Buckminster Fuller wrote the 1983 Foreword to the original version of my book, Alcohol Can Be a Gas! Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century. He has always been an inspiration and guide to me. —David Blume
Physicists, astrophysicists, astronomers, chemists, and engineers employ … standards of measurement to discover how the physical universe in which we live operates. Such methodical measuring has discovered a complete integrity of energy accounting in the universe.
What follows was originally the foreword for the 1983 version of this book. I was greatly honored that my colleague R. Buckminster Fuller felt that my project was important enough to take time out of his busy schedule to write something to my readers to communicate just what it might mean to have a solar-powered future.
Unlike a lot of solar visionaries of the day, Bucky had been around long enough to witness and understand the interlocking corporate/governmental structure, and in his last book, The G.R.U.N.C.H. of Giants, he talked about how it would all end. The acronym stood for “Gross Universal Cash Heist.” He prophesied that not only would corporations grow bigger than giants, but that predatory transnational capitalism was leading us to a very bad end indeed. Bucky always inspired me and millions of others with his emphasis on direct positive action as a strategy for rapid change. This perspective is a source of what he refers to as the change from a world based on weaponry to one based on livingry.
During the press conference marking the premiere of my television series, Alcohol As Fuel, Bucky said that he had been in charge of America’s alternative energy research for the military during World War II. He himself had run an engine on alcohol for two years during his war research. In a very thinly veiled comment, he noted that his voluminous notes and research done within the military-industrial establishment are now missing, apparently stolen from military archives in 1970.
Shortly after the series went on the air in 1983, Bucky and his wife both passed away within three days of each other. I still miss him and wish somehow he could see this book finally published—finally out doing its intended work. —David Blume
***
The area of the surface of a sphere is exactly four times the area of the sphere’s great-circle disk, as produced by a plane cutting through the center of the sphere. The surface of a hemisphere is, then, twice the area of the sphere’s great-circle plane. When we look at the “full” Moon, we are looking at a hemisphere’s surface which is twice the area of the seemingly flat, bright, circular disk in the sky. The total surface of the Moon’s invisible other side plus the visible hemisphere is exactly four times that of the flat disk area of the full Moon as our optical illusion views it.
All of Earth’s operational energy comes from the stars, but primarily the star Sun. It comes either as radiation or as inter-astrogravitational pull. One half of Earth’s 200-million-square-mile surface is always sunlit. Twenty-four hours a day the Sun radiation is drenching the outside of the aurora and cloud-islanded biosphere’s 100-million-square-mile hemispherical surface. The planet Earth’s total biospheric mantle, which travels with it through space, has a depth of 400 miles. Forty billion cubic miles of Earth’s Sun-radiation- impounding biosphere is always exposed to Sun, while the other 40 billion cubic miles of Earth’s biosphere is always in Earth’s night shade.
While its thermosphere mantle is 400 miles deep, its mesosphere 50 miles deep, its stratosphere 30, Earth’s propeller-flyable atmosphere is only 10 miles deep. This gives us one billion cubic miles of wind turbulent atmosphere on the sunny (day) side, and one billion cubic miles on the shadow (night) side. The one billion cubic miles of atmospheric molecules in the hemisphere which is constantly saturated by Sun are kinetically accelerated, while simultaneously the one billion cubic miles of atmospheric molecules in the shaded night hemisphere are kinetically decelerated.
The shadow side of Earth consists of one billion cubic miles of contracting atmosphere, while the one billion cubic miles on the sunny side is sum-totally expanding. All around Earth, both yesterday’s and today’s Sun radiation impoundments countered by gravity pulsatingly perturbate the atmosphere by anti-gravity thermal columns and Sun-evaporated Earth surface water risings, here and there outwardly against gravity, from oceans and lands. The rotation of Earth brings about a series of high-low relative atmospheric pressure differentials and their world-around semi-vacuumized drafts, which altogether produce the “high” and “low” atmospheric pressures and the complex turbulence which we speak of as “the weather.”
The combined two billion cubic miles of atmospheric kinetics continually and anew convert the solar energy into weather, which in turn differentiates into wind power and gravity-accelerated “rain” and highlands-landed water power. A fraction of the wind power again interacts with gravity to produce the great waves, rolling power-laden, onward across the 150 million square miles of surface of the oceans, lakes, rivers, and ponds, to pound thunderingly and grind ceaselessly with fury upon the rocks, producing the gravels, sands, and dusts of Earth’s million miles of coastlines. Wind power is Sun power in its most abundant, day and night, anywhere and everywhere, by a relative energy abundance factor of better than 99 to 1 in contradistinction to any of the other known means of terrestrial impoundments of Sun energy.
Three-quarters of Earth’s total surface is covered with water. Employing photosynthesis, the water-borne algae convert Sun radiation energy into hydrocarbon molecules which, in a complex succession of swallowings by progressively larger marine organisms, metabolically accomplish a vast impoundment of Sun-emanated energy within Earth’s waters.
Since human lungs and other organisms are designed for initial success only on dry land, and since the development of boats capable of mastery of major life support through offshore fishing means required millions of years of development, we must first look to the dry land for comprehension of humanity’s initial life support.
The water-free one-quarter of Earth’s surface consists of land which is largely covered by deserts, ice and snow fields, and rugged mountains. Only about 10% of our planet’s surface is blessed with a total complex of natural conditions suitable for humans’ outdoor cultivation of animal and vegetable food products. This suitability occurs only where the properly watered and temperatured topsoil vegetation can impound Sun’s radiation by photosynthesis.
Among the solar-energy-impounding dry land vegetation species, none can now match sweet corn’s performance efficiency. Sweet corn converts and stores as recoverable energy 25% of the received ultraviolet radiation, whereas wheat and rice average only 18 to 20%. Sustained by the initial botanical impounders of solar energy, animals and other creatures automatically proliferate the production of orderly hydrocarbon molecules in their own DNA-RNA-programmed cell growth.
Humans in turn consume the energy-rich hydrocarbons proliferated by creature and vegetation cell growth to sustain their own subconsciously (DNA-RNA) accomplished corporeal cell multiplication, as well as for sustaining their conscious expenditures of physical work or play effort. Objectively employing the cosmic principles discovered by human mind, human work can design and produce the extracorporeal tools which in turn produce the commercial alcohol, methane, gas, etc. Or humans can leave untampered-with the slow process of nature’s energy production of solid and liquid fossil fuels produced through heat and pressure conditions accomplished by nature within Earth’s crust.
The requisite pressures and heat that must be maintained continuously and steadily over the multimillenia involved in the natural production of liquid fossil fuels, when accounted at the kilowatt-per-hour prices charged to retail customers by the public utilities for that much energy for that vast span of time, amount to well over a million dollars per each gallon of petroleum. Kilowatts are energy units employed by scientists and engineers which are mathematically convertible into (and predicated upon) humans’ prime measure of energy as work, i.e., the amount of energy expended to oppose gravity by lifting a given weight a given vertical distance in a given amount of time, which is expressed as foot-pounds-per-minute, or meter-kilograms-per-minute, or as centimeter-gram-seconds (cgs), etc., ergo kilowatt-hours. Physicists, astrophysicists, astronomers, chemists, and engineers employ these standards of measurement to discover how the physical Universe in which we live operates. Such methodical measuring has discovered a complete integrity of energy accounting in the Universe.
Newton’s discovery of the geometrical rate of interattractiveness variance, in respect to arithmetical change of celestial bodies’ interdistancing, from which we derive the gravitational constant, plus the measurement of the linear speed of radiation in a vacuum (186,000+ miles per second) is compounded with quantation of photons radiated per second to provide the radiation constants. Nonsimultaneous-scenario Universe’s eternally regenerative, 100%-efficient integrity is predicated upon the ever-energetic intertransformings of gravity vs. radiation—from matter to radiation and vice versa. Einstein’s equation of E=mc2 (as eventually proven by fission) provided humanity with the competence to participate in the integrity of cosmic accounting.
All of humanity’s world-around energy uses are so inefficient that 95% of it is wasted. Despite that wasting, the total amount of energy consumed by humanity as of 1982 amounts to less than one five-hundred-thousandth of 1% of our daily energy income from the Sun and only one 12-millionth of a percent of our daily energy income from both the Sun and our geothermal sources.
It is incontestably clear that it is now technologically feasible to harvest enough of our daily income of extraterrestrial energy as well as of the surface eruptive steams of internal Earthian infernos, all generated at an inexorable, nature-sustained rate, to provide all humanity and all their generations to come with a higher standard of living and greater freedoms than ever have been experienced by any humans and to do so within ten years, while completely phasing out all further use or development of fossil fuels, atomic and fusion energies.
This means it is possible for Earthian humanity to live on its daily energy income as generated by star radiation and cosmic gravity—primarily that of the star Sun—rather than: (a) by exhaustion of the millions of years of celestial energy photosynthetically impounded by the terrestrial vegetation and deposited into Earth’s crust as a cosmic savings account possibly to be used many billions of years hence to convert planet Earth into a star; or (b) by burning up the atoms of which Spaceship Earth is structured; or (c) by fusion’s disruption of the biosphere’s delicate hydro and thermal balancing, the incisive integration of which governs the comprehensive metabolic chemistries of terrestrially regenerative ecology.
Three-quarters of our planet Earth’s surface is covered by water. Water constitutes about 60% of the physical substance of planet Earth’s biological organisms. Sixty-five percent of the human body consists of water. The Earth’s oceans contain 97% of all our planet’s water. The surface of the Earth’s waters is being continually vaporized into clouds to be redistributed around Earth as rain or snow. Sum-totally, Earth’s waters are being continually recirculated throughout its combined ecological and geological biospheric system. Water is the “blood” of Earthian life. The average depth of its oceans is less than one four-thousandth of the Earth sphere’s diameter. It is a gossamer film so thin that it is proportionately less than the depth of the blue-ink printing of the oceans on a 24-inch Earth globe. This almost ethereal film is kept from instant evaporation by the Sun only through the energy-reshunting properties of the plurality of additional concentrically enshrouding chemical and electromagnetic spherical mantles of Earth’s biosphere.
The entropic energy losses to Universe occasioned by our emergency-urged fortuitous exploitation of Spaceship Earth’s inventory of integral atoms either by fission or fusion will probably violate the integrity of the complex cosmic design for successful maintenance of human life aboard Earth. —R. Buckminster Fuller.