I said to myself. "You are going to have to do all your own thinking." I had been brought up in an era in which all the older people said to all the young people. "Never mind what you think. Listen to what we are trying to teach you to think!" However, as experience multiplied, I learned time and again that the way I had been thinking was often a more accurate, informative, and significant way of comprehending the significance of events than was the academic and conventional way I was being taught, so I said, "If I am going to discard all my taught-to-believe reflexings, I must do all my own thinking. I must go entirely on my own direct experiential evidence. 

I then said, "I see the hydrogen atom doesn't have to earn a living before behaving like a hydrogen atom. In fact, as best I can see, only human beings operate on the basis of 'having to earn a living.' The concept is one introduction into social conventions only by the temporal power structure's dictums of the ages. If I am doing what God's evolutionary strategy needs to have accomplished, I need spend no further time worrying about such matters." 

"I happen to have been born at the special moment in history in which for the first time there exists enough experience-won and experiment-verified information current in humanity's spontaneous conceptioning and reasoning for all humanity to carry on in a far more intelligent way than ever before. 

"I am doing what I am doing only because at this critical moment I happen to be a human being who, by virtue of a vast number of errors and recognitions of such, has discovered that he would always be a failure as judged by society's ages-long conditioned reflexings--and therefore a "disgrace" to those related to him (me)--in the misassuredly, eternally-to-exist "not-enough-for-all," comprehensive, economical, selfish, personal, family, corporate, or national advantage-gaining, wherefore I had decided to commit suicide. I also thereby qualified as a "throwaway" individual who had acquired enough knowledge regarding relevantly essential human evolution matters to be able to think in this particular kind of way. In committing suicide I seemingly would never again have to feel the pain and mortification of my failures and errors, but the only-by-experience-winnable inventory of knowledge that I had acquired would also be forever lost--an inventory of information that, if I did not commit suicide, might prove to be of critical advantage to others, possibly to Universe." The realization that such a change of being true was a powerful reconsideration provoker and ultimate grand-strategy reorienter.

The thought then came that my impulse to commit suicide was a consequence of my being expressly over concerned with "me" and "my pains," and that doing so would mean that I would be making the supremely selfish mistake of possibly losing forever some evolutionary information link essential to the ultimate realization of the as-yet-to-be-known human function in Universe. I then realized that I could commit and exclusively "ego" suicide---a personal-ego "throwaway"---if I swore, to the best of my ability, never again to recognize and yield to the voice of wants only of "me" but instead commit my physical organism and nervous system enduring whatever pain might lie ahead while possibly thereby coming to mentally comprehend how a "me"-less individual might redress the humiliation, expenses, and financial losses I had selfishly and carelessly imposed on all the in-any-way-involved others, while keeping actively alive into to only the possibly-of-essential-use-for-others inventory of my experience. I saw that there was a true possibility that I could do just that if I never-again-for-self-use employment of my omni-experience-gained inventory of knowledge. My thinking began to clear. 

I then found myself saying, "I am going to commit myself completely to the wisdom of God and to realization only of the advantages for all humanity potentially existent in what life has already taught and may as yet teach me." I found myself saying, "I am going to commit myself completely to God and to realization of God's apparent intent to assign semi-divine functioning to an as-yet-to-qualify-for-such-functioning humanity. To qualify for such local-Universe's evolutionary adjustments, humans themselves must intelligently discover and spontaneously employ their designed-in potentials and themselves realize the sustainable success of their evolutionary scheduled physio-economic potential." 

From that time, 56 years ago, I had absolute faith in God. My task was not to preach about God, but to serve God in silence about God. Because such commitment to faith is inherently a "flying blind" commitment, I have often weakened in my confidence in myself to comprehend what it might be that I was being taught or told to do. Because I am a human and designed like all humans to learn only by trail and error, I have had many times only to do the wrong things in order thereby to learn what next needed to be done. Making mistakes can be and usually is a very dismaying experience---so dismaying as to make it seemingly easier to "go along with unthinking custom." 

If I had not in 1927 committed "egocide," I would probably have yielded long ago to convention and therewith suicide of my "only-for-all-others" initiative. 

Friends would say, "You are being treacherous to your wife and child, not going out to earn a living for them. Come over here and we will give you a very good job." When, persuaded by their obvious generosity and concern, I did yield, everything went wrong; and every time I went "off the deep end" again, working only for everybody without salary, everything went right again. 

No one has ever won their direct monetary gains by their investment-for-profit bets on my artifact-investing and ­developing concepts. I have always been saddened by this because the backers' motives were most often greatly affected by a personal affection for me. Fortunately, this gambling on the financial seems altogether to have ceased a third of a century ago. 

With several hundred thousand geodesic domes, millions of my world maps and books, and structural and mechanical artifacts now distributed and installed around the world, I have realized new and even greater degrees of technical advantaging of society and its individuals. I have continually increased the knowledge of the means of accomplishing across-the-board and world-around advances in nominally effective structures and machinery that do ever more work with ever less pounds of materials, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per function---all accomplished entirely within the visible structural inventions and invisible (alloying, electronic, etc.) realms of technology. Twelve years ago I had learned enough to be able to state publicly that humanity had now passed through an evolutionary inflection point where after, for the first time in history, it is irrefutable demonstrable that a ten year design-science-revolution years, have all humanity enjoying a higher standard of living---interminably sustainable---than any humans have ever experienced, while concurrently phasing out all further everyday uses of fossil fuels or atomic energy. We can live handsomely using only daily income of the Sun's and gravity's multi-way-intergenerated energies. 

Following are a few links to pages dedicated to his works and theories about life.

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