The spaceship metaphor stresses the earth’s smallness, crowdedness, and limited resources; the need for avoiding destructive conflict; and the necessity for a sense of world community with a very heterogeneous crew. On these grounds, Boulding argues, the metaphor is as good today as it was in the 1960s, and that the challenge is that ultimately we must face the spaceship earth on earth. The author writes that the evolutionary process is not a significant planned economy any more than an ecosystem, and that the greatest weakness of the metaphor is that the spaceship presumably has a clear destination and mission to accomplish – essentially a planned economy.
