"Why we need to treat Earth like a spaceship"

Blog Post 8 May 2026

(1) A personal reflection on Chris Rapley’s timely Op-ed "Why we need to treat Earth like a spaceship": https://theconversation.com/why-we-need-to-treat-earth-like-a-spaceship-281606?utm_medium=article_clipboard_share&utm_source=theconversation.com

In an increasingly self-centred world, we urgently need new narratives to redefine humanity. Having historically shifted from political to religious, and finally to economic definitions of Self, we must now ask: what comes next? Modern science and technology have conquered the material and yet remains largely ignorant of consciousness and what physicist David Bohm called 'culture as collectively shared meaning.' Our material freedom is built on the false assumption that reality is only physical.

The spacecraft allegory perfectly encapsulates our modern condition—the relentless speed, the arrogance, and the profound loneliness born from being severed from nature, community and the sacred. It highlights the void left by a purely material existence that has abandoned our deepest human faculty: the sense of belonging, the living, experiential understanding of being in the world, and the transformative encounter with the 'Other', if we ever will find our way back Home.

(1) Prof. Chris Rapley and I were colleagues in the late 90's at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Secretariat, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Chris as Executive Director, and I as Deputy-Director, Social Sciences.