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Life is wonderful.
Imagine there still are intelligent beings alive on this planet in a billion years. And always are from now until then, one learning from the other.
Now imagine you could help to make this possible. Is there a greater ambition?
milliongenerations.org invites you to think about the conditions required for civilization to exist on the earth while the sun provides a suitable environment. To help identify the requirements for lasting civilizations. This knowledge would make it easier to find ways to create the right conditions.
How? Let us assume here that civilizations of intelligent and self aware individuals continue while a biosphere supporting life in any form exists on this planet. 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. If you want to help, you can improve this and most other 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.
Why? To help finding ways for civilization to continue. Perspectives on the survival of civilization 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 posess or develop means for potentially disasterous conflicts or mishaps, make ourselves superfluous with technology and our "monoculture" is vulnerable to "parasites". Current methods have so far failed to provide obvious and attractive solutions that are widely adopted. 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 enable life for all possible future generations.
To this end, milliongenerations.org 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, i.e. there still is at least one civilization on this planet in a billion years that evolved from today's. 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. If in this process some of us can come up with viable visions or inspiring ideas, we may hope for beneficial feedback to current affairs.
As various organizations dedicated to influencing the here and now in one way or another already exist, the focus of milliongenerations.org 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.
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:
- 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
- Current events to check out what urgently needs to be done
- milliongenerations.org to learn about this project
- Related topics to add references or learn about similar work
- The environment to suggest improvements for the site
- Foundation to contribute to the foundation behind milliongenerations.org
- Help pages and guidelines
- A short video about ideas that helped start milliongenerations.org
- Criticism for disapproval or faults of milliongenerations.org and warnings about its dangers
- Overview over the pages on this website (select a namespace, the namespaces "Main" and "Milliongenerations" contain most pages)