A Logic for the Future: Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson on Imagining Planetary Governance
The Long Now Foundation
On March 19, 2025, at the Cowell Theatre in San Francisco, the Long Now Foundation brought together two people who approach the same problem from opposite ends. Stephen Heintz is a public policy expert and president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Kim Stanley Robinson is a science fiction writer whose novels include the Mars trilogy and The Ministry for the Future. The board president of Long Now moderated. The question for the evening was how the international system, built around sovereign nation-states, could be reimagined for a planet facing crises that no single nation can solve. The moderator framed the conversation as a "journey of imagination" that would start at the planetary scale, move in to the international and the local, and then zoom back out into the future.
Both speakers argued that the current system is, in Heintz's recurring phrase, part of "the logic of the past." They also agreed that the tools for building something better already exist in partial form: the European Union, track-two diplomacy, the UN's Pact for the Future, citizens' assemblies, and conservation programs that looked utopian only a few years ago.
Arriving at the Planetary Frame
Robinson traced his planetary perspective to the start of his career as a science fiction writer in the 1970s. The Viking missions gave humanity Mars "in a way never existed before," apart from some earlier Mariner data. Voyager then revealed the rest of the solar system. For a young science fiction writer, he said, the subject was planets. Science fiction is "the literature where you can actually use the word planet without boggling people's minds," and the planetary romance was a well-established form in the work of Jack Vance, Frank Herbert, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Mars had suddenly become millions of times better documented, and nobody had yet written it up. That project took a large part of his life.
Looking back at Earth from that vantage point, Robinson said, the conclusion is obvious. Earth is the best planet for human beings, who co-evolved with it. It is one space, one biosphere, and one species, and "it ought to be governed as such if we want to be in a good relationship with the rest of the biosphere." That it is not governed this way, he added, means there are more stories to tell.
Heintz came to the same frame through the study of political history and international relations. History is always turbulent, he acknowledged, but he argued that the 21st century differs because multiple sources of turbulence are producing planetary consequences at the same time. He named three simultaneous existential threats: the climate crisis, a new nuclear arms race that is beginning, and emerging technologies whose governance no one can yet imagine well enough to capture their benefits while avoiding deep risks. In his view this is an inflection point for planetary survival. Unless people begin thinking at the planetary level and adjust current systems accordingly, the "age of turbulence" could become an "age of catastrophe."
Fiction, Realism, and the Critique of the Nation-State
The moderator noted that the two speakers cross over: Robinson writes fiction grounded in research and in conversation with policymakers, while Heintz works in policy, philanthropy, and think tanks and draws inspiration from fiction. Robinson explained why his fiction requires research. Once a writer tells a story set in the future, he said, realism is gone, and readers have reason to question everything. The sets can look like cardboard, "like the Star Trek bridge." His aesthetic goal has been to make the future "more real than realism," which means learning enough to make the story feel solid.
That research, Robinson said, quickly led him to two conclusions. The first is that the nation-state system is a historical artifact not fit for planetary governance. It is a zero-sum game and a source of misunderstanding and strife. The second, given his background, is that capitalism as currently practiced is "a kind of predatory parasitic social system" that produces inequality and environmental destruction as part of how it works. The line drew applause, and Robinson remarked that in San Francisco it would.
Robinson then turned the question to Heintz. Heintz had seen nation-states try to get along, for example during the Iran nuclear negotiations, and had found a role for organizations like his as a kind of clutch or lubricant that keeps the gears of diplomacy from seizing up.
The Iran Case: Track-Two Diplomacy as Intermediary
Heintz told a condensed version of a long story. On September 11, 2001, his office on Madison Avenue looked straight down toward the Twin Towers. The next morning the towers were gone and smoke was rising from the site. Like everyone, he began asking what the attacks meant. Attention was focused on the Arab world because the attackers were Sunni Arabs. Looking at the map, Heintz kept returning to Iran. It was a large, geostrategically located Shia country that Americans barely understood, because the United States had had no diplomatic relations with it since the 1979 revolution. He had a feeling Iran would loom large in the coming years, though he said he knew nothing about Iran himself at the time.
Through the networking his profession allows, he was introduced to Iran's ambassador to the United Nations. The ambassador told him that Americans and Iranians needed a way to talk about the issues dividing them, or the two countries would be on a collision course. The result was a track-two diplomatic effort: unofficial, but staffed by serious practitioners. The American team consisted of distinguished former diplomats who had served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, some at very high levels, including a former ambassador to the UN. The Iranians eventually assembled their own team. Heintz said that simply getting started was very complicated.
Heintz explained that the governments could not do this themselves because of the zero-sum logic of international relations and the grievances each side carried. Americans carried the memory of the hostage crisis. Iranians carried the memory of the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister who had nationalized the oil industry. Heintz gave an example of "how stupid it gets": American diplomats at embassy receptions at the UN were not allowed even to greet Iranian diplomats in the same room.
The two teams met dozens of times in the woods outside Stockholm. Once trust was established, they began putting ideas on the table about how the nuclear problem might be solved and what each side could accept. Participants then returned to their capitals. The Americans went to the White House and State Department to report what they had learned, received the government's perceptions, and met again about six weeks later. Heintz described this as an iterative process that generated useful ideas. He was careful not to overstate its impact, but said that John Kerry, and even President Obama, would say it helped create the possibility of direct negotiations between the two governments. Once official track-one negotiations began, the track-two process continued to feed ideas into them. He noted that the process is still ongoing. For Heintz, the case shows that civil society organizations can serve as constructive intermediaries on problems of planetary significance.
Utopia as Process, Not Endpoint
Asked what "things working out" might look like, Robinson described himself as a utopian science fiction writer, which he called unusual. He repeated a formulation he said he may have used on the same stage before: utopias are like blueprints and novels are like soap operas, and combining the two does not automatically produce good art. Le Guin's The Dispossessed showed it could be done, and he has held it up to himself ever since: "If it can be done once, it could be done again."
The key, Robinson argued, is to treat utopia as a process rather than an end state, a name for "positive history." Seen that way, utopia generates stories, because it must be created and then protected. He quoted what he called "the greatest American utopian science fiction story ever written": the line from the Gettysburg Address that government of the people, by the people, and for the people "shall not perish from the earth." He pointed out that it is written in the future tense, as an injunction, almost a legal term, and that it describes a story people have to keep alive. He concluded that the blueprint-versus-soap-opera framing had been mistaken. The real subject is history.
For the present moment, Robinson said, avoiding a mass extinction event counts as a utopian science fiction story, because "we are so scarily close. We've begun it." Pulling out will require extensive international cooperation. With the bar that low, he joked, many kinds of fiction could qualify as utopian.
The European Union as a Model of Pooled Sovereignty
Robinson turned to Heintz's monograph, A Logic for the Future, and its ideas of "scaling up" and "scaling in." He noted that Heintz calls the EU the most important development of the second half of the 20th century. Robinson said his late teacher Fredric Jameson had taught him the same thing: moving from nation-state to member state is crucial legally, financially, and psychologically.
Before answering, Heintz recalled Andrew Wyeth describing his paintings as "dreaming in the presence of reality." He said Robinson's novels do this with science, and his own work attempts it with the realities of international relations. The founders of the EU, he argued, were doing exactly that. Europe had fought two world wars back to back, largely between France and Germany, and the founders set out to invent something that would prevent a third. They started small with the European Coal and Steel Community, a common market for those products, and kept building. Today the EU is thought of as a political entity and an economy roughly equivalent in GDP to the United States, but Heintz stressed that it was fundamentally a peace project and has worked well ever since.
The real lesson, in his view, is that 27 countries have given up some sovereignty because they see the benefit of pooling it and addressing environmental, economic, political, social, and now security problems collectively. He called this probably the most successful political development of the 20th century and a model for the future. He acknowledged its flaws, which the Europeans themselves recognize. The founding documents of the EU (the Treaty of Rome and the Maastricht Treaty), the US Constitution, and the UN Charter are all, he said, flawed in fundamental ways and have become almost unamendable, even though they need amending for these institutions to stay relevant.
Heintz highlighted a second European innovation: subsidiarity, the principle that problems should be handled by the level of government best able to solve them. A city like San Francisco should manage building codes for earthquake resilience. A planetary problem like climate change needs planetary institutions. Regional organizations such as the EU, the African Union, and ASEAN are starting to play an intermediary role. The nation-state will not become irrelevant, he said, but it must become less dominant. Nation-states fight wars, violate the Paris Agreement, and withdraw from it. The nation-state is a 17th-century invention dating to the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War. It need not be eliminated, but it belongs to the logic of the past and has to be redesigned.
Amendment Bars, the "Lazy Voter Act," and Sufficient Consensus
Robinson picked up the point about unamendable documents. The bar for amending the US Constitution is so high, he said, that "even the youngest person here will probably never see an amendment," even though there are 27 and the process used to work. The UN Charter has a similar two-thirds requirement. The COP process under the Paris Agreement requires unanimity for its annual statements, which he called impossible, and there is now talk of "unanimity minus one or minus five." The EU has some tools to pressure a single recalcitrant member, and he gave Hungary as an example, but most of these bars are too high. He compared them to the rules of a California homeowners association, where two-thirds of all residents must vote yes to change anything.
Robinson's proposed remedy came from California, which he said has what is called a "Lazy Voter Act." If an association makes a legitimate attempt and reaches something like 50 percent but not two-thirds, it can go to a judge, who can approve the change on the grounds that the non-voters were lazy. The world, he suggested, needs something similar, perhaps a world court in the H. G. Wells style. A world court exists but does not really function as one. Such a body could allow institutional change at, say, 60 percent rather than 67. He added that the organizers of COP30 in Belém, Brazil, would bring proposals to change the process so it does not become irrelevant by being "so damn slow."
Heintz offered his preferred term: "sufficient consensus," meaning not unanimity but enough agreement to indicate a direction. Robinson noted a problem with the word itself. In English "consensus" can mean either everyone or most people, and which one is meant only becomes clear when the matter is hashed out.
The Summit of the Future and the Pact for the Future
The moderator observed that existing governance structures were once acts of great imagination, and asked Heintz, who helped shape the UN Summit of the Future, what he had seen there. Heintz credited Secretary-General António Guterres with the idea and quoted his framing: the international system designed by our grandparents is not fit for the future our grandchildren deserve. Guterres set out to think about "the UN we need as opposed to the UN we have." The summit was a heads-of-state gathering preceded by two years of negotiations among the 193 member states over successive drafts of the outcome document, the Pact for the Future.
Heintz pointed out a coincidence. Mary Murphy, the head of the ministry in Robinson's novel, is an Irish diplomat and politician. The person Guterres tasked with organizing the summit was also an Irish diplomat, Michelle Griffin, whom both speakers came to know and whom Heintz called an extraordinary global public servant. At the outset many people did not take the summit seriously because it seemed utopian. Heintz framed the challenge as turning a utopian idea into something meaningful through iteration, which with 193 sovereign states is "a messy process at the very best."
The document had to be adopted by unanimous consensus, and it nearly failed at the last moment. Russia put forward a motion that would have derailed the whole effort. According to Heintz, the African group in the General Assembly pushed back hardest, and Russia's amendment failed with only five countries voting for it.
Heintz admitted the resulting document is "pretty turgid" and written in UN language. He still called it an important benchmark. It contains 56 commitments by member states toward building the UN that is needed. It falls short in many areas, but it is the first major statement on Security Council reform the UN has adopted since 1963. It includes an annex called the Global Digital Compact, which he especially recommended to the Long Now audience, and a Declaration on Future Generations. One outcome is that the Secretary-General will appoint an envoy for future generations, meaning not today's youth but "literally the unborn" and their rights.
What inspired Heintz was seeing ordinary people who happened to be diplomats work hard, compromise, and produce a baseline. The open question now is accountability. He argued this will have to come from global civil society, movements, think tanks, and investigative journalism, the same means used to hold countries to their climate and human rights commitments, with greater ambition. The pact, he said, will not solve the global problem on its own, but it is a start.
How Others Can Take Part: A Kindergarten, San Francisco, and Oxford
Asked how the audience could see a role for themselves, Robinson told a story from Germany. A group of women approached him and said they ran a ministry for the future, which turned out to be a kindergarten. The point, he said, is that "we all can do stuff." He then praised California and San Francisco, which he called the cultural leader of the world, a place where one can feel "the shadow of the future" being made by collective action. Here, he said, one does not have to be a tiny minority fighting alone.
Robinson then criticized people in Washington, D.C. He spoke of genocide, ecocide, and "attempted future-side," an attempt to kill the future, which he said cannot be done. He described it as a fantasy of people burying their heads in the sand and hoping to return to the past. "As a science fiction writer, I hate fantasy," he joked. The future comes regardless of what a few reactionaries do "in a momentary seizure of power."
Heintz pointed to another creative community that had responded to Robinson's novel: scholars and scientists at Oxford who created an Oxford Ministry for the Future. Robinson said it involves Hertford College and a couple of the business schools, and that he was made "instantly emeritus and advisory," which he said beats having to do the work. He has asked them to take up specific topics. An upcoming session at the end of April would address the health of wild animals and ideas such as interspecies money and debt-for-nature swaps: how to bring "our fellow citizens that happen to be the other creatures" into political economy. The group plans two or three meetings a year. Robinson described Oxford as a complicated but productive ecology where people are excited and talking energetically.
Robinson also reflected on the power of phrasing. It had to be the ministry for the future, not of the future. There were about 20 candidate titles for the book, and for once he insisted on keeping his own. The phrase seems to act as "a turning of a key in people's imaginations."
Heintz added that 2025 is an especially interesting year for San Francisco to think about its role in the international system, given that the UN originated in the city. He argued that the area's entrepreneurial, technological, political, and societal imagination is exactly what the conversation about a new international system needs.
A Retreating United States: From Indispensable Nation to Indispensable Partner
An audience member noted that the US appears to be retreating from building global coalitions and asked whether the speakers' hopes for the next decade had changed. Heintz explained that he wrote the monograph in 2023 and published it in 2024, before both the election and the Summit of the Future. At the end of 2024 he reread it to see what should change and "hardly changed a word." He admitted this might be pride of authorship taken to extremes, but he believes the ideas are more relevant now. One of the paper's key subchapters argues that the United States must completely transform how it behaves in the world, and that has become more apparent over the preceding 55 or so days.
Specifically, Heintz argued that the US must give up the notion of great-power dominance and the idea of being "the indispensable nation," a phrase coined by his friend Madeleine Albright, about which the two used to argue. The US should instead be an "indispensable partner": more humble, more honest, less hypocritical, and supportive of the International Court of Justice rather than walking away from it. He noted that the Long Now community talks a lot about creative destruction, and said that what is happening now is "all destruction and no creativity." That leaves room for others to supply the creativity. People must defend and protect what needs protecting, and then use the destruction as material for building something new.
At the moderator's prompting, Heintz told the story of the Atlantic Charter. In August 1941, Hitler had swept across Europe, Britain was hanging on by a thread, and the US had not yet entered the war. Churchill and Roosevelt met on a ship off Newfoundland and drafted a short, beautifully written document laying out what Heintz called a utopian vision for the postwar world. In his summary, the major powers would forgo force to settle their differences, there would be freedom from want, problems would be solved cooperatively, and mechanisms would be built to prevent another such war. They did not even know whether they would win, yet they "pierced the darkness." According to Heintz, the charter became part of the inspiration for the United Nations, founded in San Francisco in 1945. The lesson he drew was the combination of moral and political imagination with political will: they had the vision and were determined to make it happen.
Robinson on Empire, Supply Chains, and the Cuts to Medical Research
Robinson responded through the lens of subsidiarity and American identity. He described California as a "magical catastrophe" spanning the Gold Rush, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley, a place with 115 languages where people from everywhere come to make something new. In that sense, he said, America is indispensable as an idea of everyone getting along together. But the utopian dream of America is bound to "the horrible empire, the manifest destiny, the genocide of the Native Americans." The two stories are "like conjoined twins." They cannot be separated, only improved through clear sight and acknowledgment of both.
He cited figures to describe American power: about 5 percent of the world's population, about 7 percent of its land surface, about 70 percent of its capital, plus the dollar as the benchmark currency, which together make "a fiscal empire of immense power." Empires fall, he said, and people devoted to them get very upset when they do, but there are real advantages to not being an empire, since empire is always oppressive, "a form of master-slave relationship." When people in power celebrate the bad part of America as its highest value, it creates an opening to insist on the other, better America. Much of that is illustrated in California, he said, but it needs to happen at the federal level.
Robinson then described a map he said he had recently seen from the economist Doyne Farmer, now at Oxford. It showed everything required to make a single laptop: roughly 60 points around the world connected by about 300 lines, not counting the expertise involved. This, he argued, is why tariffs and a "fortress America" are a "stupid fantasy" with "a certain viciousness to it." It cannot be enacted because a laptop cannot be made without engaging the whole world. Globalization, "for better and worse, it worked." Farmer had taught him that supply chains are not really chains but networks and loops, an ecology. Robinson predicted the fantasy that one nation, even the one holding the dollar, could dominate the network would crash, leaving others to pick up the pieces.
He was most pointed about cuts to the National Institutes of Health, which he called "particularly stupid and vicious" and "a murder-suicide," since everyone suffers when medical research stops. He rejected efforts to find a rational motive. Instead, he characterized it as Götterdämmerung: "if I have to go down, the world's going down with me," a form of "malignant narcissism" with smokescreens but no economic plan. He cited a cost-benefit estimate he attributed to social scientists: for every $10 billion devoted to medical research, the average human lifespan rises by about a month. He said he has been telling college students that, being young, they will suffer the greatest loss of lifetime, and that the preceding 55 days or so had shortened their lives by months to years. Death, he said, is "the incontrovertible reality," and shortening lifespans for a cause without rationale reflects a destructive mentality that must be resisted, stopped, and reversed. That will be hard, he acknowledged. Something broken in six months may take ten years to fix, though some things can be reversed immediately. He closed by saying reality will win in the end, and therefore "the people who are the party of reality will win in the end."
Can Representative Government Scale to 8 Billion?
Kevin Kelly asked how representative government for 8 billion people might work. Robinson described a practice he had recently heard about from Taiwan, noting that it might be Kelly's own idea coming back to him. A group of citizens is convened much like a jury, given food, time off work, and a political problem to brainstorm. Robinson acknowledged that most brainstorming sessions feel like a wasted day. In this program, however, a large language model turns the day's post-it notes into two pieces of draft legislation, which the Taiwanese legislature has agreed in advance to consider. The result is crowdsourced legislation that bypasses gatekeepers and lobbyists. Robinson thought it would scale while remaining representative, and saw it as a case where AI assistance looks genuinely useful. A model can summarize in about 30 seconds what might take a human two months, and a human's bias would shape the summary anyway.
Heintz agreed and pointed to many experiments with citizens' assemblies, facilitated and moderated deliberative gatherings whose output is used by legislative bodies. Technology, he said, can scale these remarkably. He added that he is "not yet an advocate for world government," which he considers both frightening to people and inadequate as an idea. He sees ways of aggregating citizen opinion and contribution as the right starting point.
Complexity Versus Control
Peter Schwartz asked why, in several of Robinson's books such as Aurora, complexity defeats humanity's ability to control it. Robinson questioned whether the two words belong together. Complexity, as he understands it, concerns emergence: new, unpredictable levels arising from simpler earlier systems. Life, weather, and the universe are complex. "Control" comes from a different universe of engineering, and he said even engineering schools would say their work is about coping, not control. He described Aurora as a starship novel in which people travel to another planet, realize humans will only thrive on Earth, and try to return. Their attempt to control an environment completely and move elsewhere might be read as an attempt at control, and the complexity of their situation drives them back to the place they co-evolved with. He called that "one story to tell."
China: The Most Consequential Relationship
Don Means submitted a one-word question: "China?" Heintz said he has been going to China since 1976, shortly after college. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has an office in Beijing, and, to his own surprise, the Chinese government appointed him to a high-level international advisory body on environment and development. He said China takes that body extremely seriously, and that nothing like it exists in Washington. He has come to appreciate China's complexity and its extraordinary progress in many fields.
In simplified terms, Heintz argued, the world is becoming "a G2 world, not a G20 world," with China and the United States as the two major powers economically, technologically, environmentally, and militarily. He called the US–China relationship the most consequential of the 21st century and warned that getting it wrong means planetary catastrophe. Framing it as a new cold war, in his view, drags people back into the logic of the past, with its binaries of us versus them and its bipolar world. He summarized the alternative as competing where necessary, cooperating where necessary, and avoiding confrontation for the planet's benefit. He said this is not easy, and that the US is not approaching it thoughtfully.
His monograph proposes that the relationship should not be left to episodic summits between presidents or meetings between counterpart ministers. Those are necessary but not sufficient. Instead, he proposes a joint entity in a neutral location such as Geneva or Singapore, where senior civil servants from the key ministries of both countries would be seconded to work together daily. They would argue, debate, produce ideas, write papers, and send them back to their capitals.
Long-Term Thinking Against Short-Term Catastrophism
Gideon asked how to stoke interest in long-term utopian thinking when people are consumed by short-term catastrophism. Robinson admitted it is "harder than hell," especially for people who are stressed and part of the precariat, "which means almost everybody." But he also called it natural. People care intensely about their children and grandchildren, and it takes only one more step to realize those grandchildren will have grandchildren of their own. That leads to the Indigenous notion of seven generations: the seven that came before and made you, and the seven that follow. If people can clear any space in their heads from the daily pressure of making ends meet, he said, this kind of thinking is "as natural as being human."
Heintz added that there is something liberating about focusing on a longer-term and potentially optimistic future, and that it can reinvigorate how people deal with day-to-day problems. Robinson agreed. The moderator added that long-term thinking is the opposite of a constant crisis mindset.
Closing Visions: The Berlin Wall and Half-Earth
For the final question, the moderator asked each speaker what it might feel like for imagination to truly blossom in the future. Heintz answered with the Berlin Wall. One month before it fell, he crossed through Checkpoint Charlie from West to East Berlin, spent the day in the East, and returned that evening. He left convinced that the divided city was an abomination that would not change in his lifetime. A month later the wall came down. People can convince themselves that things will not change, he said, and then they do. The real question is whether people are prepared to make the best of such moments. One cannot prepare for the unimaginable event itself, but one can prepare for what the event makes possible.
Heintz called the period from 1989 to the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, "a moment of missed creativity." The United States in particular treated it as a triumph: the end of communism, the victory of capitalism and democracy, a comfortable unipolar moment. It failed to imagine that the moment would evaporate, which it quickly did. Because imagination was not exercised then, he argued, the world became stuck in the logic of the past and is repeating actions that will lead to further global difficulty. Thinking ahead and being ready to pivot when unexpected moments arrive is, for him, what everyone must prepare for.
Robinson said that when he finished The Ministry for the Future, he considered its most unrealistic and utopian element to be E. O. Wilson's Half-Earth idea: confining human impact to about half of the planet's land and oceans so that wild creatures, and in turn humans, could flourish. Yet there is now a 30x30 program in California and internationally, aiming to leave 30 percent of land and ocean to wild creatures. He noted that the idea was not originally Wilson's. It had precursors in early American and early 20th-century history, and Wilson codified it into a system. Robinson had met Jennifer Norris, who heads California's 30x30 program. She told him the state is at about 25 percent, needs to reach 30, and will get there, and that people in her program talk about "50 by 50": half the Earth by 2050. That, Robinson said, implies regenerative agriculture, healthy fellow creatures, and dodging the mass extinction event. So one can imagine a utopian space and also see its roots and first shoots. He compared this to the rapid growth of spring and called it unstoppable, even by the negative forces at work.
Robinson said he had spent the previous five years traveling the world talking to people about these issues. It had been intense and very interesting, and he compared it to how Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly have lived for the past 50 years. From these travels he sensed that humans as a group are realizing that 8 billion people on the planet is "a technological achievement" but "unstable as hell." The work ahead is to stabilize it so that everyone has adequate means of life and the opportunity "to become more like themselves than ever before," which he called a great definition of utopian space. If humanity can thread the needles of the next few decades, he said, it could reach a place of astonishing potential.
He ended with what he called another great American short story: "We must all hang together, or else we will all hang separately." His closing request to the audience was to hold the line, keep their nerve, and hang together.
[Music] [Applause]
Good evening and welcome to the Long Now Foundation. My name is Patrick Dow and I'm board president here at the Long Now Foundation. I'm very excited to introduce our speakers for this evening. Public policy expert Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and science fiction author and longtime Long Now member Kim Stanley Robinson. Stephen and Stan are going to be speaking this evening about a logic for the future of international governance. But the conversation, as you'll see and I hope your questions will guide, is really about imagination. How can we imagine a better world and make it possible through new forms of governance? Stephen and Stan, welcome to the stage.
Stan, Stephen, welcome to the Long Now Foundation. How does it feel to be back and be here for the first time?
Nice to be back. Hometown, sort of. I'm from the provinces of my hometown, so I love it more than even the people here.
And for me, it's a great pleasure and a great honor. And thank you all for coming. This is great. And I have to say it's a particular honor to be here with Stan, somebody I admire and respect so profoundly. So it's really a delight.
Tonight is going to be a journey of imagination. And we're going to start far out, looking on a planetary, even multiplanetary level, and come in closer towards the national and international, into the local in this moment where we are now, and then we're going to zoom back out further and further. So beginning at this level of the planetary: Stan, you explored this both in the Mars trilogy and The Ministry for the Future. Stephen, you've looked at global governance futures through a planetary lens. Could you share with us how it is that you came to have the imagination that you did for these possible futures, and what are you finding in the real world?
Well, I am a science fiction writer, and when I began, the Viking missions and Voyager were going out in the 70s, and the Viking gave us Mars in a way it never existed before, except for Mariner a little bit. And then Voyager showed us the rest of the solar system in ways we had never seen before. And so for a young science fiction writer, it was about planets. And science fiction is the literature where you can actually use the word planet without boggling people's minds. It's really one of the topics that science fiction is about. The planetary romance: you go to another planet, it's new, it's interesting, it's exotic, it's exciting. Jack Vance or Frank Herbert or Ursula K. Le Guin. The planetary romance was big. And so I naturally got an interest in Mars because it had just been handed to us on a platter. Millions of times more information about that planet than we had had before, and nobody had written it up yet. So that was an obvious project that took a big chunk of my life. And then the other bodies in the solar system, equally beautiful and interesting. So it was a kind of a story space, I guess you would say.
Then you look back at Earth, and it's the greatest planet for human beings. Duh. Having evolved here, co-evolved with it, and rather remarkable in the sweet spot, the golden zone of liquid water, etc., etc. You look at it, and it's obvious from that perspective, which is an excellent perspective: it's one space, it's one biosphere, it's one species. It ought to be governed as such if we want to be in a good relationship with the rest of the biosphere. Very obvious, very not the case. So there's more stories to be told.
And Stephen, how did you come to the planetary as a frame for governance futures?
Well, I would say it's largely through the study of history, and the study of political history in particular, international relations, and the recognition that in the 21st century, increasingly, we are living in an age of enormous turbulence that is unprecedented. We all think, well, history is always about turbulence. You know, it's wars, it's plagues, it's catastrophe. And that's true, but we are living in a period when there are multiple sources of turbulence causing multiple planetary consequences, and the risks of three simultaneous existential threats: the climate crisis, obviously, but a new nuclear arms race which is beginning, and also the advent of technologies that we can't really yet imagine how they will be managed so that we get maximum benefit and avoid potential deep risk. And so we're at an inflection point in planetary survival. And unless we start thinking at the planetary level and adjust our current systems to that frame of reference, we might experience not just the age of turbulence but the age of catastrophe.
And in this planetary frame, Stan, you're approaching it through the lens of science fiction, based on deep research into the current realities and future possibilities of technology and governance, while being in dialogue with people who are leading and shaping governance systems around the world. And Stephen, you are in that milieu of the governance systems and academia and philanthropy and the think tank world, and you're getting inspiration from the fictional genre. So could you both speak about how, in terms of cultivating imagination about what can be possible in the future, you're both inspired by both fiction and non-fiction?
Well, for me, if you're going to tell a story of the future, you've left the realm of realism, and there's reason for the readers to question everything you say. Why, this is kind of a fantasy. The sets seem to be cardboard, like the Star Trek bridge. Trying to make it more real than realism has been an aesthetic goal. So then you have to learn some stuff to make your story feel solid in the reader's mind. So then very quickly you come to this realization that the nation-state system is a historical artifact that is not fit for purpose for planetary governance. This is a zero-sum game and really a cause of enormous misunderstandings and strife. And then, given my background, it becomes equally obvious that capitalism as practiced is a kind of predatory, parasitic social system that creates inequality, creates environmental destruction as part of its system. In San Francisco, you get applause for that line, and thank God for that.
So this is what I'm interested in, Stephen, is that you have actually been there and seen the nation-state systems trying to get along, like with the nuclear deal with Iran, and the sheer awkwardness and badness and the potential for misunderstanding and conflict. But you have seen a role for yourself and for organizations like yours to serve as a kind of a clutch between an engine and motor, or some lubricant to make the gears work better and not just freeze up. You've had experiences that few people have had of that kind, and I'm interested to hear more about the Iran deal.
Yeah. Well, thank you, Stan. It's a very interesting case study, and it's kind of a long story which I'm going to really work hard to truncate. But after 9/11, literally, as I had an office on Madison Avenue that looked straight down to the Twin Towers, and the next morning I showed up for work and the towers were no longer there and the smoke was rising from the site. And like everybody, we began to ask questions about why did this happen? What is it telling us? What do we need to think differently? And everybody was focused on the Arab world because, of course, the terrorists who conducted that terrible event were Sunni Arabs. And I kept looking at the map and saying, yes, I understand that, and that's obviously something people need to work on, need to understand, need to figure out. But then I kept saying, but you know, Iran, which is a Shia Muslim country, is geostrategically located, very large, and totally not understood by Americans, because we have not had any diplomatic relations with them since the 1979 revolution. And I had this feeling that Iran was going to loom very large in the coming years.
And so I just started talking to people about this. I didn't know anything about Iran either. And through the kind of networking that people in my profession are very privileged to be able to do, I was introduced to Iran's ambassador at the United Nations, and we started having this conversation, and he said, you know, we need to find a way for Americans and Iranians to actually talk to each other about the issues that divide us, because otherwise we are headed into some kind of collision course.
And so we organized what is known in the field as a Track Two diplomatic effort. So nonofficial, but with people who are serious practitioners of diplomacy. The US team that we assembled were all former American diplomats, highly distinguished and regarded diplomats who had served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, some for their entire careers and at very high levels, including a former ambassador to the UN, etc. And the Iranians ultimately also brought together a team, and it was very complicated, as you can imagine, just getting started.
The point I think you're asking me to address is that the governments couldn't do this because of the zero-sum logic that pervaded international relations and the fact that the 1979 revolution happened. We had the hostage crisis. We carried that grievance deeply in the American psyche. They had the assassination, or the overthrow rather, of Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, in 1953 because he nationalized the oil industry. They carry that grievance deeply in their psyche, and there was no possible way for the two governments to talk to each other. In fact, American diplomats, this is how stupid it gets, American diplomats, if they went to an embassy reception at the United Nations, they were not allowed to even greet the Iranian diplomats in the room.
So we became the alternative. And it was a very, very difficult process. It's still ongoing in this moment. But we did, to your point, once we started building trust between these two teams that met dozens and dozens of times in the woods outside of Stockholm, because we were then able, once we had the level of trust, to start putting ideas on the table. Well, how could we solve this nuclear problem? What are things that might work? What are things that might be acceptable to your side and the other side? And then we would go back to our capitals. We would go to the White House, we would go to the State Department, and we would describe what we were learning, and they would give us their perceptions, and we'd go back and meet six weeks later. And this was an iterative process that ultimately generated ideas that helped. And I don't want to overstate the case, but John Kerry would say if he were here, and even President Obama, that this helped create the possibility for the two governments to actually begin to negotiate directly. And then when they started the negotiations, we were a place that was able to keep transmitting ideas into the formal Track One negotiations from this Track Two process.
So it is a good example of how civil society organizations, of which we are one at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, working with other civil society organizations, can actually be a kind of constructive intermediary in solving planetary significant problems like the Iran nuclear question.
Both in The Ministry for the Future and in your monograph, Stephen, A Logic for the Future, you imagine a world in which things work out for planetary governance, and I want to invite you to share that with our audience, perhaps people who might not have already read either of your works. What does it look like, things working out, over what kind of time frame? What are some of the elements of a planetary program that could get us from where we are to a more sustainable future?
Well, I define myself as a utopian science fiction writer. So that is unusual and interesting. New stories come out of it. I've said this before, perhaps on this very stage: utopias are like blueprints and novels are like soap operas. And so combining blueprints and soap operas is not automatically a key to aesthetic success. But we have Ursula K. Le Guin and The Dispossessed as an example of how it can be done. And I've always held that up to myself. If it can be done once, it could be done again. The human story of trying to make a better world. As long as you don't think of utopia as an end case, but rather as a process, a name for positive history, that's utopian. Then you've got stories. You've got to create it. You've got to protect it after, and keep it good after it's been established.
In fact, I would like to quote the greatest American utopian science fiction story ever written as an example of how it works: "that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." This is in the future tense, the future imperative. It's an injunction. We are required to do it. We are enjoined to do it. It's almost a legal term: shall not. And that is a utopian story that we have to keep keeping alive. So stories are there. It was a mistake to think that utopias were blueprints and soap operas. It was actually a matter of writing about history.
And then I will just finish by saying, for our moment in history, avoiding a mass extinction event is a utopian science fiction story, because we are so scarily close. We've begun it. It'll be hard to pull out of it. It's going to take a lot of international cooperation of the kind you're describing to make it work. And so now, with the bar that low, all kinds of fictions that are interesting could be called utopian science fiction.
And so I'm thinking now here of the scale in your Logic for the Future. There's scale up and then scale in. And I'll mention them, but you'll have to talk about them one at a time. Maybe the scaling up for national sovereignty, this zero-sum game that's wrecking things. You mentioned the EU as the most important development of the second half of the 20th century, and I already had been taught that by my beloved late teacher Fredric Jameson: to go from nation-state to member state is crucial, legally, financially, and psychologically. So that's the scale up. And then the scale down, I want to talk later about human sovereignty as a phrase and an idea. But tell us more about why you describe the EU that way.
You know what, can I just say, as I get ready to answer that question, that I think in this conversation about the importance of imagination, Patrick, which you started this with, I remember Andrew Wyeth saying about his paintings that they were dreaming in the presence of reality. And I think that's what your novels do. You are dreaming about a future based on the science of today and science that people are developing. So it is a dream based on scientific realities. And my own work in this regard is about dreaming of a better system for this century, not as far into the future perhaps as some of the work that you've done, also in the presence of the realities of international relations and history and politics.
So when we think about people who had dreams, the founders of the European Union were doing exactly that. They were dreaming in the presence of the reality of the end of the Second World War, on a continent where they had fought two world wars back to back, basically, largely between France and Germany. And the dreamers who created the European Union decided they had to invent something that would prevent that from ever happening again. And they started out small with something called the European Coal and Steel Community, to create a common market for those products. And from there they kept building and building and building out to create a peace project, essentially. We think of the European Union as a political entity, as a market, as a very, very important economy in the world now, more or less equivalent in GDP to the US economy. But it was a peace project, and it has worked really well ever since it was founded.
But the real lesson in this is that 27 European countries have given up some of their sovereignty because they see the benefit of pooling that sovereignty, expanding the zone, and working on environmental, economic, political,
social and now security problems collectively as opposed to trying to do it individually. And to me, this is probably the most successful political development of the 20th century, certainly the second half. And it is a model for the future. It has its flaws and they know it. The Europeans know it. And they're trying to work through those flaws.
They have the same problem that we have in this country and that the United Nations has. And you and I were talking about this earlier, which is their founding documents, the Constitution of the United States, the Maastricht Treaty or the Treaty of Rome, the two founding documents of the European Union, and the UN Charter are all flawed in the most fundamental ways, in that they are almost unamendable at this point. And yet we need to amend them in order to make these institutions relevant to the world we're facing. But the EU to me is the best example we've got so far because of this notion of actually giving up some sovereignty.
Then they also created another innovation that gets to a point, Patrick, that you were talking about. They created the concept of subsidiarity, which is that problems ought to be delegated to the unit of government best able to provide a solution to that problem. So if it's better handled by the city government of San Francisco to manage, let's say, building code regulations for, you know, better earthquake sustainability, that's obviously where that should happen. If the problem is a planetary problem like climate change, we ought to be creating the institutions that can manage that problem as a planetary problem, and regional organizations like the European Union or the African Union or ASEAN in Southeast Asia are beginning to play another intermediary role.
And the nation state is not going to be irrelevant, but it needs to become less dominant, because who fights wars? It's nation states, right? You know, who violates the Paris climate agreement? It's nation states. Who withdraws from the Paris climate agreement? A nation state. So I think the nation state, which by the way is a 17th century invention in the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War in 1638, and we're still living with this concept. And it's not that we need to eliminate it, but it's part of the logic of the past that needs to be really rethought and redesigned as part of a logic for the future.
Something occurs to me from what you said, that there's too high of a bar for amending the US Constitution. Even the youngest person here will probably never see an amendment to the US Constitution, even though there's 27 of them and it used to work, but two-thirds of the state legislatures voting for something, it just seems very unlikely at this point. Changing the UN Charter has a similar two-thirds bar. The COP process for the Paris Agreement requires unanimity for each COP statement at the end of the year, which is impossible. And so they're talking about unanimity minus one or minus five. The European Union has the problem of, luckily they have some tools to beat on, if there's one country like, say, Hungary being recalcitrant, they can beat on that country and override it. But mostly these are too high a bar.
So in California, if you're a member of a hippie commune that is actually a homeowners association, you have CC&Rs where two-thirds of all of the residents have to vote yes before you can change anything in it. Much the same.
Yeah.
I just want to say the world needs what California has, which is called the Lazy Voter Act. If you make a legitimate attempt and you don't get to two-thirds, but you get to something like 50%, you can take it to a judge who will look at it and say, "Okay, you did the best you can. These are lazy voters. I'm passing it." So now we need a world court in H.G. Wells style. And we have a world court, although it doesn't really function as such, but someone to say that if you've gotten to 60% but not 67, you could still make institutional changes, because we're somewhat frozen in older formulations that are not flexible enough and not fit for purpose.
That's right.
So we are in a scary situation in that regard, and there is no such thing as a Lazy Voter Act, although the people running the Paris Agreement for COP 30 in Belém, Brazil, by the time they get there, will have proposals to change that process so it doesn't become completely irrelevant by being so damn slow.
You know, the term that I like for this concept of moving away from unanimity or moving away from these very high bars is sufficient consensus. Not unanimity, but sufficient consensus. Do we have enough consensus that it means this is the direction we should go? It's the lazy voter concept but with a different kind of twist.
Yeah. Although consensus in English, it either means everybody or it means most. And that's not unusual for a word to have two meanings that crosscut each other. But in this case, a little unfortunate, because it's confusing. What kind of consensus do you mean? Well, we don't know until we hash it out.
Yeah. It's so helpful for you both to call to attention how the government of the place where we are having this conversation was once an act of great imagination. The major governance structures that organize other parts of the world and actors were once acts of great imagination. Stephen, your logic for the future was, and you yourself were instrumental in shaping, the UN Summit of the Future and the resulting Pact for the Future, which was a serious collaborative attempt at active imagination within the UN context. And I'm really curious, what did you observe there? How are you seeing these ideas that you're advocating for finding purchase in the real world?
Well, the Summit of the Future was an idea put forward by the Secretary-General, Guterres, who has framed it, I think, really quite elegantly. He said the international system designed by our grandparents is not fit for the future our grandchildren deserve. And that's exactly the problem. So he decided that while he was Secretary-General, he was going to organize a process to actually think about the UN we need as opposed to the UN we have. And that became the Summit of the Future, which was a heads of state summit, but with two years of negotiations among the 193 member states around iteration after iteration of this pact, the outcome document that was finally adopted.
And both Stan and I, and this I think is a wonderful little coincidence, you know that Mary Murphy, the minister for the future in Stan's novel, was an Irish diplomat and politician. And by complete coincidence, the woman that Secretary Guterres tasked with organizing the Summit of the Future was an Irish diplomat named Michelle Griffin, and we both got to know her, and she's an extraordinary global public servant.
And it was an audacious idea to have a Summit of the Future. I mean, it was really an audacious idea, and a lot of people in the beginning didn't take it very seriously because it was utopian. And so the real challenge is how do you take a utopian idea and begin the iterative process of actually getting to something meaningful? And when you're negotiating with 193 sovereign states, that is a messy process at the very best. And it had to be a consensus document, not of the sufficient consensus type, but of the unanimous consensus type.
And it almost got lost at the very end. Literally at the 11th hour, there was a motion put forward by Russia that would have derailed the entire thing. And it was the African group of nations in the General Assembly that pushed back the hardest, and they managed to get this thing adopted with only five countries voting for Russia's amendment, which failed. So it was a pretty remarkable story.
And the document, if you read it, it's not fun reading like Stan's books. It's pretty turgid, but it's a very important benchmark, written in UN language, but it has 56 commitments that the nation states, the 193 members, make to building the UN of the future that we need. Now, it falls short in a lot of areas, but it's the first major statement about UN Security Council reform that the UN has adopted since 1963. It has a remarkable statement or annex document, which is called the Global Digital Compact, which is, especially for this audience, something I really commend you to read. And then there's a further annex called the compact for future generations, and one of the things that came out of this is that the Secretary-General is now going to appoint an envoy for future generations. Not just youth, not today's youth, but literally the unborn, and what are their rights in this world of the future.
So it was a utopian concept, very audacious. A lot of people were very skeptical. But you know what was so inspiring was that these diplomats, just, you know, normal regular human beings who happen to be diplomats, worked really hard at this and compromised. And there was a lot of give and take, and they've now put out this kind of baseline. And now it's up to, to get to our earlier conversation, who's going to hold them accountable.
Yeah.
And that's going to have to happen through global civil society, through movements, through think tanks, through investigative journalism, through all the means that we've been holding countries accountable for their climate commitments, and all of the things we've done to hold people accountable for their human rights commitments. And we're going to have to do the same and up the ambition, because this pact, even as good as it is, is not going to solve this global problem. But it's a start, and we need to build on it and make it something really, really meaningful.
How would you invite people in the audience, in the community, in the global community of long-term thinkers, into this process of imagination, so that they can see a role for themselves in shaping something along the lines of the planetary governance features that you've been speaking about?
I was in Germany when a group of women came up to me and said, "We run a ministry for the future. It's a kindergarten." So, we all can do stuff.
Yeah. That was a great moment.
Yeah. We all can do stuff. We already know it already. And for sure, this is a moment to speak to the glory and comfort of being a Californian. I mean, San Francisco is the cultural leader of the world, and then also it's the obvious cultural center of California. And so being here or near it, around it, you can feel the buzz of the shadow of the future, the making of the future by the collective action of people here. You don't have to fight or be a tiny minority. It's actually just San Francisco culture leading the world into what? Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Yeah.
So, arrest this band. Yeah. And I will say that there are some people in Washington DC who, I would say, you know, there's genocide, there's ecocide, there is attempted future-cide, to kill the future, which you cannot do. So this is a fantasy of people sticking their head in the sand and hoping that they could go back to the past. Various kinds of bad fantasy. And as a science fiction writer, I hate fantasy, of course. But these people, you cannot kill the future. It comes. And it comes no matter what a few reactionaries do in a momentary seizure of power. It's coming anyway. They can't stop it.
I also want to say that Stan's book, this is not San Francisco, but it's another important intellectual and creative community called Oxford University. And a group of scientists and scholars at Oxford were so inspired by Stan's book that they've created the Ministry for the Future. And maybe you should say a word about that.
Yes, it's a beautiful thing. Oxford University, Hertford College, and a couple of the business schools. There's an Oxford Ministry for the Future, and I am instantly emeritus and advisory. It's better to be instantly emeritus than to actually have to do the work. But I asked them to follow one topic or another. At the end of April, it will be about the health of wild animals and things like interspecies money or various kinds of debt-for-nature trades. How can we introduce into a political economy our fellow citizens that happen to be the other creatures, our cousin creatures, what we are called, our horizontal brothers and sisters?
Yeah.
So that will be just one topic at the Oxford Ministry for the Future, and they'll have two or three meetings a year to talk about these things. And Oxford does have an immense crowd of interesting thinkers gathered there to talk to each other. It's a complicated ecology, but it's actually quite productive and fruitful. They're excited to be there. They're having a good time. They're talking their heads off. It's amazing how long the days go. I've been stunned, in the most literal sense, days there. So I'm happy that it's working. I'm really happy at all these things.
I think there's a, I mean, as an English major, of course you believe in sentences, but even phrases, like it couldn't be Ministry of the Future. It needed to be Ministry for the Future. And the book could have had, there were about 20 titles, and I actually for once said, no, I've got the right title here. Don't change it. And The Ministry for the Future as a phrase seems to be a kind of a spark or a turning of a key in people's imaginations. So I'm very happy, of course, and they're doing good things that I'll continue to stay involved in.
Yeah. Patrick, can I just say one thing about San Francisco?
Yes, please.
You know, I was thinking about this since you asked me this question earlier, and because of the origins of the UN in the city, I think this is a remarkably interesting year for this community to think about its role in the future of international relations, of the international system, and the kind of creative talent in this ecosystem. That is, entrepreneurial imagination and technological imagination and political imagination and societal imagination are all the things we need to bring into this conversation about an international system that will actually help us get through this planetary crisis that we're facing. And this is a place that can really contribute enormously to that.
Not to mention the erotic imagination.
I wasn't going to mention it. San Francisco, after all.
You mean that in the creative sense? World leader.
God bless San Francisco. What can I say?
Yeah. A question from audience member An Juna: It's clear the US is retreating rather than building global coalitions in this new age of international relations. How do you see this going over the next few years if things continue in this direction? And would you adjust your hope for the next decade considering the current state?
Well, I'll just jump in, if that's okay. So I originally wrote my monograph in 2023, and it was published in 2024, before the election, and it was before the Summit of the Future had actually taken place. So at the end of last year, with the summit having taken place and with the results of the election that we got, I went back through the paper to say, what should I change here to make this paper more relevant to the new? And I hardly changed a word, because I actually think, and this is, you know, pride of authorship probably taken to extremes, but I actually think the ideas in the paper are more relevant because of what's happening in Washington right now than maybe they were before.
Because one of the most important subchapters in this work is that the United States itself needs to completely transform the way it behaves in the world if we're going to get to the global system that we really need. And that is more apparent now because of the way the United States has been behaving in the last 55 or whatever days it is. And we need to give up on the notion of great power dominance. We need to give up on the notion that the United States is the indispensable nation, a phrase that a very good friend of mine, Madeleine Albright, coined and we used to argue about. We need to move to the notion that the United States needs to be an indispensable partner. We need to be more humble on the world stage. We need to be more honest on the world stage and not hypocritical. We need to back up the
International Court of Justice and not walk away from it. And those things are more apparent now because of what is happening in Washington today. So in some ways we have to get through this very, very challenging and potentially very dark period. And then, you know, this is a community that talks a lot about creative destruction. What we're getting right now is all destruction and no creativity. But that gives us all the opportunity for the creativity, which gets back to the imagination theme that we've been talking about. So we've got to defend what needs defending. We've got to protect what needs to be protected, but we then got to use the destruction that's occurred and make something out of it for the future.
Stephen, on this point, and I want to invite your answer as well, Stan. But Stephen, you were mentioning backstage about the Atlantic Charter and what was the environment in which that came to be. Yeah, I found that inspiring. Would you share that story?
So, and you will remember this from your own study of history, but in August of 1941, after Hitler had literally swept across the European continent, Great Britain was literally hanging on by a thread. The United States was not yet in the war because Pearl Harbor didn't occur until December. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met on a destroyer off the coast of Newfoundland and they together drafted a very short, beautifully written document called the Atlantic Charter, which lays out actually a utopian vision for the postwar world that said the major powers eschew the use of force to settle their differences. There will be freedom from want and freedom from need. We will work to solve problems cooperatively and we will create the mechanisms so that we never have a war like this again.
They didn't even have the confidence that they were going to win the war, and yet they were able to think through that darkness, pierce the darkness and offer literally a vision, a bold ray of light that became a part of the inspiration for the United Nations here in San Francisco in 1945. So in one of the darkest moments in human history, people of moral and political imagination were able to pierce that darkness and move to something that was, you know, just an extraordinary accomplishment. And that's what we need to do in this period. It's exactly what we need to do.
And they married it. So this is the last point, and I'm sorry I'm probably going on too long here, but it was this marriage of political and moral imagination and political will. They not only had the vision, they were determined to make it happen. And that's what we're going to need to build.
Yeah. Hopefully we can. I'm thinking about this subsidiarity. San Francisco, the cultural capital of California. California, the great state, the great world space between the Gold Rush, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, some kind of magical catastrophe. That is our state. So then subsidiarity: America, well, it is an indispensable country as an idea of everybody getting along together from all over the world, like in California, the 115 languages and the sense that everybody could come here and make something new in history, the utopian dream of America. Also, the horrible empire, the manifest destiny, the genocide of the Native Americans. The two stories are tied together like conjoined twins. They can't be separated. They can only be improved by clear sight and by acknowledging both parts of it.
So that while you have to fight a bad vision of America that's still being inflicted on us, 5% of the world's population, about 7% of the world's land surface and about 70% of the world's capital, and also the US dollar, the benchmark currency. So a fiscal empire of immense power. But empires fall. Yeah. And when they fall apart, people who are devoted to the idea of that empire get very upset. But there's some huge advantages to not being an empire, because an empire is always oppressive, a form of master-slave relationship that isn't good. So the bad part of America, if there are suddenly people in power who are proclaiming it as the greatest possible value, what it does is give an opportunity for saying no, that's not the right part of America. There's another right part of America, and a lot of that is illustrated in California, but it needs to be done at the federal level.
And then I want to add a little story. I just saw, maybe it was yesterday, Stanford economist, actually he's at Oxford now, Doyne Farmer, a map of all the things it needs to make your laptop. And it was a map of the world and there were like, I don't know, 60 dots on the map and therefore about 300 lines between the dots on the map. And this is just to make one laptop for you, and not to mention the expertise, etc., etc. You can't do tariffs. You can't raise a Fortress America. This whole thing is again a fantasy. It's a stupid fantasy. And there's a certain viciousness to it, but it can't be enacted because you can't even make a laptop without engaging the entire world.
Globalization, for better and worse, it worked. We are in a global economy and we're in a global technology in terms of the supply chains, which Doyne taught me, it's not really chains, it's more networks and loops. It's an ecology that we've created for ourselves that is our economy. To think that one nation, even the one that holds the dollar, could dominate and bully around all the other parts of the network, really, no. This is what I think: that this fantasy will crash and then we will have to pick up pieces.
Damage is being done. I want to say this, that hammering the National Institutes of Health is particularly stupid and vicious because it's a murder-suicide, in that everybody suffers when there isn't medical research. Everybody. So then you have to ask, why do it? Now, there are people struggling mightily in Washington and New York and around the world thinking, well, there must be some rational urge behind it. No, I'm gonna say it's simply the Götterdämmerung. It's: if I have to go down, the world's going down with me. It's the god-damning of the world. It's the twilight of the gods. This is a kind of malignant narcissism. There is not an economic plan behind it. There's various smokescreens, but underneath it is an urge to destroy.
Because every time 10 billion dollars is devoted to medical research, say 10 billion, the average lifespan of all humans on earth goes up by about a month. Social scientists do this cost-benefit analysis. So I've been talking to college students in the last couple weeks and I like to shock them a little bit with the idea that them being young, they are going to suffer the most loss of lifetime, that the last 55 days or whatever has shortened their life by months to years. And sometimes, of course, you know, they're 25, they're thinking, well, I'm never going to die anyway, much less get old. But nevertheless, if you talk about it as actuarial tables and say let's get real for a while, and what's real? Well, death is real. That's the incontrovertible reality.
And when you begin to shorten humans' lifespans in order to pursue a cause that doesn't even have a rationale to it, then you're in a destroy-type mentality. And these people need to be resisted and hopefully stopped and reversed, and that will be hard. I mean, you can break something in six months that it'll take 10 years to fix, but some things you can just overturn immediately, say no, that's wrong, let's fix it back to right. So we are in a wicked political battle now, but I think reality bites. They call it reality because you can't escape it with a fantasy. You stick your head in the ground and then you drown. So reality will win in the end, and therefore the people who are the party of reality will win in the end.
This is a question from Kevin Kelly. Describe how a representative government for 8 billion people might work. Does it scale?
Well, this might be a Kevin Kelly idea, in which case it's very recursive, but I just heard this. In Taiwan, you gather together a group of citizens like in a jury system. Come on down and we'll host you. You got your food, you got maybe a per diem and time off from work. We're going to give you a political problem. We want you to brainstorm about it. So they do that, and we've all been in brainstorming sessions. You know what they're like? Mostly you walk away and think, well, that was kind of a waste of a day. But what they do here in this program is they give it to a large language model and they say, turn today's brainstorming Post-it notes into two pieces of legislative language, bills to be enacted, that the Taiwanese legislature has already agreed to consider as legislation.
Suddenly you've got crowdsourced legislation that bypasses the gatekeepers and the bot lobbyists, etc. And it would scale. You would actually have, it's still representative, and for once there's AI assistance that looks to be quite useful, because they do summarize quite, you know, they could do something in about 30 seconds that might take two months for a human to do, and then the human's bias would bias it anyway. So there's something quite interesting going on in this crowdsourced legislation that might scale.
Yeah, I agree with that. There are all kinds of experiments with various forms of citizens' assemblies that are kind of facilitated and moderated citizens' gatherings for deliberation that then are actually utilized by legislative bodies. And you could, you know, with technology you can scale these things quite remarkably now, and I think that's the way we have to get at this. And, you know, I'm not yet an advocate for world government. I think that's an idea that, you know, is scary for people and also is not adequate. I think it's more complicated than thinking about a kind of a name. But I do think these ways of aggregating citizen opinion and citizen contribution is a really good way to start this process.
This is a question from Peter Schwartz in, Peter writing in from Hawaii. Oh, never mind, Peter. In a number of your books, Stan, for example in Aurora, complexity defeats humans' ability to control it. Why?
Well, control. So aren't those two kind of, those words come from different... Complexity is emergence from bottom up, from earlier simpler systems, and then suddenly there's a break, if I understand complexity theory right, up to an emergent level, to something unexpected that the earlier iteration couldn't predict. And so lots of things are complex: life, weather, the universe and things. And then control. Well, this is a word from a completely different universe of sort of engineering, and even engineering schools would say, look, we're not about control, we're about coping. So I think it's always important to make these points.
I don't know that Aurora... Aurora is a starship novel where people go out to another planet and realize that we only will thrive on this planet, and they try to get back home. Maybe that's an attempt at control. Let's control our environment completely and move somewhere else. And then the complexity of the situation drives them back to the place that they co-evolved with. That, I think, is one story to tell.
I have a beautifully short question here from Don Means, who writes: China, question mark. Right. Exactly.
Well, fortunately, I've been going to China since 1976, when I was just recently out of college, and have been working there on and off pretty much ever since, and we are still working there at the foundation. I have an office in Beijing, and I serve on, kind of to my own surprise, the Chinese government appointed me to a high-level international advisory body on environment and development, which they take extremely seriously. You wouldn't see anything like this in Washington, by the way. I have really come to appreciate the complexity of China and also the extraordinary progress that China is making in a lot of fields.
And we are actually moving more and more to a world where there are two really important major powers, China and the United States, economically, technologically, environmentally, militarily. This is, you know, to simplify, one could argue this is becoming a G2 world, not a G20 world. So the future of US-China relations is absolutely the most consequential relationship of the 21st century. And if we get it wrong, we're going to have planetary catastrophe. And that's why we have to change the thinking about China dramatically.
And people who are trying to get us to think, oh, we're now in a new cold war, and the wars with China, are pulling us back into the logic of the past, which is these binaries of us versus them and a bipolar kind of world. And it won't work. And we have to recognize the complexity, the subtleties, the nuances, and compete with China where we must, cooperate with China where we must, and avoid confrontation with China for the benefit of the planet. And that is not an easy matter, but we are not going about it in a very thoughtful way.
So the one proposal that I put in my monograph was that because this relationship is so important, it shouldn't be left to episodic meetings of top-level officials, summits of the presidents, or even meetings of the Secretary of the Treasury and the finance minister of China, or the foreign affairs ministers or the environment ministers, etc. That's all very important and necessary, but it's not sufficient for managing this relationship in a constructive manner. And I propose creating an actual joint entity in some neutral place like Geneva or Singapore, where high-level civil servants in the key ministries of both countries are literally seconded to work together on a day-to-day basis, and argue with each other and debate each other and produce new ideas and write papers and send them back to their capitals and work on this relationship so that we get it right. Because China, question mark, is the question of the 21st century.
Love it. A great Long Now question here from Gideon. How do you stoke interest in long-term utopian thinking right now, when people are so focused on short-term catastrophism?
I think it's harder than hell, especially people that are stressed and in the precariat, which means almost everybody. Yeah. On the other hand, it's a natural thing, or it's a cultural thing. You care intensely about your kids and then about your grandkids, and you only have to take one more step to think your grandkids are going to have grandkids, and it won't take very long for that to happen. And you get to the kind of Indigenous notion of the seven generations, and the seven generations that came to you that gave you what you are, and then what you give to the seven generations along. That's not a very hard notion to talk to people about. And then if they can clear any kind of a space in their heads from the daily pressure to make ends meet, it's as natural as being human.
Yeah. Isn't there something liberating in a way about thinking about the future instead of focusing on your problem today? Focusing on something that is longer term and offers the possibility of something very optimistic, I think, can also be reinvigorating in how we address the problems we face on a day-to-day basis.
Completely. Long-term thinking, I like to say, is the polar opposite of being in a constant crisis mindset. I want to close this evening's conversation, this journey of imagination from the planetary to the international to the local, with zooming out into the future and asking each of you to inspire us with a vision of what it would feel like for imagination to really blossom in our future. Stephen, you had a front-row seat to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Stan, in your novels, when you get to the end of them, you can feel sometimes this resolution and imagination working. How might that feel for us in the future?
In very unexpected ways, I suspect. And you mentioned the Berlin Wall. I happened to be in Berlin one month before the wall fell, and I went through Checkpoint Charlie from west to east, spent the day in the east and went back through Checkpoint Charlie in the evening, and I left Berlin after that visit thinking this divided city is a is an
abomination and it's not going to change in my lifetime. One month later. So the point is we can get ourselves convinced that things won't change and then they will change, and the question is, are we prepared at that moment to make the best of it?
And so to me the future is going to be about those unexpected moments and how we as a human society react to them. And the more we think about that, the better prepared we will be. Not for the thing we can't imagine, which is in that instance the fall of the Berlin Wall, but for the things we can imagine that we can then say, oh, now that this has happened, we can do some things to get closer to that.
You know, just to end on this because I think it's quite relevant. I would say that period from 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down to the end of 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed was a moment of missed creativity. We, especially in America, treated it as a triumphal moment. The end of communism, the victory of capitalism and democracy, and it was the unipolar moment that we could feel so comfortable in. But we did not exercise our imagination and realize that that was going to be gone like that. And it did. It evaporated very quickly.
And because we weren't able to exercise imagination in that moment, we have gotten stuck in the logic of the past. And we are doing things again that are only going to lead us into more international and global difficulties. So thinking ahead and being ready when those unexpected moments happen to pivot is to me the thing that we all have to prepare ourselves for.
Yeah.
Well, I thought when I finished The Ministry for the Future that the most unrealistic and utopian part of it was the idea of E.O. Wilson's idea of Half-Earth, that we would confine humanity's impact on the earth to about half of the earth's surface and the oceans, and the wild animals and the biosphere at large, the living cousins, would prosper and then we'd be healthier. Oh, that's a beautiful dream. So, I put it in that novel.
But now we can think 50 years out. There's a 30 by 30 program in California and in the world at large: 30% of the land surface and of the ocean left to the wild creatures. This is so fast, that toning point, the first idea of it. And it wasn't Wilson's idea. There were precursors in various space cadets in early American history and early 20th century history imagining these things, and then Wilson codifying it up into a system. And now we've got a state program.
I met Jennifer Norris, the head of California's 30 by 30 program. She tells me that in California we're at about 25% and we need to get to 30% and we're going to get there. And everybody in her program talks about 50 by 50, that by 2050 we have half the earth. Well, this implies regenerative agriculture and it implies a health for our fellow creatures. It implies dodging the mass extinction event.
So, not only can you imagine out to a utopian space, but you can see the roots of it and the first shoots of it. Since we're in springtime, you know, the rapid growth of spring. And this is unstoppable even by negative forces out there. There's a certain kind of a momentum in world history right now that those things—
And I've just spent the last five years traveling the world talking to people about these very issues and it's been intense and it's been super interesting. It's kind of like the way Stewart and Kelly have lived the last 50 years, and I'm amazed. It's quite an effort, but it's interesting, right? It's interesting because you learn a lot.
And you also get a sense that civil— humans as a group are realizing that 8 billion people on the planet is an intensely dangerous situation. It's a technological achievement. It's unstable as hell and we got to work to make it more stable so that everybody has that adequacy of life means and the opportunity—this is very San Francisco—to become more like themselves than ever before, which I think is a great definition of utopian space.
There's a role towards it that if we can thread the needle, or the needles, in this next few decades, that we can get to a space that is really quite astonishing in terms of its potential. Yes. So let's hold the line here and, you know, keep our nerve and hang together. In fact, this is another great American short story: we must all hang together or else we will all hang separately. Had supper, right? So, let's hang together here. Here.
[Applause]
Thank you. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you, Stan, for inspiring us to think long term. Thank you for calling us to imagination, and for being here with us this evening. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you all. That was fun.
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