"Fuller’s theory of ephemeralization anticipated the digital age; his invented terms 'synergy' and 'Spaceship Earth' became part of the language..."

"... scientists who discovered a carbon molecule that looked like a geodesic sphere were aided by his insights (and named it buckminsterfullerene). But it’s also hard to take some of his more eccentric ideas seriously, such as 'air-deliverable housing,' or the proposal to cover Midtown Manhattan with a huge dome. National Lampoon parodied his apparently limitless technological optimism in a feature titled 'Buckminster Fuller’s Repair Manual for the Entire Universe.'... Fuller’s public lectures, which could go on for five or six hours, were famous. Always extemporaneous, these modern-day Chautauquas were a startling weave of poetry and science, delivered in his own peculiar locution. Stewart Brand summed it up well: 'Fuller’s lectures have a raga quality of rich, nonlinear, endless improvisation full of convergent surprises.'... The counterculture eventually lost its enthusiasm for the domes, which, according to Brand, always leaked, wasted space and were impossible to subdivide and furnish. 'When my generation outgrew the domes,' Brand wrote, 'we simply left them empty, like hatchlings leaving their eggshells.'"

 
Writes Witold Rybczynski, in "Buckminster Fuller, Role Model and Cautionary Tale/The biography 'Inventor of the Future,' by Alec Nevala-Lee, explores the dreams and failures of an American optimist" (NYT).

There's a Wikipedia article for "Spaceship Earth," and it refutes the assertion that Fuller "invented" the term:

The earliest known use of the term is a passage in Henry George's best known work, Progress and Poverty (1879). From book IV, chapter 2: 

It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we sail through space. If the bread and beef above decks seem to grow scarce, we but open a hatch and there is a new supply, of which before we never dreamed. And very great command over the services of others comes to those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to say, "This is mine!" 

George Orwell ... had earlier paraphrased Henry George in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier:

The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.

 In 1965, Adlai Stevenson made a famous speech to the United Nations, in which he said: 

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

The following year, Spaceship Earth became the title of a book by a friend of Stevenson's, the internationally influential economist Barbara Ward.

In 1966, Kenneth E. Boulding, who was influenced by reading Henry George's work, used the phrase in the title of his essay, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth. Boulding described the past open economy of apparently illimitable resources, which he said he was tempted to call the "cowboy economy", and continued: "The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the 'spaceman' economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system." This "cowboys in a spaceship" theme would eventually be taken up by scholar David Korten in his 1995 book When Corporations Rule the World. 

The phrase was also popularized by Buckminster Fuller, who authored the 1968 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.This quotation, referring to fossil fuels, reflects his approach: 

... we can make all of humanity successful through science's world-engulfing industrial evolution provided that we are not so foolish as to continue to exhaust in a split second of astronomical history the orderly energy savings of billions of years' energy conservation aboard our Spaceship Earth. These energy savings have been put into our Spaceship's life-regeneration-guaranteeing bank account for use only in self-starter functions. 

Did Fuller have something before 1968? If so, somebody ought to update Wikipedia. 

I went on to read the Wikipedia article on Fuller. I enjoyed this (as a contrast to our present-day obsession with pronouns):

In his 1970 book I Seem To Be a Verb, he wrote: "I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe."

Pronouns? I don't even have nouns! I've a verb! 

ADDED: How about Fuller's "invention" of the term "synergy"? That claim is even less defensible. From Wikipedia:

In Christian theology, synergism is the idea that salvation involves some form of cooperation between divine grace and human freedom.

The words synergy and synergetic have been used in the field of physiology since at least the middle of the 19th century: 

SYN'ERGY, Synergi'a, Synenergi'a, (F.) Synergie; from συν, 'with', and εργον, 'work'. A correlation or concourse of action between different organs in health; and, according to some, in disease.—Dunglison, Robley Medical Lexicon Blanchard and Lea, 1853

In 1896, Henri Mazel applied the term "synergy" to social psychology by writing La synergie sociale, in which he argued that Darwinian theory failed to account of "social synergy" or "social love", a collective evolutionary drive. The highest civilizations were the work not only of the elite but of the masses too; those masses must be led, however, because the crowd, a feminine and unconscious force, cannot distinguish between good and evil.

In 1909, Lester Frank Ward defined synergy as the universal constructive principle of nature:

I have characterized the social struggle as centrifugal and social solidarity as centripetal. Either alone is productive of evil consequences. Struggle is essentially destructive of the social order, while communism removes individual initiative. The one leads to disorder, the other to degeneracy. What is not seen—the truth that has no expounders—is that the wholesome, constructive movement consists in the properly ordered combination and interaction of both these principles. This is social synergy, which is a form of cosmic synergy, the universal constructive principle of nature. 

   —Ward, Lester F. Glimpses of the Cosmos, volume VI (1897–1912) G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1918, p. 358

We're told that Fuller explored the idea of synergy. The term he coined was "synergetics":

A dynamic state in which combined action is favored over the difference of individual component actions.

Behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately, known as emergent behavior.

The cooperative action of two or more stimuli (or drugs), resulting in a different or greater response than that of the individual stimuli.

Or so says Wikipedia. But when I look up "synergetics" in the OED, the oldest use in print is:

1955 A. Coulter Synergetics i. 1 The word ‘synergetics’ means, literally, ‘working together’. It is here used to denote the study of interactions in a functioning system. Potentially, it is an evolving set of abstract ideas and precision tools applicable to any complex system, from factories to living organisms. Here, we are concerned solely with its application to human beings.