“Stellar: A world beyond limits and how to get there” is one of the most optimistic books I have read in years. Reminds me of “Moonshots” . Abundance thinking. And it is within our grasp.
Extractive
The very deepest root of our civilisation is extractive. That is what got us where we are now. If we do not change, it is the end of the road for yet another civilisation. That is the bad news. All the “fixes” we are applying are not working, as the basis is still extraction. Lipstick on a pig.
The authors call it the X-flow
X-flow: The constant flow of inputs of land, labour, and capital needed to produce useful outputs in the extractive production system. These inputs are external, excludable, extractive, and depleting. Either you grow or you get outgrown. You exploit or you’re exploited. That is the core dynamic created by the X-flow, one that the authors call “the growth imperative.” Just standing still was no longer an option. The X-flow is, therefore, existential, extractive, and exploitative.
Losing touch with our nature
Psychologically, physiologically, and socially, we have become extractive beings. It’s extraction, therefore, that tilts us toward baser thoughts, emotions, behaviours, and relationships. The holistic approach of the hunter-gatherer, which sought to understand the diversity, complexity, and connections between things, was no longer an advantage. The extractive context rewarded short-term rather than long-term thinking. Extraction didn’t just lead to separation from nature, but from our fellow humans as well.
It is already there
The good news is that new technologies, such as solar energy, batteries, wind energy, AI, robotics, and programmable biology, have the potential to fundamentally transform society. The only way out is to move beyond extraction. The Stellar production system.
Energy systems
If I could build the best possible energy system, how would I do it? You wouldn’t have to look far, for there are two in particular that are available everywhere and are provided by nature for free, namely the sun and the wind. Reflect on just how incredible solar cells are. They allow us to produce electricity from an energy source that’s inexhaustible and free. The next key technology, one that’s also been around since the 19th century, shares similar qualities, namely the wind turbine. Once built, the only input it needs also comes from the sun. Wind is just a by-product caused by pressure differences that arise from changes in temperature. Finally, there’s the humble battery, which is older still – they were invented way back in 1800.
Stellar technologies
Solar, wind, and batteries are what we term Stellar technologies. They’re part of a group of core technologies that, once built, require no extractive inputs to function. It is a technology that produces useful output with no extractive flow of inputs and no toxic outputs. The cost and capabilities of these three Stellar technologies are improving at an extraordinary rate. So much so that solar is now the cheapest form of energy generation in most places on Earth, having dropped in cost by 80% over the last 10 years. The cost curves are unstoppable and will continue to fall over the next decade, with solar dropping by a further 70%, wind by 50%, and batteries by 80% in our projections. These improvements mean we can produce more energy with fewer resources and, just like cost curves, this is a trend that will continue long into the future.
A Stellar energy system
The convergence of these three technologies—what we call SWB (short for solar, wind, and batteries), or a Stellar energy system—opens up the most extraordinary possibilities. It’s far more than just a cleaner version of coal or gas electric power generation – it’s a fundamentally different system, with new properties, behaviours, and metrics. The manufacturing capacity required for delivering the SWB system for the whole planet in just over two decades. Yes, just 20 years.
Seed flow
The flow of materials to build the first generation of this energy system represents a seed of materials, just as dust and other matter collect and condense before igniting to become a star. They call this the “seed flow.” This seed flow can be endlessly recycled into future capacity; solar panels built today can last over 60 years, and the vast majority of the materials embodied within them can be recycled at the end of their life. For example, Redwood Materials, founded by a group of former Tesla executives, can already manufacture a new battery using 98% recycled materials. With productivity improvements over time, each molecule embodied in the system will be capable of producing more output, so the output from the system as a whole will naturally grow.
Circular
This is completely transformational. The vast flow of materials needed to fuel the current system – the coal, gas, oil, biofuels, uranium, and wood pellets, along with the vast global infrastructure of power stations, refineries, ships, trucks, and trains needed to process and transport them – will stop. People and planet, bedrocks of the extractive system, will no longer be needed as the exploited inputs. The system has almost everything it needs embodied to produce useful output, almost indefinitely. As we’ve seen, it spells the end of the X-flow and produces no toxic outputs- no carbon emissions, no environmental degradation, no pollution, and no waste. For example, superpower could be used to suck CO2 out of the air to slow and ultimately reverse climate change.
Radiant
Radiance: The capacity to use the super production of energy and labour inherent in a Stellar production system to help restore the destruction of extraction.
Artificial labour
Stellar energy is the first and most important step toward building an entirely new production system, but there are other core Stellar technologies upon which the new system will be built. These are AI and robotics. Over time, they’ll learn how to design and build themselves. As they continue to improve, AI and robotics, which combined we call artificial labour (AL), that is to say that, at some point in the future, AL will be practically self-sufficient and require no human input across R&D, design, manufacture, and maintenance. We can argue about how long it will take, whether it’s 20 years (as we think) or 50 years, and how far it will go, whether it’s 90% or 100% of labour, but that’s just quibbling over the details.
Double exponential
In fact, AI is seeing double-exponential (both in hardware and software) improvements in technological capability. Robotics is also improving on a double-exponential basis. As AI software efficiency improves by orders of magnitude, software upgrades to the AI computer that controls robots will be able to conduct far more work, faster, and with greater precision using the same hardware.
Zero cost
The cost of AL technologies is also improving rapidly. In their models, the cost per hour of labour will drop to $1 by 2035 and $0.10 by 2045. Assuming that double-exponential improvement in AI continues and that humanoid robots are built by other humanoid robots, another exponential feedback loop will dramatically reduce the future costs of AL. Now factor in the near-zero cost of Stellar energy, and the real cost per hour of AL is essentially zero.
Stellar convergence
AL and superpower are unlikely bedfellows, but they’re perfectly suited to each other. The convergence of SWB and AL will create an energy system that not only produces enough output to meet demand but also has sufficient superpower, intelligence, and labour to build itself, grow, and improve.
Ignition
Ignition point. This is what the authors call the “ignition point.” From this point on, the system becomes not just self-sufficient but self-building, self-managing, self-repairing, and self-improving. Ignition point: The point at which Stellar technologies have enough super production embodied that they can produce output with no further extractive input. The system becomes capable of sustaining itself indefinitely and increasing its output.
Biotechnology
But this isn’t the end of the story – there’s one final set of Stellar technologies. These are biotechnologies that will produce food and biomaterials of any kind, powered only by energy from the sun or plant matter. The most important of these is precision fermentation, PF, which essentially allows the “programming” of microorganisms to produce pretty much any complex molecule desired. These biotechnologies are not limited to food production. They can be used to produce all kinds of biomaterials across every sector of the economy.
Commons
Together, these Stellar technologies will be able to meet all humanity’s needs. This system can only reach its full potential without private ownership, which would not only act to constrain the extraordinary possibilities it offers, but also add significant cost by sucking out super production in the form of profits.
Extractive ownership
Under extractive ownership, the super production and wealth the system creates will stay in the hands of core elites, preserving and increasing inequality, as will the short-term profit incentive that ensures products throughout the value chain are not built to last. Instead, individual consumers must have the rights to all outputs, to use or share as they wish.
Governance
The same must be true for governance. Vested interests in business must not be allowed to hold sway over the political process at all levels—local, regional, and national—which is becoming increasingly subverted by powerful individuals, corporations, and interest groups. Fully open-source AI directed toward the public good can help overcome this problem.
The beginning of infinity
When liberated from all constraints, there are essentially no extractive limits to the size of the Stellar economy. Driven by superabundant energy and almost unlimited AL, all at near-zero cost, useful output (not GDP) can expand at rates orders of magnitude greater than is possible today. In the words of British physicist David Deutsch, it’s “the beginning of infinity.”
The Stellar World
The only external input required by the Stellar system is energy from the sun, which is boundless, non-excludable, and non-depletive. With the end of the X-flow, the growth imperative —the single most important driver of geographic expansion and technological progress for thousands of years —will dissolve. This new system will be based on boundless, not finite, resources. Stellar World: A society organised around a production system based on Stellar technologies, where land, labour, and capital are embodied in the system. People and planet transcend the system of production. This new Stellar production system will completely transform civilisation.
It is happening
And it is already happening. All of these technologies are already being applied in the real world across several key sectors of the economy, and they’ll disrupt extractive incumbents for purely economic reasons. As we’ve seen, the cost and capabilities of SWB technologies are improving dramatically, so much so that an SWB system is by far the cheapest we could build today, far cheaper than any fossil fuel system based on coal, oil, and gas, and orders of magnitude cheaper than one based on nuclear power. This means the energy system is already past the rupture point. Change is now inevitable. The
Investment in solar, wind and batteries
A virtuous cycle for SWB is gathering momentum as demand and economies of scale grow. Investment has flooded into the industry, increasing innovation and building out manufacturing capacity. At the same time, conventional power is facing a vicious cycle that has seen first nuclear, then coal, and shortly gas suffer from uncompetitiveness, leading to falling demand. This dynamic means they’re beginning to resemble peaking plants – those that are kept idle and used to meet peaks in demand.
Everything that can be electrified will be
Driven purely by economics, everything that can be electrified will be, thus accelerating the electrification of transport, heating, and industry. The uses for superpower are limited only by our imagination. Industries that are limited by power costs today could become viable on a much greater scale. Vertical farming, for instance, where energy is the primary cost, could outcompete conventional agriculture.
The internet of electrons
Training AI is also a great match, as is cryptocurrency mining, water desalination, and the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere at a scale orders of magnitude greater than is possible using the current, extractive system. The new Stellar energy system will be like an internet of electrons. The new SWB system can be built out over the next 10 years, during which time the costs of all the key underlying technologies —namely, solar, wind, and batteries —will continue to decline. Energy companies may become service providers that charge fixed monthly fees, in the same way that AT&T or China Mobile charge for broadband services.
Transformation
This new Stellar energy system will be completely transformational. Using too much energy will no longer be perceived as a waste in terms of cost, nor a sin in terms of the environmental impact. Instead, given the extraordinary things it could be used for, it will be seen as the right thing to do. Meanwhile, near-zero-cost energy eliminates the need for open-ended subsidies, saving governments worldwide trillions of dollars each year. A distributed, modular system is also far more resilient, as there’s no single point of failure, making the energy supply much more secure.
It will start locally
The impact of boundless, near-zero-cost energy will be felt across the global economy. And it will start at the community or city level, below the radar (and resistance) of central governments. Regions that resist, where incumbency is strong, will get left behind until they have no choice but to reverse course and adapt. Just one city, one region and the Stellar system will spread, just as the extractive system did many thousands of years ago, although this time by imitation, not coercion. The Stellar system is distributed and modular, and doesn’t need to happen at the scale of a national grid. Those regions or cities that lead the way will secure a massive competitive advantage.
Local governance
Our current systems of government, essentially mechanisms for managing the X-flow, will also become largely redundant. The emphasis will move to local, community-level government that can better understand local issues and avoid the kind of one-size-fits-all prescriptions that can lead to
Impact
- The need for progress will no longer be existential. It won’t be based on predatory competition—grow or be outgrown—but rather on collaboration.
- When the key inputs needed to fuel the production system are embodied within it (land, labour, and capital), there’s little role for free market capitalism or, in fact, any other extractive economic model.
- With no growth imperative, the fundamental driver of all conflict will disappear.
- Private ownership becomes a disadvantage because it adds cost in the form of the scarcity premium. Such a system cannot compete with a Stellar system, which has almost zero total cost. Established economic theory will therefore be rendered meaningless as the dynamics of extraction disappear.
- Protectionism, on both individual and collective levels, will serve no purpose, as everyone will have everything they need.
Joy, creativity, and enthusiasm
In the world of the sun and not the fire, what is rewarded will change fundamentally. No longer will humans be tilted toward the darker side of their psyches, toward anxiety, anger, and jealousy. Without the fragility and uncertainties of extraction, our lives will no longer be driven by fear. Emotions, thoughts, and behaviours will become Stellar too. Love is an example. The more someone gives, the more they get. It’s inexhaustible and restorative, healing and life-enhancing. The result will be a world where joy, creativity, and enthusiasm can replace want, duty, and obligation. We’ll be free to reconnect with our true selves, free to pursue deeper connections with each other and the world around us.
Rupture
Rupture point: The point at which the negative feedbacks keeping a system stable break down. Change becomes inevitable. These dynamics mean that adoption of truly disruptive products doesn’t stop at 20% or 50% of the market, but continues to almost 100%. The shift from extraction to the Stellar World represents the highest level of change, one we haven’t seen since the Neolithic Revolution. A meta-metamorphosis, if you like, as the extractive caterpillar transforms into a Stellar butterfly. The emerging world is fundamentally different from the old world. It’s a metamorphosis. The attributes and dynamics of the system change completely.
A Stellar food system
Just as in the energy sector, new Stellar technologies are paving the way for an entirely new food system. This means Stellar foods will reverse the extractive march toward monoculture. When combined with superpower, the cost of superabundant production is essentially zero. By adding PF inputs, the cost of producing extraordinary dishes, better in every parameter, will plummet. Just like energy, this will not simply be a case of substituting one production method with another for the same foodstuffs – the new system will open up extraordinary possibilities.
Stellar agriculture
Machine learning and AI will increasingly play a part in this process, helping to design new and interesting recipes for both familiar and innovative foods. Thanks to advances in robotics, these farms can be almost entirely automated.
Stellar distribution
The endless, destructive flow of inputs in the form of land, feed, fertiliser, labour, and machinery, as well as the ships, trains, and trucks needed to transport food, will stop. A fragile, centralised system will be replaced by a robust, distributed, self-sustaining system where demand follows supply, not the other way around.
Stellar water
Water use falls by around 90%, while food waste is almost eliminated, as are GHG emissions and pollution. All of this can be tailored to our individual needs thanks to extraordinary advances in monitoring and diagnostics in healthcare.
Stellar transport
Transportation will also transform beyond recognition, with autonomous electric taxis replacing individual car ownership. This huge cost saving will drive a move toward what we call Transport-as-a-Service (TaaS). Fleets of taxis will be in almost constant use and then charged and maintained in facilities near urban centres, negating the need for both widespread and massively expensive charging infrastructure and car parks. TaaS will require 80% fewer vehicles and therefore vastly fewer natural resources, see an 80% reduction in road transport energy demand, and save families thousands of dollars a year, providing a huge economic boost to other sectors of the global economy.
Mushrooms
The extraordinary properties of mycelium, the root structure of fungi, are also being harnessed in the same way to produce lightweight, inexpensive, and durable building materials.
Metal
Metals currently tied up in the extractive system will be reused and fed into the Stellar system. Recycled steel, for example, can be used as a feedstock for electric arc furnaces, allowing the electrification of steelmaking, which currently accounts for around 7% of global CO2 emissions.
Healthcare
In healthcare, the same technologies and processes used in food and material production will also help transform drug production, massively reducing costs.
Wearables
Technologies such as wearable devices that monitor all manner of vital signs, symptom tracking apps, and early detection technologies, including methanobiology—how cells respond to mechanical stimuli—will significantly increase both our ability to predict illnesses and diseases and diagnose them early, reducing the need for costly treatments.
Education
As Stellar technologies replace extractive technologies as the core components of all sectors of the economy and society, education changes entirely. The delivery of education will change dramatically as AI and communications technologies enable completely new education models. The focus could move to problem solving, navigating uncertainty, spirituality, critical thinking, the science of complexity, or indeed different ways of thinking entirely. The switch will be so profound we can only speculate – the only way of knowing the end destination is to embark on the journey.
Extraction Mistakes and Chimaeras
The Stellar technologies that lay the foundation of the Stellar World are not being recognised as transformative, but just as more of the same – more extraction. As a result, they’re being shoehorned into the extractive system for which they’re wholly unsuited. Chimaera: A compromised product, “solution,“ or system that arises from placing Stellar technologies within extractive organising structures.
False solutions
The fact that solar is so cheap and getting cheaper means the old extractive incentive structure for banks to lend and utilities to invest doesn’t work anymore. This is already becoming a problem for banks and investors. The industry, therefore, dreams up all kinds of extractive “solutions“ such as using excess solar and wind to make hydrogen, a gas that’s extremely expensive and energy-intensive to produce, to be used when generation drops in winter. Because this chimeric energy system is so compromised, it pushes the industry down a vicious cycle in which it needs to dream up any number of “solutions“ to overcome shortcomings of its own making. The fact that all the “solutions“ currently being discussed to reduce emissions from the power sector become completely redundant in the Stellar World. CCS, nuclear power, ammonia, gas bridges, biofuels, and liquefied natural gas are nothing more than hallucinations dreamed up by those who either benefit from the preservation of the old extractive system or cannot see the potential of the new Stellar system.
Chimerism is so prevalent that even some environmentalists are now starting to question whether solar and wind power are the answer to climate change. Instead of aiming for the superpower and radiance of Stellar energy, the world is literally doing its best to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Less bad
Regenerative farming is a beautiful idea that involves going back to more traditional methods of farming to rebuild our soils and provide healthier, more natural foods. But it’s still the essence of extraction. It won’t address food security, inequality, conflict, or the volatility of supplies, and will cause prices to rise, not fall. Why go back to slightly “less bad“extractive farming approaches when the Stellar alternative frees the land from exploitation in any capacity, allowing it to return to its natural state, if that’s what society chooses? Rewilding, not more extraction.
It is still extractive
The same is true for plant-based alternatives. These are becoming increasingly popular, particularly in the dairy industry, where products such as soy and nut milk are eating into cow milk’s market share. Not only do these “solutions“ fail to address key issues of extractive farming, they actually perpetuate the current system by distracting from the need for more fundamental change. For example, almost all insulin is now made using PF, but even though the cost of making it has fallen by more than a million times since it was approved in the early 1980s and 10,000 times since 2000, the price to consumers is far higher now than it’s ever been.
The end of capitalism
Realising the full potential of Stellar technologies will require radical changes to the organising system in which they operate. Given that the Stellar energy system, once built, is an eternal system – it has everything it needs to self-repair, self-improve, and thus provide energy perpetually – old ownership models become entirely redundant. Capitalism (private ownership) is no longer required to harness investment and innovation. Yes, capitalism is required to build the Stellar energy system, to provide the incentives to invest and innovate, and to organise the flow of resources to develop, build, and operate the system. But at the ignition point, it’s no longer needed.
AI ownership
While private ownership of the Stellar energy system is a massive problem, it creates even more troubling implications for AI. The process is already playing out with OpenAI, a company originally conceived to benefit humanity through developing “safe and beneficial“ AI, but which was quickly subsumed by investors, including Microsoft, in the name of maximising profits. It has instead become “ExtractionAI,“ a closed and controlled platform.
Private AI
AI is built on access to the world’s collective and cumulative knowledge. Today, private enterprise is taking humanity’s open, shared knowledge —painfully built up over generations —and using it to develop AI that privatises that knowledge, profiting enormously from it. The ownership of AL is, therefore, absolutely critical as it increasingly displaces humans in the workforce. Whoever owns such AL would control the world’s intelligence and labor, a truly terrifying prospect creating the possibility of the most unequal society that has ever existed. By allowing AL to be privatised indefinitely, humanity is quite literally throwing itself at the mercy of a few individuals who will be unfathomably powerful to provide for them.
Common AI
Instead, societies must grant rights to the output of the new system to citizens, particularly as human labour is displaced and the extractive model of trading labour for capital breaks down. A form of “un-ownership“ if you like. Getting ownership right will, therefore, be a critical challenge for the transformation, particularly in relation to the Stellar core of energy and AL.
Sunset mechanism
One tool that may prove useful on the journey are sunset mechanisms on ownership structures that reward the innovation and investment needed to reach a Stellar system, but which then unwind to allow the benefits to be reaped by all. Just think about the internet, which has given rise to millions of businesses and trillions of dollars in wealth around the world, but remains unknown to everyone. The same is true for the Interstate Highway System in the U.S., which has given rise to millions of businesses, tens of millions of homes, and trillions of dollars of wealth, but remains a platform for the public good.
The problem of current problem-solving
This is what’s wrong with our approach to the issues of extraction. We try to make them a bit less bad. Band-aid: An intervention to staunch or redirect the X-flow. Not a cure. (Might have some benefit in buying time, alleviating symptoms,
Technofixes
First are extraction technofixes, innovations that attempt to make existing technologies less bad, many of which are aimed at reducing their environmental impact. We’ve already discussed the hallucinated solutions that arise from the emerging energy chimaera, such as CCS, but there are many others. These include all kinds of attempts to make livestock farming less damaging, such as feed that makes cows burp less, farming fish to protect wild stocks, and farmed insect proteins to replace meat or animal feed. E-fuels to make ICE vehicles cleaner are another example. They’re all just slightly cleaner versions of the X-flow.
Redistribution
Redistribution is another “solution“ that doesn’t work. Taxing the rich, or AL, or wealth and capital, might have political benefits and temporarily alleviate inequality, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem, which is inherent to extraction. Behaviour change interventions are further band-aids. Nudging us to do “better“ things – recycle, shorten showers, eat less meat, drive or fly less – and the clarion calls to consume and pollute less are based on a misunderstanding of the dynamics of the world we currently inhabit.
Top-down interventions
That’s the mistake of the COP. In our competitive, extractive world, it’s nothing more than magical thinking to believe we can solve these problems through some sort of top-down intervention, where everyone toes the line. You can’t expect countries or individuals to stop competing when it’s the key determinant of success in our extractive world. The same goes for efforts to address the “failure of capitalism.“ To somehow change capitalism to be kinder, fairer, or regenerative is equally magical while extraction is still our world.
Going back
That there are “limits to growth.“ These are the most dangerous “solutions“ because they’re not just band-aids but calls for fundamental changes in behaviour that will have disastrous consequences. First and most obviously, it cannot succeed. Climate change is a serious problem that requires us to cut emissions not just to zero, but beyond zero, to remove emissions from the atmosphere to help repair the damage we’ve already done. But degrowth cannot get us there. But even worse is the fact that degrowth would close off the path to the Stellar World. Such an approach would block off our only escape route from extraction,
Starving the caterpillar
To build the Stellar World, we’ll need more metals, minerals, oil, and fossil fuels over the next few decades to seed the Stellar system that will produce output indefinitely. And then we’ll need none. Starving the caterpillar won’t just stop metamorphosis, but kill the caterpillar. It will die before it flies.
The dual economy
Over the next few decades, the Stellar economy will outcompete the extraction economy across the board. It won’t happen in an even and predictable way, but sector by sector, region by region. It will follow the pattern of all transformations – an X-curve representing the decline of extraction and the rise of the Stellar World. To the extractive mindset, it will happen shockingly fast, with the transformation all but over in just 20-30 years.
- First, the legacy extraction economy, which will continue throughout the period of transformation, diminishing over time.
- Second, the seed flow economy. This is the flow that will be used to build the Stellar core. However, as the Stellar core reaches ignition point and human labour and resources from outside the system are no longer required, this part of the economy will quickly and irreversibly end.
- Finally, there are the applications of the outputs of the Stellar economy, all those extraordinary possibilities we talked about earlier.
Over time, as the need for external inputs falls away, Stellar technologies will be capable of taking on more and more of what humans contribute. Without the legacy extraction organising system, like the gravitational pull of a star, all the activity in the remaining extraction economy will fall into the Stellar World.
Measuring progress
As the Stellar World is built out, this conventional dashboard will not be able to differentiate between the flow of land, labour, and capital used as the seed for the new Stellar system and extractive flows that underpin the extractive system. Today’s dashboard is focused on measuring the dollar value of activity (GDP). But for the Stellar economy, where output is produced at near-zero cost, it won’t understand or capture the bits/bytes or intelligence, miles travelled, or the kWh and proteins produced. The deflationary trend is already evident in our economy, but hidden in the numbers. In its infancy, it applies mainly to information, which has been largely dematerialised. As land, labour, and capital are embodied in the production system, Stellar output rights, or SORs (having a right to share in the output), replace money and wealth.
The end of money
If GDP drops, governments and central banks are likely to print money on a grand scale to ensure the hole in GDP caused by deflationary forces is offset. Printed money could also be used to pay those impacted by the inevitable job losses that come with the end of extraction. We call this “print and pay.“ During the transformation, fiat currencies will rapidly devalue and alternative means of exchange will emerge, including SORs. Some form of blockchain-based SOR token or ledger could provide the mechanism for the micro payments that the trading of these rights will require. Alternatives will also have to be found for the “store of value“ role that money has traditionally served. Cryptocurrencies could have a valuable role to play here. The journey to the Stellar World will see the creation and destruction of value on a scale never seen before, with huge gains in the new system and losses in the old as industries are wiped out at terrifying speed.
Opportunity
In the short term, there might be huge gains to be made as building out the Stellar system creates surging demand for extractive materials and other resources. Investors will face a period of extraordinary opportunity and profound risk. As AL and Stellar energy gather pace, the opportunity to adapt existing industries and discover new possibilities based on the transformed dynamics of a Stellar system will lead to huge value creation.
Leadership
Stellar leadership will confer enormous benefits. Those who lead the way will gain a competitive advantage that will attract the industries, people, and investment needed to arrive in the Stellar World. The interests of the early movers will be best served by interconnecting and experimenting together, learning and sharing as they go. This network, along with the nodes themselves, will act as Stellar nurseries.
Chaos
The journey will feel deeply chaotic. The accelerating pace of change and the transformation of every part of society, of humanity itself, will feel like being trapped under a tsunami until, if successful, humanity emerges breathless and disoriented in a world where even the experience of change changes.
The guiding principles
1. Rethink: Complexity, curiosity, humility
2. Adapt: Antifragility, anti-dogma, anti-incumbency, truth-seeking
3. Solve the Right Problems: Protect people, build guardrails, solve the problems of transformation, not extraction
4. Prioritise: Anti-scarcity, raise the floor of collapse
5. Harness Extraction: Jiu-Jitsu, scarcity with intention
6. Optimise with Purpose: Choose goals with intention, courage, and agency
7. Create Stellar Nurseries: Find fellow travellers, start the race-to-the-stars
8. Align: Whole, complete, incorruptible; align self, community, and society.
9. Let Go: Unlearn, be curious
We all have agency
For anyone, anywhere, has the agency to effect change, to start the boulder rolling that will lead to a cascade of transformation. Burying your head in the sand will, of course, be easier, hiding from the uncertainty, believing that things are out of control and that no one person can make a difference. We’re not naive – a Stellar World will present its own set of problems. But only a Stellar society can endure, one with the ability to adapt constantly, to enable future generations to realise their full potential. For extraction in any form is unsustainable; it carries the seed of its own destruction. Extraction depletes (it’s highly entropic) and will self-destruct—stellar restores (it generates negative entropy).
I am in.
