Main Page

Life is wonderful.

We all hope that our children enjoy a good life. And their children, too. Our civilizations have achieved amazing feats: close to 7 billion humans on this planet, on average living more peaceful, longer and easier lives than any generation before us.

Is it assured that human civilizations of some form or other continue on this planet indefinitely?

A lot of people see our ways of life (and thus the achievement of having so many of us) at risk. So there are many initiatives and organizations working to improve the situation by one action or another. milliongenerations believes it will be helpful to better understand what allows civilizations to last. To this end, this site asks questions and invites debate from a different perspective.

This site invites you to think about the conditions required for knowledge to be shared while life is possible on the earth i.e., while the sun provides a suitable environment. To help identify requirements for lasting civilizations. This knowledge would make it easier to find ways to create the right conditions.

Why?

To help identify ways for civilizations to continue, or at least to clarify intrinsic risks and develop concepts required for permanent (not static) existence. Perspectives on the survival of civilization, even of the human species, on this planet for even a few hundred more years tend to be pessimistic. History provides plenty of examples of collapsed civilizations and we have consumed most easily accessible resources, significantly alter our environment and possess or develop means for potentially disastrous conflicts or mishaps, make ourselves superfluous with technology and our "monoculture" is vulnerable.

Existing methods have so far failed to provide obvious and attractive solutions that are widely adopted. The current crises demonstrate that neither some wise organization nor any automatic mechanism ensures everything will be all right. More useful concepts need to be found and shared.

The advent of online collaboration pioneered prominently by Wikipedia opened new ways to gain and share insights. Together we might succeed to develop viable visions that increase the chances for all possible future generations to enjoy the benefits of knowledge.

How?

Let us assume here that the exchange of information between intelligent and self aware individuals continues on this planet while a biosphere supporting life in any form exists. For the latter, let us assume at least one billion years, forty million generations for current humans. Let us discuss what follows from this assumption to clarify some conditions of lasting civilizations. The fewer assumptions we make, the more valid our conclusions will be, no matter what such civilizations or individuals will be like.

This site invites everyone interested to think out of the box and look from a different perspective i.e., to look back from an assumption rather than to predict the future or change the present. To leave pressing and important issues such as climate change, resources, inequality, and conflicts for what they are for a while and to focus here exclusively on the constraints placed by the assumption that civilization(s) continue for millions of generations. To develop positive concepts for possible futures and create ideas for sustainability and resilience rather than reducing unsustainability or just hoping everything is going to be all right. For example, let us realize how much we can consume and what materials we can use if there still are millions of generations after us. If this perspective helps some of us to come up with viable visions or inspiring ideas, we may hope for beneficial feedback to current affairs.

Various organizations dedicated to influencing the here and now in one way or another already exist. The focus on this site should firmly remain in the long term, no matter how (or if) we believe it can or should be reached. If you're looking to do something else, you could check out initiatives listed here or actions discussed here.

If you want to help, you can improve most pages on this site now: click on the "edit" tab at the top of the page. If there's no edit tab, create an account and log in and the edit tab should appear (only some special pages are protected). Please check the help pages and guidelines first. It also helps to know about which relevant thoughts exist or which structures exist on this site. Note that all the blue text are links that you can follow.

In the long run we are all dead, as was famously observed by John Maynard Keynes. Life, however, should be possible on earth for several billions of years, and it would be a shame not to have civilizations while life is possible. To let civilization continue warrants a sincere effort, everything within our control. Even if we fail, we could better understand the gift we have. And we might yet be standing in a line that continues for millions of generations with individuals who realize life is wonderful.

---

Quick links

Content and debate

• Questions to consider what could be derived from this assumption
• Motivations to think about why this is relevant
• Conditions of sustainable and resilient civilizations
• Actions to be taken to achieve sustainable and resilient civilizations
• Related topics to add references or learn about similar work
• A short video about ideas that helped start milliongenerations.org
• Overview over the pages on this website (select a namespace, the namespaces "Main" and "Milliongenerations" contain most pages)

Editing

• Help pages and guidelines

Community: improving and enabling this site

• milliongenerations.org to learn about this project
• The environment to suggest improvements for the site
• Current events to check out what urgently needs to be done
• Foundation to contribute to the foundation behind milliongenerations.org

Criticism of this project

• Criticism for disapproval or faults of milliongenerations.org and warnings about its dangers

---

Sorry that this is so much text and all the blue links need a long time to go through. We hope that you'll stretch your attention span and find that it's worth it. If you know how to say all this shorter, please do, and make this site better.