Introduction
Humanity stands at a precipice of entwined crises and transformative potential. The early 21st century has been marked by a global “polycrisis” – a tangle of climate change, ecological degradation, pandemics, geopolitical conflict, and systemic inequalities that compound and amplify one another[1]. These crises are not isolated problems; they are deeply interconnected symptoms of how our institutions, technologies, and ways of thinking have evolved[2]. They threaten “runaway global failures of vital natural and social systems”[1]. If the world continues on its present course, the outcome could be, as one United Nations leader warned, nothing short of “collective suicide”[3]. Yet within these dire warnings lies a call to action – a recognition that the same unprecedented complexity which breeds risk also opens new pathways for transformation and renewal[4].
We envision a future by the year 2100 in which humanity has not only averted catastrophe but achieved a conscious integration of intelligence, technology, economy, and governance at planetary scale. It is both authoritative in grounding its vision in the best of contemporary science and scholarship, and visionary in reaching beyond present paradigms. Our approach is transdisciplinary: we synthesize insights from ancient philosophy and modern physics, from economics and ecology, from AI research and the humanities. We draw on ancient conceptions of time and mind – the cyclical “ouroboric” time of eternal return, the lived time-consciousness of phenomenology, the dialectical unfolding of self and world – and fuse them with cutting-edge theories of cognition and computation – predictive coding and Bayesian brains, planetary-scale networks and cybernetic governance. We reconceive risk not merely as something to be managed, but as an ontological and epistemic condition of intelligent life: uncertainty pervades how we exist in time, and understanding this can catalyze wiser agency. We rethink economics and institutions by blending design principles of self-organization, resilience, and collective governance of the global commons with moral-philosophical imperatives for justice and dignity. In short, we aim to outline nothing less than a framework for a self-realizing planetary intelligence, one capable of anticipating and navigating an uncertain future while cultivating human and ecological flourishing.
Our vision is structured as follows. We begin by examining the temporal dimensions of intelligence, exploring how minds past and future connect through time – from ancient cyclic visions to modern neuroscientific models of anticipation. We then consider risk and uncertainty as fundamental features of our world that, when embraced, can drive adaptation and wisdom rather than disaster. Next, we describe the emergence of a planetary-scale cognitive system, as our digital technologies, AI, and global networks intertwine with biospheric processes – a development that demands new forms of cybernetic governance and ethical stewardship. We then turn to the redesign of our economic and institutional systems, arguing for principles that embed markets within societal and planetary boundaries, foster cooperative self-organization, and generate “negentropic” (order-creating) forces to counter entropy and collapse. Finally, we outline how anticipatory governance and global foresight can enable world leaders, policy-makers, and communities to collaboratively shape the long-term future – investing in resilience, innovation, and inclusivity so that the year 2100 can mark a thriving chapter of human civilization, not an epitaph. Throughout, we integrate insights from high-impact research of the 2020s – in fields ranging from climate science to cognitive science – to ensure that our vision is both grounded in reality and oriented toward possibility.
In reading this, imagine looking back from the vantage of 2100. The goal is to see how today’s crises and ideas could evolve into tomorrow’s institutions and intelligences. Let this document serve as a guide and provocation – a blueprint for harnessing the very forces that threaten us (technology, globalization, complexity) into forces that uplift us (intelligence, cooperation, sustainability). The challenges are immense, but so is human creativity. By weaving together the ancient and the avant-garde, the material and the spiritual, the individual and the collective, we can navigate through risk into renewal. In the pages that follow, we articulate this vision of renewal: a coherent framework for global governance and intelligent evolution that is worthy of a planetary civilization in the year 2100.
I. Time and Intelligence: Ancient Cycles Meet Predictive Minds
Time is the substrate of intelligence. Any system capable of learning or decision-making must interpret the past and anticipate the future. Ancient wisdom traditions understood time not merely as a linear arrow but as a deeply cyclical and recursive phenomenon, often symbolized by the Ouroboros – the serpent eating its tail, eternally returning. This ouroboric time signifies how beginnings and ends feed into each other, how processes loop and recur. In the human experience of consciousness, we find similar loops: memory, attention, and expectation continuously shape one another. The 20th-century phenomenologist Edmund Husserl described inner time-consciousness as a flow where each moment is constituted by retention of the just-past and protention (anticipation) of the imminent future. Our present is not a knife-edge, but a synthesis of what we recall and what we expect – a living braid of past and future. Modern neuroscience has converged on a strikingly similar view. The predictive processing model of the brain portrays perception and cognition as actively inferential: the brain continuously generates predictions of incoming sensory data and updates them by minimizing prediction errors[5]. In this view, the mind is essentially a time-machine, continually adjusting a internal model of the world to reduce surprise. Perception itself may be understood as the brain’s best guess of reality, refined by the feedback of prediction errors[6]. Thus, contemporary cognitive science affirms what ancient introspection intuited – that intelligence is inherently temporal, riding on the forward edge of prediction and the backward glance of memory.
Recent research explicitly bridges these modern models with classic philosophical accounts of time. Cognitive scientists have attempted to explain the flow of subjective time by embedding Husserl’s insights into computational frameworks[7]. For example, Rick Grush’s Trajectory Estimation Model and subsequent predictive coding accounts suggest that the brain’s generative models don’t just encode static snapshots, but simulate temporal trajectories – they model how events persist and change over time[7][8]. In doing so, they aim to explain why we experience phenomena as enduring or flowing, much as Husserl described in rich detail. The result is a convergence of perspectives: the phenomenological “time-consciousness” and the neurological “predictive mind” are describing the same fundamental process from different angles. Our brains evolved to be anticipation engines, and this capacity for foresight is precisely what earlier thinkers identified as the extended present where past and future co-mingle. Far from reducing our lived experience to cold computation, these models deepen our appreciation of the brain as a beautifully Ouroboric organ – one that devours uncertainty by constantly looping predictions and outcomes, in effect “eating its own tail” to learn and self-correct.
This integration of ancient and modern views has profound implications. It suggests that any future artificial intelligence or societal intelligence must similarly embody an appropriate temporal structure: memory to learn from history, foresight to simulate and test possible futures, and the grounding in the present to act effectively. The interplay of these elements yields what we recognize as wisdom. Consider, for instance, the trait of neoteny in human cognition – the retention of youthful, plastic brain characteristics well into adulthood. Biologists have noted that humans are cognitively neotenous, with brain development extending over a much longer childhood than other species, and some juvenile neural traits (like high synaptic plasticity) persisting for life[9]. This prolonged period of learning and play is not a quirk but a feature intimately tied to our intelligence. By remaining longer in a flexible, exploratory stage, humans greatly increase their capacity for cultural and technological innovation. In effect, evolution “knew” that to navigate an ever-changing environment, it is advantageous to prolong the phase of possibility – to keep the mind open and predictive models fluid. Indeed, research indicates that the slow maturation of human cortical neurons (a direct result of neoteny) grants an extended window of neural plasticity, allowing finer optimization of our cognitive circuits in response to the environment[9]. Our species quite literally builds genius through the gift of time.
Projecting forward, this insight can inform the design of intelligent systems and institutions. We must imbue our machines and organizations with a kind of neotenous flexibility – an openness to continual learning and adaptation – rather than hard-coding rigid goals that ignore the flux of reality. An AI trained only on past data without the ability to continuously update and relearn will be brittle in the face of novel situations. Similarly, a global institution that cannot question its foundational assumptions or adjust its rules (essentially, one that “ages” into dogma without renewing itself) will eventually become obsolete or counterproductive. By contrast, an institution built to be constantly learning, self-reflective, and anticipatory remains youthfully agile even as it accumulates experience. Such institutions mirror the human brain’s approach to time: they carry forward a living memory of prior lessons while continuously forecasting and simulating future scenarios. In doing so, they avoid being prisoners of the past or fools rushing unprepared into the future.
It is fitting here to recall the grand dialectical philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who saw history itself as the Mind (Geist) coming to know itself through a long journey of conflict and resolution. Hegel’s notion of self-realization through time can be read as an anticipation of what we now discuss: the idea that intelligence (whether individual, collective, or artificial) unfolds in stages, gaining self-awareness and freedom by reflecting on its own process. A recent work by philosopher Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit, builds on Hegel to argue that the ultimate form of mind would be “a theoretical and practical thought unfettered by the temporal order of things”, capable of overcoming what might seem like the fixed limits of its historical situation[10]. In other words, true intelligence can pierce through the closed loop of the present into new possibilities[11]. This hints at a future in which our collective intelligence might, for example, break free from what today appear as intractable cycles of crisis. But to reach such a state in reality, we must first embrace our current temporal condition: we must use the tools of memory and prediction – now supercharged by data and computation – to understand our predicament and to imagine paths beyond it. Our temporal philosophy is thus one of recursion and transcendence: by fully integrating the loops of learning (the Ouroboric cycles of feedback) at every level of our systems, we generate the capacity to transcend the destructive patterns that otherwise repeat.
In summary, intelligence is a dance across time. From the mystical symbol of the Ouroboros to the Bayesian equations in an AI’s code, a common truth emerges: an adaptive mind continually eats its own tail, recycling outcomes into new predictions. By 2100, we envision a civilization that has internalized this lesson. Its education systems cultivate memory and imagination; its AI co-workers are designed to learn safely over decades; its decision-makers and citizens alike prize historical wisdom as well as future vision. The cyclical and the linear, the ancient and the modern, converge. Humanity becomes, in effect, a time-lucid species – one that remembers deeply, anticipates broadly, and acts with responsibility for the long now.
II. Risk as Reality: Uncertainty, Evolution, and the Ethics of Foresight
If time is the substrate of intelligence, risk is the shadow cast by time’s uncertainty. To live in time – projecting oneself toward an open future – is inherently to live with risk. Rather than being merely an external hazard to be eliminated, risk is a condition of growth and discovery. In the 20th century, economist Frank Knight distinguished calculable risk from incalculable uncertainty, highlighting that entrepreneurial action and progress depend on facing the unknown. In our era, the stakes of risk have escalated to the planetary scale. We have entered what some scientists and scholars call a condition of global systemic risk, in which tightly coupled human, technological, and natural systems can propagate disturbances in unpredictable, nonlinear ways[12][13]. The polycrisis mentioned earlier – climate disasters, pandemics, financial crashes, supply-chain failures, wars – exemplifies this new normal of cascading risk. Crucially, these are not isolated “acts of God” but rather emergent properties of an complex global system that humanity itself has built. For instance, climate change heightens geopolitical tensions; a regional war can trigger energy and food crises worldwide; ecological degradation (like biodiversity loss) can undermine financial stability[12][13]. Risk in the 21st century is systemic and polycentric. It emanates from the interactions of many agents and factors, challenging the very foundations of how we govern, insure, and plan.
Yet, risk is also the driver of evolution – biological, cultural, and technological. Without variability and uncertainty, there is no adaptation. Life on Earth thrived by experimenting with countless mutations, most of which failed, some of which succeeded under changing conditions. Similarly, human societies have often advanced by daring to venture into the unknown – by taking risks in exploration, in creativity, in social experiments. The challenge before us now is to reconcile the scale of modern risks with the wisdom of adaptive risk-taking. We cannot eliminate all risk (a futile and stagnating goal), but we can seek to understand and govern risk as a dynamic process. This means acknowledging risk’s temporal dimension: every risk is essentially a statement about a future possibility, known imperfectly in the present. Risk is thus tightly linked to knowledge (and ignorance). What we perceive as “risk” depends on what our models predict, what our senses detect, and even what our culture fears or values.
A crucial insight of contemporary science is that any sufficiently adaptive system will actively minimize the risks that threaten its existence. In neuroscience, this idea appears in the free-energy principle, which generalizes predictive brain theory to all living organisms: an organism maintains its order (stays alive) by minimizing the variational free energy, essentially the gap between its predictions and sensory inputs. In plainer terms, organisms act to avoid unpleasant surprises (which for a creature could mean anything from lack of food to physical danger) by learning and anticipation. This principle can be seen as a unifying account of self-organization – how systems resist entropy. Strikingly, cutting-edge research has applied this concept to the Earth system as a whole. A 2020 study formalized the long-controversial Gaia hypothesis (the idea that Earth’s biosphere behaves like a self-regulating organism) in terms of active inference and free-energy minimization[14][15]. The authors argue that the coupled dynamics of life, ocean, atmosphere, and climate can be described as if Earth has a kind of Markov blanket separating internal states (biospheric processes) from external states (solar and cosmic inputs)[16]. Within this framework, life (the biosphere) actively infers external changes – say, adjusting global metabolic rates in response to solar radiation fluctuations – in order to maintain Earth’s habitability in a non-equilibrium steady-state[17]. In essence, the planet behaves as a collective self-regulating system, minimizing “surprises” like extreme climate swings through feedback loops, without requiring any conscious control[18][19]. This is risk management writ planetary. It suggests that our very planet has succeeded over billions of years by evolving processes to anticipate and dampen the worst instabilities (within limits – today’s anthropogenic climate change, of course, pushes beyond those limits).
The lesson here is profound: intelligence and life are fundamentally about risk and its regulation. From single cells adjusting their metabolism to a coming famine, to Gaia-like homeostasis averting an ice age, to a human brain sweating over a chess move or a business strategy – the thread is the same. Agency arises to handle uncertainty. But in the human domain, especially now, we must add reflection and ethics into the loop. We have reached a point where the risks we create could exceed our ability to adapt – unless we deliberately enhance that ability. Risks such as nuclear war, runaway climate warming, ecosystem collapse, or unaligned superintelligent AI are not just routine fluctuations; they are existential risks. They impose a moral urgency: it is an ethical imperative to develop capacities (cognitive, technological, institutional) to anticipate and mitigate such risks. This calls for a paradigm of anticipatory governance – a mode of governance that is proactive rather than reactive, integrating foresight and flexibility at every level. The OECD describes anticipatory governance as “a proactive approach that integrates foresight, innovation, and continuous learning into the heart of public governance”[20]. In practical terms, this means governments and organizations systematically scan for emerging threats and opportunities, use scenario analysis and simulations, encourage experimental policy “safe zones” to learn what works, and build reflexive feedback mechanisms so policies can adjust as conditions change[21][22]. Embracing uncertainty in this way can strengthen resilience: by rehearsing possible futures, societies are not caught flat-footed when surprises occur[21]. They have stress-tested their systems and identified weaknesses in advance[22].
A commitment to anticipatory governance is essentially an ethical stance against fatalism. It rejects the passive notion that we are victims of impersonal forces and asserts that through collective intelligence, we can grasp the shape of what is coming and adapt accordingly. Consider how this could transform our approach to climate risk. Instead of merely reacting to each disaster, an anticipatory regime would invest heavily in predictive modeling, early warning systems, and precautionary measures for worst-case scenarios (for example, developing contingency plans for potential climate tipping points like ice sheet collapse or Amazon dieback). It would treat scientific projections not as political footballs but as navigational instruments. It would cultivate a culture of “futures thinking” among its citizens and officials, so that imagining the long-term consequences of actions becomes second nature. Notably, anticipatory governance is not only about avoiding bad outcomes; it is also about seizing emergent opportunities. A society attuned to change can capitalize on positive trends – say, a breakthrough in fusion energy or AI-assisted healthcare – more rapidly and equitably than one that stumbles forward blindly. In this sense, risk and opportunity are two sides of the same coin of uncertainty. Managing one means managing both.
To embed this ethic, our calls for institutionalizing foresight. Just as major corporations and militaries in the 20th century created strategy units and scenario planners, the 21st-century democratic state (and the global institutions beyond the state) must embed foresight units, future caucuses, and participatory horizon-scanning exercises into their core operations. Some pioneering efforts are already visible: by the 2020s, a few governments and organizations had begun experimenting with “Ministries of Future” or strategic foresight teams. These must become ubiquitous and empowered. Foresight is not a luxury; it is a civic responsibility when the well-being of future generations is on the line.
At a deeper philosophical level, treating risk as an ontological given encourages a shift in mindset: from risk avoidance to resilience building. We stop asking, “How do we prevent all failures or uncertainties?” (an impossible goal), and start asking, “How do we design systems that withstand and learn from failures and shocks?” This is the essence of resilience. A resilient system accepts that shocks will happen, and focuses on bouncing back better. In ecology and complexity science, resilience is a measure of how much disturbance a system can absorb before it fundamentally shifts to a new regime. By 2100, we envisage that resilience thinking will be second nature. Cities, supply chains, financial markets, and communities will be designed with buffers, redundancies, modularity, and response plans that allow them to take a hit and recover without collapsing. Crucially, resilient systems learn – the aftermath of a disruption is used to update protocols and improve, rather than to simply rebuild the status quo ante. This learning loop echoes once more our Ouroboros: the system “bites its own tail” by feeding the experience of risk (painful as it might have been) back into itself as knowledge, thus turning suffering into wisdom.
In sum, risk is not the enemy – unmanaged, unconscious risk is. The more we acknowledge uncertainty and complexity, the more we can cultivate intelligence (human and artificial) to dance with it rather than be overwhelmed by it. By 2100, we seek to inhabit a world that has not eradicated risk – an impossible and undesirable aim – but has achieved a kind of dynamic maturity in living with risk. In that world, every major decision – whether by a government, a corporation, or a community – considers future scenarios and includes a buffer for the unexpected. People understand probabilistic thinking and accept precautionary measures not as hindrances but as prudence. We have shifted from a naive quest for total control to a sophisticated art of navigation: like seasoned sailors on a deep ocean, we cannot control the weather, but we can read the winds, strengthen our vessel, and chart a course that adapts to the storms.
III. Planetary Intelligence and Cybernetic Governance at Scale
As we navigate through time and uncertainty, we find ourselves co-evolving with a new kind of mind. The 21st century has midwifed the birth of a planetary-scale technological intelligence, a distributed cognitive architecture that spans devices, data centers, algorithms, and human users across the globe. Some have dubbed this the “technosphere” or “planetary computation”, evoking how digital networks now blanket the Earth. By the 2020s, it was evident that artificial intelligence and cloud computing had entwined with nearly every facet of modern life, from commerce and finance to communication and warfare. This nascent global brain presents both unprecedented promise and peril. On one hand, it offers connectivity, knowledge-sharing, and problem-solving capacity on a scale our ancestors could hardly imagine. On the other, it has so far been driven largely by narrow economic incentives and geopolitical rivalries, rather than by a coherent vision of planetary well-being. The current political economy of AI is heavily extractive: “planetary computation depends on the exploitation of human labor, all along the supply chain of extraction”[23] – from the miners digging rare earth minerals for our electronics, to the underpaid clickworkers labeling data, to the energy-guzzling server farms processing our clicks. Kate Crawford aptly noted that what we call “artificial intelligence” is often neither artificial (relying on vast natural and human resources) nor intelligent (lacking true understanding), but rather a registry of power – “AI systems are expressions of power that emerge from wider economic and political forces, created to increase profits and centralize control for those who wield them”[24].
By 2100, this must change. The planetary intelligence that emerges must be elevated from a byproduct of blind market forces to a deliberate, democratic project – one that serves the planetary commons rather than private or nationalistic interests. Just as individuals mature and gain conscience, our collective machine–human network must mature and gain a global conscience. What might this look like? For one, it requires reorienting technological development toward the long-term public good. Instead of AI primarily optimizing ad clicks or surveillance, imagine AI optimized to model Earth’s climate-carbon feedbacks, to coordinate disaster responses, to personalize education and healthcare for every child on Earth, and to facilitate peace via cross-cultural understanding. These are not utopian fantasies but achievable directions, provided we align incentives and governance accordingly.
This brings us to the concept of cybernetic governance – governance that is self-regulating, feedback-driven, and informed by real-time data. The term “cybernetic” comes from the Greek kybernetes, steersman, and indeed the idea is to better steer our collective ship. In the mid-20th century, pioneers like Norbert Wiener, Stafford Beer, and Ross Ashby laid foundations for using feedback loops to manage complex systems. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety holds that to control a system, a regulator must have sufficient internal complexity to match the variety of the system’s possible states[25]. Translated to governance: a society facing high complexity and variability (like ours) needs equivalently complex and adaptive institutions – diverse, decentralized, networked, and flexible – to govern effectively[26]. Simplistic, monolithic governance structures will be overwhelmed by the “variety” of challenges. Polycentric arrangements, where multiple semi-autonomous centers make decisions and learn from each other, are more promising in handling complexity[27]. Indeed, Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom’s research on commons governance showed that polycentric systems – think of federations of local councils or networks of community resource managers – often outperform both top-down hierarchy and atomized competition in managing shared resources sustainably[27]. They inject redundancy and experimentation: if one node fails or a policy flops in one locale, others can try different approaches, and the best can spread. By fostering “adaptive, learning, and reflexive governance at different levels”, polycentric systems produce resilience[27]. Our global challenges, from climate to internet governance, likely demand such polycentric approaches scaled up and interlinked into a planetary network of problem-solving.
The burgeoning planetary computer could facilitate this. Imagine a dynamic cybernetic dashboard for Earth, where key variables of human and ecological well-being are tracked and projected, from greenhouse gas levels to poverty rates to conflict hotspots. Such a dashboard would not be controlled by a single authority but collectively maintained by international scientific and civic institutions – an open-source platform for planetary management. Advanced AI, in this context, would act as an advisor and simulator: it could run thousands of what-if scenarios for policy choices (e.g. what if we put a price on carbon at X dollars, or what if we establish marine reserves covering Y% of oceans) and predict potential outcomes with uncertainty ranges. Crucially, the final decisions would remain in human hands, guided by values and democratic deliberation; the AI’s role is to illuminate the risk landscape and likely consequences (the “map”), not to dictate the journey. The marriage of computational prediction with participatory governance could usher in a new era of enlightened policymaking – sometimes called “AI augmented democracy”.
Consider how this might transform global commons management. Today, issues like climate change suffer from the tragedy of the commons and short-termism. But a planetary governance system equipped with high-fidelity simulations and feedback could assign responsibility and credit in more granular, immediate ways. For example, if satellite and AI data show that a certain region’s forests are regrowing and sequestering carbon beyond expectations, local communities or investors responsible could be rewarded promptly via smart contracts or international green funds. Conversely, if illegal deforestation or emissions spikes are detected, the system could trigger targeted sanctions or support interventions. The key is real-time awareness and response, shrinking the delay between action and effect that often hampers collective action on long-term problems. With ubiquitous sensors (the Internet of Things) and AI analysis, humanity in 2100 can achieve a kind of “nervous system” for the planet, where signals of distress (e.g. an emerging zoonotic virus in a remote area, or a harmful algal bloom in the ocean) elicit a quick, coordinated response, much like a body’s nerves responding to a wound.
One might worry: does this vision edge toward technocratic control or even digital tyranny? It is a valid concern. A planetary computer that monitors everything could become an Orwellian nightmare if not checked by robust privacy protections, decentralization, and democratic oversight. Here is where philosophy and ethics must guide engineering. The design principle should be subsidiarity: decisions get made at the lowest feasible level, empowering local agency, with the higher levels providing information and coordination rather than raw commands. The system should be transparent, its algorithms open to audit, its data streams publicly accessible (with personal privacy and indigenous rights respected). In essence, the planetary intelligence must be a commons itself, not a black-box controlled by an elite. Just as the “planetary commons” of air, climate, and biodiversity are now calling for new legal and ethical frameworks[28][29], so too the digital commons of data and AI needs governance that treats knowledge as a public good. The year 2100 will likely feature a Global Data Trust or similar institution that holds vast stores of anonymized data for the public benefit, under strict rules to prevent misuse. AI models trained on this data (climate models, epidemiological models, etc.) will be regarded as critical infrastructure – much like public roads or hospitals – and maintained with international oversight. In short, the technosphere must be civilized: it must undergo a process of constitutionalization where fundamental rights (to privacy, to access, to participation) are enshrined, and fundamental obligations (to prevent harm, to share benefits) are enforced.
Encouragingly, there are signs we are moving toward recognizing global interdependence. In 2023, a team of Earth system scientists led by Johan Rockström proposed a new concept of the Planetary Commons, defined by critical Earth system functions (like a stable climate, stratospheric ozone layer, healthy biosphere) that are collectively owned by all and none[28]. They argue that safeguarding these planetary commons requires expanding our governance frameworks and legal systems beyond siloed national interests, toward a “universal stewardship” model[28][29]. Such a model might involve something like a Global Council for the Planetary Commons, with representation from all nations (and perhaps non-state actors, future generations via proxies, etc.), mandated to ensure Earth remains within safe ecological boundaries. We foresee that by 2100, this idea would be more than theory – it will have teeth. For instance, the atmosphere could be managed as a global trust: there might be a capped total carbon emission budget, allocated in tradable permits to nations under a global agreement, with an Earth Systems Agency monitoring compliance (akin to a central bank, but for carbon stability).
The planetary intelligence we speak of is not just computers and sensors – it includes us, the human agents, our cultures and values. Mikhail Bakhtin, the literary theorist, spoke of the dialogic nature of meaning – truth emerges from a dialogue of many voices, not a single monologue. In a similar way, the global mind must be polyphonic, allowing diverse perspectives (scientific, indigenous, local experiential knowledge) to converse and inform decisions. The digital platforms of the future could enable a continuous global town hall, where discourse is structured and aided by AI moderators to remain constructive, multilingual translation is instantaneous, and citizens can routinely deliberate on key issues. This may sound idealistic given the toxic state of much social media in the 2020s, but by 2100 social media itself will either have evolved or been replaced by systems better tuned to collective sensemaking rather than division. Augmented reality and AI companions might help individuals navigate information floods, acting like personalized Socratic guides connecting personal choices to global impacts (imagine an AI that helps you understand how changing your diet or energy use links to planetary trends, nudging you toward more sustainable behaviors while learning from your preferences).
On the economic front, the planetary-scale computation enables what some call “hyper-coordination”. Supply chains, for example, can be orchestrated with minimal waste if demand and supply signals are synced in real time, reducing the huge inefficiencies (and injustices) of boom-bust cycles. Idle resources can be dynamically allocated where needed through intelligent matching (extending the idea of the sharing economy, but on a grand, equitable scale). Such efficiency and agility are hallmarks of an intelligent system – but we must ensure the gains are distributed fairly. This will likely require rethinking incentive structures: moving beyond pure profit motive to include social and ecological value in every transaction (akin to the concept of “triple bottom line” accountability, which tracks not just financial profit but also people and planet). By 2100, with better measurements of ecological health and social well-being, these factors can be built into economic accounting via global standards (for instance, corporations might report an “Earth impact factor” alongside financial metrics, and pay dividends into a global commons fund if they overuse common resources).
Underneath these technical and structural evolutions is a philosophical shift: the recognition of our planet as one complex, interdependent system – a single intelligible whole. This echoes the Stoic idea of the cosmopolis (world city) and Kant’s vision of a federation of peoples, but now undergirded by the literal circuits of technology and the scientific understanding of Earth as a closed system. It is a realization that, in a very real sense, we – and our machines – are organs of a larger organism. Our cities light up the globe like neurons in a brain (as seen in nighttime satellite images). Our trade routes and communication lines resemble a global neural network. By 2100 that resemblance will likely become an intentional reality: we will think of ourselves as participants in a planetary brain, with duties to maintain its health. And just as mindfulness in an individual involves being aware of one’s thoughts and effects, planetary mindfulness will involve transparency about our collective actions. For example, large-scale environmental monitoring will be as routine as health monitoring is for individuals today – we might have daily “vital signs” for the planet broadcasted widely, e.g. “Amazon deforestation this week at X hectares, trend improving from last year; global renewable energy share at Y%, new milestone achieved,” so that everyone is kept cognizant of the state of our world.
In conclusion of this section, planetary intelligence is not a metaphor – it is the emerging reality of our era. By embracing it and guiding it with enlightened governance, we turn what could be a runaway sorcerer’s apprentice (technology out of control) into a wise councilor that helps us steer Spaceship Earth. The 2100 vision is of a world where data, AI, and networking are harnessed to care for the Earth and each other, not to manipulate or exploit. We will have moved from the crude early-days scenario where, as one scholar put it, “planetary computation [was] fed by the continuous extraction of human labor and natural resources”[23], to a new paradigm where planetary computation is fed by human creativity and yields regeneration of resources. The serpent of technology, too, must bite its tail and reinvent itself – turning from a devourer of the living world to a guardian of it. The cybernetic vision of global governance is that through feedback, learning, and participation, we can achieve a stable, harmonious homeostasis at the civilizational scale – not a static equilibrium, but a dynamic, evolving balance that persists through centuries.
IV. Economy and Institution as Living Systems: Design for Resilience and Justice
Our economic and institutional systems are the operating frameworks of civilization – they dictate how resources are used, how benefits and burdens are distributed, and how collective decisions are made. For much of the last two centuries, the dominant economic paradigm treated the economy as an abstract machine tending toward equilibrium, largely separable from the messy realities of ecology and human psychology[30][31]. The aim was growth (measured narrowly as GDP), efficiency, and capital accumulation. This paradigm delivered industrial and technological miracles, but also tremendous collateral damage: environmental degradation, extreme inequality, and a vulnerability to systemic failures. By the 2020s, even mainstream voices recognized that economics needed a dramatic transformation toward a more holistic, sustainable, and resilient framework[32][33]. Scholars began articulating principles for a new economics that would respect planetary boundaries and human well-being over profit for profit’s sake[33]. Among these principles were: embedding the economy within society and nature (not viewing it as an isolated engine)[34]; acknowledging limits to growth and the irreplaceability of natural capital[34]; adopting regenerative design so that economic activity actually heals and restores ecosystems[34]; prioritizing equity, justice, and inclusion as foundational, not as afterthoughts[35]; and exploring post-capitalist and decolonial models that move beyond the historical injustices and power imbalances of the past[35]. These were not utopian slogans but derived from practical, diverse approaches (indigenous economics, cooperative movements, ecological economics, feminist economics, etc.) coalescing into a coherent picture[36].
By 2100, we anticipate that many of these once-“heterodox” principles will have become common sense in global economic governance. The economy will be widely understood as a subsystem of the Earth system, drawing sustenance from it and bounded by its limits. Holistic metrics will have replaced GDP as the chief measure of progress – metrics that track health, education, ecosystem integrity, and community vitality. Perhaps a refined version of the “Doughnut economics” model (which balances essential human needs with ecological ceilings) will guide policy at all levels, from city budgets to international agreements. The result will be economies that aim for optimal scale rather than infinite growth, and for circulation and resilience rather than linear throughput. The concept of entropy – the energy dissipation and disorder generated by economic activity – will be front and center. The 20th century ignored the entropy law at its peril; the 22nd will not. Instead, our industries and cities will operate on circular principles: waste from one process becomes input for another, powered by a shift to renewable energy, drastically reducing net entropy exported to the environment. In the words of philosopher Bernard Stiegler, we need a “Neganthropocene” – a new epoch where human action increases negentropy (order, information, vitality) rather than entropy[37]. Stiegler urged re-inscribing our economic and political concepts within an understanding of entropy and inverting our current trajectory that he described as an “entropic vortex” feeding climate chaos and social nihilism[38]. By 2100, this inversion must be well underway: economies should function as net healers of the web of life, actively restoring what previous centuries tore apart.
How to achieve this? Part of the answer lies in institutional design for self-organization and learning. Traditional bureaucratic institutions were often static and siloed, ill-suited to a fast-changing, interconnected world. The future belongs to institutions that behave more like living organisms or ecosystems: capable of self-correcting, evolving new structures when needed, and fostering rich interactions among their parts. One approach gaining traction is the creation of networked institutions – think of issue-based alliances, public–private partnerships, and community assemblies that coordinate through horizontal networks rather than top-down commands. For example, managing a resource like a river basin might involve local water user associations, city and provincial governments, indigenous councils, scientists, and perhaps AI-driven monitoring systems, all linked in a governance network that shares data and negotiates solutions in real time. This reflects polycentric governance, which empirical studies have shown to be effective for commons management[27]. Polycentric systems distribute decision-making across multiple centers, enhancing diversity and adaptability – if one node fails or becomes corrupted, others can fill the gap, and policies can be compared in a kind of social learning experiment[39]. Such systems embody requisite variety: they match the complexity of governance to the complexity of the problems at hand[25]. A global illustration of polycentric governance in 2100 might be the climate regime. Instead of one single top-down treaty, imagine a web of complementary agreements and initiatives: carbon trading blocs among some countries, reforestation compacts among others, a world carbon bank stabilizing prices, thousands of cities in a coalition exchanging best practices on zero-carbon living, corporations in a race to achieve science-based targets verified by independent auditors, and citizen movements holding all actors accountable. This decentralization means many points of initiative and enforcement, reducing reliance on any one mechanism and building redundancy. It is akin to how an ecosystem’s resilience comes from the overlap and interconnection of many species’ functions.
Another key principle is participation and deliberation. Complex systems can’t be steered by a few all-knowing controllers; they require the knowledge distributed among all stakeholders. By engaging those who are affected in decision-making, we both tap local knowledge and build legitimacy. The future will see more deliberative democracy – forums where ordinary citizens, chosen perhaps by lot (like ancient Athenian practice or modern citizen assemblies), come together to learn about an issue, hear evidence, and propose solutions. Early 21st-century experiments with citizens’ assemblies on climate in countries like France and the UK showed that given the right conditions, non-experts can grapple with complex policies and produce thoughtful, publicly acceptable recommendations. In 2100, such assemblies (likely aided by AI tutors to digest technical information) could be a routine part of passing major legislation or shaping long-term strategies. This fulfills a Bakhtinian ideal: truth and sound decisions emerging from dialogue among diverse voices, not from technocratic diktat or populist impulse. It also aligns with what the Nature Sustainability principles called relationality and social enfranchisement – the idea that a good economy builds relationships and agency among people[35].
Justice and equity are non-negotiable in our vision. The hard lesson of the past is that systems built on exploitation – whether of classes, nations, or the Earth – eventually collapse or explode. A viable future requires healing historical injustices and ensuring everyone has a stake in prosperity. This means narrowing gaps between rich and poor drastically. It also means empowering those long marginalized: indigenous peoples, whose ecological stewardship and knowledge are crucial for protecting biodiversity; the Global South, which must be an equal partner, not a resource quarry or dumping ground; and future generations, who deserve representation in present decisions that affect their inheritance. We foresee institutional innovations such as Guardians for Future Generations (already trialed in places like Wales and the UN’s consideration of a Future Generations Commissioner) gaining real clout, perhaps with veto power over policies with irreparable long-term damage. We also anticipate a continued rise of legal rights for nature (rivers, forests granted personhood in law) and the expansion of human rights to include environmental rights (like the right to a healthy environment, which was recognized by the UN in 2022). These legal shifts change economic calculus: they introduce responsibilities where previously there were none. A corporation in 2100 dumping waste into a river that is legally a rights-bearing entity could find itself sued by that river’s guardians; an investment fund ignoring climate risk might be liable for infringing the rights of future children to a livable planet. In short, externalities must internalize – our systems will account for what they once ignored.
In tandem with these governance shifts, there is the role of culture and values. Institutions reflect the values of the society that build them. Our work thus calls for a cultural evolution toward what one might term planetary humanism – an outlook that sees humanity as a custodial part of a larger living community. This perspective resonates with the wisdom of many indigenous cultures that emphasize living in harmony with nature and considering the seventh generation ahead. It also resonates with Kantian ethics: treating all humans (indeed all beings) never merely as means but as ends in themselves. That moral law, updated for the 22nd century, implies that no community can be sacrificed for the “greater good” of another’s profit – whether it’s a village displaced by mining or a generation left to deal with nuclear waste. In practical economic design, it leads to robust commons institutions to steward shared resources fairly. For example, the management of global commons like oceans and the atmosphere will likely involve something like “commonwealth trusts” where all nations (or all people) are recognized as co-owners. Some economists have floated ideas like a Global Carbon Trust that would collect payments for use of the atmospheric commons (carbon emissions) and redistribute them equally per capita or invest in global public goods. By 2100, mechanisms of that sort might be normal: if you pollute, you pay into a global fund; if you innovate clean technology, you receive support from it.
Moreover, the notion of post-capitalism hints that we expect new forms of enterprise to flourish. Cooperative ownership, peer-to-peer production networks, platform cooperatives, community land trusts, and commons-based innovation may collectively form a vibrant sector that competes with or even overtakes traditional corporate capitalism in many domains. Automation and AI could, if properly managed, liberate humans from drudgery – enabling an economy of “time affluence” where people work less and have more time for creativity, caregiving, and community (the arts, sciences, and civic life could experience a renaissance when not everyone is chained to a 40+ hour work week). However, that requires intentionally distributing the productivity gains rather than allowing a tech oligarchy to capture them. Policies like universal basic incomes or collective data ownership (where people get paid for the data they generate, which fuels AI) might become pillars of the economic system to ensure everyone benefits from the fruits of planetary-scale automation.
The resilience of economic systems also benefits from redundancy and diversification – lessons from ecology and finance alike. A monoculture, whether in crops or business or ideas, is brittle. Thus, by 2100 we expect to see far greater pluralism in production. Localized manufacturing (potentially aided by 3D printing and biotech), diverse energy sources in microgrids, and a variety of organizational forms in markets (not just big corporations, but co-ops, social enterprises, commons collaborations) will mean the failure of any single node doesn’t crash the whole. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 already taught the danger of over-concentrated supply chains; the coming century will reconfigure to balance global connectivity with local self-reliance – “globally coordinated, locally self-sufficient” could be an economic motto.
Finally, let’s consider institutional investment foresight, as requested. The world of finance in 2100 will have undergone its own reckoning and reform. Long-term institutional investors (sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, etc.) will likely be mandated by law or norms to align with sustainability objectives. Even in the 2020s, we saw central banks and financial regulators begin to grapple with climate and biodiversity risks to the financial system[40][41]. By 2100, ignoring such factors would be seen as outright negligent or even illegal (a breach of fiduciary duty). Investment decisions will routinely incorporate climate models and ecological assessments – not as niche “ESG” considerations but as standard risk metrics. There may also be future generations funds – very-long-term funds that explicitly seek returns over a century or more, thereby investing heavily in things like reforestation, education, and fundamental R&D which yield slow but truly sustainable gains. The time horizon of finance must lengthen to match the long horizon of our civilization’s health. One could imagine stock exchanges giving differential voting power to shares held for longer durations, incentivizing patient capital over speculative flipping. Also, new instruments might channel global savings into global goals: for instance, “planetary bonds” to fund large-scale climate mitigation or adaptation projects, backed by the collective guarantee of nations (analogous to war bonds, but for peace with the planet).
In summary, by 2100 the economic “operating system” of humanity will be radically refactored. It will mirror natural systems in its circularity and resilience. It will elevate cooperation alongside competition, and quality of life over quantity of output. Institutions will behave less like rule-bound machines and more like learning organisms, constantly adapting through feedback. Crucially, the economy will be recognized as a means, not an end: the end being the thriving of life. As the Nature Sustainability paper put it, economies are embedded in society and nature, and their purpose is to support human and planetary well-being[42]. This inversion of perspective – from economies controlling humanity to humanity controlling economies for a higher good – is at the heart of the nexus economic vision. It is a vision of shared prosperity within planetary boundaries, achieved through ingenuity, compassion, and a willingness to redesign our tools and rules when they no longer serve.
V. Anticipation, Foresight and Global Governance: Navigating the Next Century
To implement the sweeping changes outlined above, governance itself must evolve a forward-looking brain. It is fitting to close with a focus on how world leaders and institutions can practically integrate these ideas and steer the transition. The year 2100 is far enough in the future that many unpredictable events will have undoubtedly occurred – breakthroughs, crises, surprises. The only way to govern toward such a future is with anticipatory, adaptive strategies rather than fixed plans. We have already touched on anticipatory governance in theory; now let us envision its mature practice on the world stage.
By 2100, global governance will likely be a layered affair: a mix of reformed international bodies (like a revamped United Nations with broader powers and more inclusive representation), regional unions, and a dense network of issue-specific coalitions and agreements. What will set them apart from their 2025 counterparts is an ingrained capacity for strategic foresight. Major policy proposals will come with futures impact assessments: when a new technology emerges (say advanced bioengineering of ecosystems, or quantum communications networks), a temporary Foresight Commission might be established internationally to map out best- and worst-case uses and recommend governance approaches proactively, rather than scrambling after the tech is widespread. We saw a primitive version of this with AI in the 2020s – ethicists and scientists calling for guidelines and even pauses on certain AI developments – but often policymakers lagged behind. In the future, we can expect deliberative exercises involving experts, citizens, and ethicists for any transformative innovation before it becomes ubiquitous. This is already happening in small ways (the OECD’s anticipatory governance programs and various academic scenario projects[43][22]), and by 2100 it should be standard global practice.
Global leaders in 2100 will also need to be systems thinkers. Traditional training of politicians in law or economics will be supplemented (or replaced) by training in complex systems science, environmental science, and technology ethics. It will be understood that governing a planet of 10+ billion people, advanced AI and robotics, and still-evolving climate conditions is at least as complicated as flying a spaceship, and thus requires skilled operators who understand feedback, delays, and unintended consequences. Perhaps we will see the rise of what some have called “cybernetic statesmanship” – leaders who are less demagogues and more like chief systems engineers with a moral compass. They would be adept at reading the output of those planetary dashboards, understanding the models, and making decisions that are robust under deep uncertainty.
One of the hardest governance challenges will be ensuring solidarity and cooperation across diverse political and cultural contexts. We have to be realistic: even in 2100, humanity will not be a monolith. There will be nations or groups that resist certain global norms, and geopolitical tensions may still exist. The nexus vision is not naïve about power dynamics. Rather, it posits that enlightened self-interest and common threat (like climate risks) will increasingly push actors toward collaboration, simply because the alternatives are too dire. The concept of “Mutually Assured Survival” might replace Mutually Assured Destruction from the Cold War – meaning all powers recognize they need each other alive and well to survive themselves. This could lead to stronger transnational crisis management protocols: for example, by 2100 there might be a global rapid response force for climate disasters, comprising military and civilian units from many countries ready to be deployed anywhere a catastrophe strikes (an extension of today’s peacekeeping or humanitarian missions, but permanent and proactive). Likewise, for emerging pandemics, a standing global health guard could swing into action at the first signs (building on the idea of the WHO, but much more empowered and equipped with AI epidemiologists). The COVID pandemic painfully showed how fragmentation costs lives; that lesson will hopefully spur lasting institutional changes.
A significant shift will be the role of institutional investors and the private sector in foresight. By 2100, large pools of capital (pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, even some transnational corporations) will have internalized that long-term planetary stability is a prerequisite for long-term returns. We already saw glimmers of this when groups of investors in the 2020s demanded climate disclosure from companies or when insurers started mapping climate risks to their portfolios. In the future, these financial actors might form part of an early warning system for systemic risks: for instance, if insurers collectively see an uptick in extreme weather claims year after year beyond projections, they could ring alarm bells in global forums, prompting policymakers to accelerate climate action. Central banks might coordinate not just on monetary policy but on “green swan” events (systemic environmental shocks to the economy)[44], sharing data and stress test results. We can imagine an annual World Risk Outlook issued jointly by a coalition of scientific bodies, insurers, and strategic think tanks, which assess emerging risks (from AI to bio to climate) and pushes recommendations at the highest levels (G20, UN General Assembly). Crucially, that Outlook would be acted on, not shelved.
Another important facet is education and capacity-building for anticipation. By 2100, futures literacy (the skill of thinking about and preparing for the future) will be taught from early schooling to executive training. Just as basic literacy and numeracy became fundamental in the 20th century, futures literacy will be seen as essential in the 21st. The result is a citizenry and leadership that are simply more comfortable with scenario planning, probability, and long-term thinking. Cultural attitudes may shift such that short-termism is frowned upon as irresponsible. Elections and political cycles might be modified – e.g., some have suggested having debt of term lengths or additional chambers in government oriented to long-term issues (like an upper house where representatives serve 20-year terms focusing on future generations’ interest). While specific solutions vary, the common goal is to embed continuity and foresight into governance, balancing the immediate responsiveness of democracy with the steady hand of guardianship.
Global commons management will be a litmus test for our governance evolution. We mentioned the notion of planetary commons and how a paradigm shift is required to safeguard them[28][45]. By 2100, climate mitigation, biodiversity preservation, and perhaps even things like asteroid defense and space traffic (debris management in orbit) will all require strong collective regimes. We can expect treaties that are more enforceable, possibly through creative means: trade incentives, technology sharing deals (e.g., free green tech transfers in exchange for compliance), and moral pressure via transparency (nations not pulling their weight might face global public criticism or loss of certain privileges). There might also be global commons trust funds: imagine a Biodiversity Trust funded by all countries to pay for protecting critical habitats worldwide, essentially compensating regions that forego resource extraction for the sake of everyone. Such mechanisms begin to treat Earth’s treasures as a shared inheritance with shared fiduciary duties.
Crucially, speculative imagination should remain alive within governance. The world in 2100 will face challenges we can’t even predict; thus, governance systems must leave room for creative, flexible responses. Science-fiction writers, futurists, and scenario planners might be formally integrated into government advisory roles, helping to stretch thinking. Some nations have already tried “red teams” that imagine wild cards or adversarial scenarios; this could be expanded into a global practice. Perhaps every major international summit in 2100 will include a session where participants are immersed in a simulated future world (via virtual reality or detailed scenario narratives) to jolt them out of conventional mindsets. Through such exercises, leaders might viscerally experience, say, a scenario where AI proliferation causes global labor displacement, or a scenario where geoengineering gone wrong leads to geopolitical conflict, and thus be far more motivated to take precautionary or preparatory action in the present.
Institutional learning is another concept that will be key. Institutions often suffer from inertia and forgetfulness (new staff don’t learn old lessons). By 2100, improved knowledge management – aided by AI – could allow institutions to effectively “remember” past experiences and evidence. A global governance AI might track the outcomes of thousands of policy experiments across the world, identifying which approaches worked in reducing poverty or in curbing corruption, and make that knowledge readily available to any policymaker contemplating a similar issue. This way, trial-and-error in one place benefits all places, speeding up collective learning.
Finally, a word on the normative orientation of future governance: it must be guided by ethics as much as analytics. All the data and foresight in the world won’t help if we lack a compass for what we want the future to be. Therefore, part of anticipatory governance is normative foresight – envisioning desirable futures, not just scary ones. The UN’s 2023 initiative “Our Common Agenda” and planned Summit of the Future (in 2024) indicated a step in this direction, asking what future we choose. By 2100, humanity should have a far richer repository of positive visions – not just one utopia, but plural images of futures that different cultures and communities aspire to, which can then inform policy. This nexus itself is one such exercise. We foresee global dialogues (maybe continuous via digital platforms) where people articulate and update what kind of world they want in 50 or 100 years. These conversations ensure that technical foresight aligns with human values.
To conclude this section, global governance in 2100 will be marked by intelligence, inclusiveness, and inspiration. It will leverage the best of our predictive tools (AI, big data, modeling) and the best of our collective wisdom (diverse voices, ethical deliberation) to make decisions that are both robust and just. It acknowledges uncertainty not as a loophole for inaction, but as a call to build flexibility and safeties into all that we do. Policy will be treated more like portfolio management – diversifying approaches, hedging bets, investing in low-regret moves – rather than winner-takes-all bets on single ideologies. And underlying it, a sense of common destiny: that we are in this together. When done right, the effect is profound: it cultivates hope. Citizens see that their leaders are not sleepwalking into disaster but actively scanning the horizon and adjusting course. This hope in turn fuels cooperation – a virtuous cycle.
Future: From Crisis to Renaissance – A Vision Realized
In the year 2100, we imagine a child being born into a world that, while not without challenges, is fundamentally on a sustainable and enlightened trajectory. She grows up breathing clean air, drinking clean water, knowing that the lush world she sees around her – the parks in her city, the thriving coral reefs shown in her lessons, the elephants and tigers she tracks via global wildlife cams – are not on the brink of vanishing, but carefully protected and recovering. She is taught about the early 21st century not just as a time of crisis and pandemics, but as the great turning point when humanity woke up to its planetary responsibilities. She learns that time is a circle and an arrow – that history informed the innovations her generation enjoys, and that her role is to pay it forward to future generations. She understands risk not as fear, but as a prompt for courage and preparedness – because society has systems to anticipate risks, her community faced a major hurricane with zero fatalities and rebuilt stronger, and this was normal. She interacts daily with AI systems that are transparent and trustworthy, which augment her learning and creativity. Her society’s economy values caregivers and teachers as much as entrepreneurs, and has long since abandoned the dogma that endless material growth is the goal. Instead, the goal is thriving in balance.
This vision has charted a course from 2025 to 2100 that involves profound shifts in worldview and practice. To summarize our key points: Intelligence must be understood in its full temporal depth – leveraging memory and foresight to guide action. Risk must be embraced as a reality and managed through resilient, anticipatory systems. Technology and computation must be harnessed as planetary organs of perception and response, not as uncontrolled masters. Economies and institutions must evolve to emulate life – self-organizing, adaptive, just, and oriented toward the health of the whole. And global governance must become wise, blending science and humanism to shepherd civilization through whatever lies ahead. Each of these shifts is backed by the seeds planted in our current era’s most insightful research and experiments, as we have documented with extensive sources. We stand on the shoulders of thinkers like Friston (in seeing life as prediction against entropy), Ostrom (in designing durable commons governance), Bakhtin (in recognizing the power of dialogue), Hegel (in viewing history as growth of consciousness), and many unnamed scientists, activists, and communities innovating around the world. But we have endeavored not to drop names for their own sake – instead, we wove their insights into a single cloth, a banner to carry forward.
Realizing this vision will not be easy. It will require perseverance, empathy, and creativity on a scale perhaps unprecedented. It will mean overcoming vested interests that cling to the status quo – the fossil fuel barons, the authoritarian strongmen, the monopolists of data – and doing so through moral resolve and better alternatives rather than through violence or coercion. It will mean that each of us, as global citizens, cultivates a bit of the philosopher and the scientist within, questioning assumptions and demanding evidence, but also a bit of the poet and the caretaker, keeping our values and compassion at the forefront. The year 2100 will not be a techno-utopia free of hardship; humans will always confront mortality, differences of opinion, and the whims of nature. But it can be a year in which the foundational crises of our past – war, hunger, rampant injustice, ecological loss – have been largely tamed by our better instincts and ingenuity.
In closing, we choose to echo a sentiment of profound hope: the idea that risk confronted with intelligence becomes adventure, and time guided by wisdom becomes progress. Our future is not predetermined. It is being made by the sum of our actions and visions. Manifestos are, at their heart, acts of imagination – they declare that another world is possible. This charter has imagined a world where our descendants look back and thank us for taking bold, wise steps when it mattered. Let us be those ancestors worthy of gratitude. Standing at the convergence of multiple timelines – the ancient and the modern, the perilous and the possible – we assert that by uniting the best of all knowledge, we can transform our fate. The serpent of time bites its tail, and the cycle begins anew: 2100 heralds a renaissance born from the trials of the 2020s, a time when humanity learned to learn fast enough, care deep enough, and act wise enough to not only survive but thrive.
The journey to 2100 has already begun. Let us proceed with eyes open and hearts aflame.
Sources:
- Bogotá, J.D. (2025). Can the predictive mind represent time? – Predictive processing conceives the brain as a generative model minimizing prediction error, accounting for the subjective flow of time[5][7].
- Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI – Modern AI operates as “planetary computation” reliant on extensive resource extraction and exploitative labor, linking technological systems to global political-economy[23][24].
- Rubin, S. et al. (2020). Markov blankets in the biosphere – Earth’s climate–biosphere system can be modeled as possessing a Markov blanket and actively inferring external states, achieving homeostasis through free-energy minimization (a form of planetary-scale autopoiesis)[14][15].
- Gambhir, A. et al. (2025). Global polycrisis risks – Interacting crises (climate, inequality, conflict, etc.) create systemic global risks; addressing them requires new frameworks that integrate political economy, non-human life, and uncertainty into decision-making[12][46].
- Kenter, J.O. et al. (2025). Ten principles for economics transformation – Scholars identify principles (social-ecological embedding, limits to growth, regenerative design, equity, participation, etc.) that cut across emerging economic models for sustainability and justice[32][33].
- OECD (2024). Anticipatory Innovation Governance – Defines anticipatory governance as integrating foresight, innovation and continuous learning into public institutions, to make policy more resilient, agile, and able to navigate complex future challenges[20][21].
- Stiegler, B. (2018). The Neganthropocene – Calls for a “new negentropic era” where human systems counteract entropy. Stiegler advocates rethinking economic and political concepts through entropy/negentropy to move beyond the Anthropocene’s “dead-end” chaos[37][47].
- Ostrom, E. and colleagues (2010s). Polycentric governance & resilience – Research shows that polycentric, diverse governance at multiple scales fosters adaptive, learning-based management of commons, enhancing systemic resilience and sustainability[27].
- Rockström, J. et al. (2023). The Planetary Commons – Proposes defining critical Earth system processes (climate, biodiversity, etc.) as planetary commons, requiring new governance paradigms of collective stewardship to ensure Earth system stability[28][45].
- Bakhtin, M. (20th cent.). Dialogism – (Referenced concept) Emphasizes that truth and meaning emerge from dialogue among a plurality of voices (heteroglossia), reinforcing the need for inclusive deliberation in knowledge and governance (concept woven, not directly cited).
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