Manifesto

Info

The manifesto is an evolving document. The most recent version (v0.3) is published in May 2026.

Moral imperative

Life expands. Self-preservation and movement into new niches are evolutionary drivers for every living organism, including Homo sapiens. Space is the next niche.
To the best of our current knowledge, technological civilisations and consciousness are rare in the universe, or absent altogether. The complex life that has assembled on Earth may be the densest concentration of order in the observable universe.
Within six hundred million years the Earth will become uninhabitable to life as we know it. The window of opportunity is closing, and unrelated risks (asteroids, supervolcanoes, gamma-ray bursts) mean every year inside the window carries its own probability of cutting it short.
These three together produce an asymmetric stake. The loss is total and unrecoverable on civilisational timescales. The gain is open-ended.

Current state

Progress is not monotonic. Civilisations have risen and fallen across recorded history. The honest figure of progress is a pendulum, not an arrow.
We face complex systems we cannot fully understand or steer (climate, pandemics, geopolitical conflict, financial cascades). They interact in ways that produce large failures from small local triggers.
Economic progress has decoupled from social progress in the wealthy world. Productivity, wealth, and technological capability have continued to rise while measures of well-being, social trust, and meaning have not.
Energy remains a binding constraint. The energy return on energy invested is falling for fossil sources, and conversion to useful work is still inefficient and environmentally costly.
Scientific and technological progress is showing signs of stagnation. Breakthroughs that earlier generations achieved with small teams now require thousands of researchers and very large funding. AI is the prominent named candidate exception.
Democratic institutions are under strain. Their feedback loops are too slow, and their internal variety too low, to keep pace with the systems they are trying to steer.
Algorithmic platforms have produced an attention economy that bad actors can and do exploit. The result is not only noise; it is the active suppression of shared epistemic ground.
A pragmatic, mobilising long-term vision is absent. Cultural production cycles through hauntological re-hashes of older futures and dystopian narratives, leaving no positive image of where we are going.

Paths forward

Diagnose honestly. We need clarity on where we stand and on the most probable trajectories from here.
Treat the three types of progress (economic, scientific-and-technological, social) as one entangled system, not as a hierarchy with the social as the junior partner.
Build the capacity to design and manage complex systems. This means refusing both reductionism (single-variable optimisation) and universalism (one solution for all places and times). Different solutions in different places.
Develop a shared language for systems thinking, so that hard-won lessons in one domain can reach another. Without that vocabulary the diagnoses stay siloed and the prescriptions repeat.
Steer iteratively. Stay in the game. Reduce variety where the system overwhelms its regulator, amplify it where the regulator is the bottleneck, avoid lock-in. Antifragility over efficiency.
Replace the dystopian default with a constructive, pragmatic vision of progress. Not a triumphant fix; the best we can do, worked at deliberately and stated honestly, is already enough to mobilise.