How can human society have reached the moon, harnessed the unobservable mechanics of the atom, continued to build computers that become exponentially faster and cheaper each year, and yet have operated so poorly in establishing stable economies, reducing the incidence of conflict and disease, and discovering and manufacturing effective biomedical drugs? It is certainly not through lack of interest, resources, effort, and intelligence.

The war on cancer, the pursuit of greater economic equality and financial stability, the creation of online safety and security, and the invention of new nontoxic and effective pharmacological drugs have absorbed astronomical sums of money into both research and development—and yet in so many cases they have foundered and failed through the misapplication of previously highly successful ideas of engineering and design to complex systems.

There is an urgent need for novel concepts directed at achieving an evolutionary and emergent engineering, and it is our contention that they are likely to come from the domains of biological and social life—not from the deterministic world of designed mechanical artifacts.

This Life Support System imagines deep-futures beyond the confines of the pre-existing systems we currently occupy. When building new civilzations across the universe, why bring with us the artifacts of broken systems when we can invent anew? With limited payload, let us jettison our mistakes and our assumptions.

Architecture, Cities and Scale

Art and Imagined Futures

Astrobiology and Life Detection

Autonomous Ecosystems

Emergent Engineering

Intelligent Systems

Motion and Energy Technology

Planetary Policy, Law and Regulation

Social and Economic Engineering

Time Design