Science of Fiction: Spaceship Earth 2050 [Kids Edition]

Featuring the world premiere of Spaceship Fuller

"Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it."
– R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

In 1968 the visionary thinker and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller proposed that humans think of the world as a wondrous spaceship, a shared vehicle with finite but regenerative resources meant to last for eternity.

On May 4, 2017, from 2-6 PM at USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, the USC World Building Institute will host an invited audience of faculty, guest experts and children for Science of Fiction: Spaceship Earth 2050 [Kids Edition]. The event will feature the world premiere of Spaceship Fuller, an interactive, immersive experience created by our spring 2017 World Building class under the guidance of world builders Joe Unger and Trisha Williams.

At the event new recruits – the kids of Earth – will:

• experience a mobile space colony
• explore Spaceship Fuller’s history in our freshly-minted museum
• learn more about the design process and research that brought this vessel to life
• see the spaceship itself in virtual reality
• help us answer new questions that have arisen since launch

Spaceship Fuller is the first prototype from our Spaceship Earth 2050 (Kids Edition) project, a collaboration between the Wbi and the Buckminster Fuller Institute with the growing engagement of partners worldwide including the UN, multiple academic institutions, and the FutureScouts organization.

Since launching at the Spring 2016 Berlin Film Festival with numerous young multinational filmmakers and participants from the White House, the UN, Google, the Zatari refugee camp, and the German government, the Spaceship Earth 2050 (Kids Edition) project has used the Wbi's world building process and Fuller's principles to engage participants around the world in future narratives around ocean, climate, migratory populations and the future of cities. The project focuses on the impact of new narratives, policy and discovery on the future of today’s children and places the tools of change in their own hands. Our goal is to help schoolchildren worldwide collectively envision a brighter 2050 and write Fuller's lamented missing manual through narratives told and launched by children, supported by experts, and designed to provoke substantive change on our fragile Spaceship Earth.

Please join us in supporting Spaceship Earth 2050 (Kids Edition), its ongoing build of our future world, the stories it will contain, and the outcomes it will provoke. We invite you as explorers and fellow innovators to come see what Spaceship Fuller has to offer, and to leave your mark on this new world along the way!

Teens and kids welcome!

For more details visit the event page on the Wbi site.