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Life is wonderful.
Biological life in some form will most likely be on this planet earth for as long as the sun continues to provide the right conditions.
Imagine there still are intelligent beings alive on this planet in a billion years who realize they are alive and share information. 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?
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.
- To help finding ways for civilization(s) 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 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. Better ways need to be found.
- 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.
- 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. The fewer assumptions we make, the more valid our conclusions will be, no matter how such civilization will look 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.