``We are on a spaceship; a beautiful one.
It took billions of years to develop.
We're not going to get another.
Now, how do we make this spaceship work?"

      Buildings lose heat (or gain it in summer) only through their outside surfaces. A sphere encloses maximum volume with minimum surface. So Fuller developed the geodesic dome as a living space (there are now 300,000 in the world). Because a load on any one point gets distributed over all the joints, the structure is incredibly strong, yet uses only a fraction of the materials needed for a conventional construction. One two-mile diameter dome over mid-town Manhattan (NY, USA) would have a total surface area that is only one eighty-fourth of all the buildings now there; i.e., the heating and cooling requirements would be reduced eighty-four fold. Snow plows would not be needed. The combined savings would pay for the dome in ten years. (The struts needed to form the structure would be so small that, if the dome were covered with a transparent skin, from inside looking up, the dome would be invisible.)