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million generations
milliongenerations.org invites you to think about the conditions required for civilization to exist on the earth while the sun provides a suitable environment.
Let us assume here that intelligent and self aware life, which forms civilizations, continues 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. (The sun is expected to provide a suitable environment for about another five billion years.) Let us discuss what follows from this assumption to clarify the conditions of sustainable 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. Kindly check the help pages and guidelines first.
Why? Perspectives on the survival of civilization on this planet for even a few hundred or thousand 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. 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 may open new ways to gain and share insights. Together we may succeed to develop visions that inspire us all to enable a happy 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 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. 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.
Quick links:
- Questions to consider what could be derived from this assumption
- Motivations to think about why this is relevant
- Conditions of sustainable civilizations
- Actions to be taken to achieve a sustainable civilization
- 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
In the long run we are all dead, as was famously observed by John Maynard Keynes. Pushing this perspective for civilization out to reasons beyond our control warrants a sincere effort. Even if we fail, we may better understand the gift we have. And we may yet be standing in a line that continues for millions of generations with individuals who realize life is wonderful.