'Thinking far beyond the Critical Decades, and long after Century XXI'
Observe Impacts. Forecast Legacies. Educate Generations. Archive Essentials. Conserve for Posterity.
MISSION STATEMENT
LOOKING FORWARD
It is widely recognised that the immediate future of our shared biome and common heritage is now governed by the actions of Earth's principle geological agent; humanity. Our near-future is profoundly intertwined with the moral decisions we enact today, and our capacity to forecast emergent, longer-term impacts that will cascade down through the ages for all terrestrial life.
Pivotal to this deep-time planetary stewardship is our species' ability to identify, and adequately document, the unfolding inheritance of the Anthropocene, while also ensuring mutual comprehension of these indelible legacies for future entities that we may not recognise as 'human'. Understanding the imprints arising from our ‘waste’ and material legacies for ourselves, is crucial for our attempts to convey this ‘essential’ information to futurity across an unknown, temporal horizon.
OUR RESEARCH
The foundation is a decadal research initiative and educational-outreach institute, established to investigate the breadth of these enduring legacies, and study the semiosis dilemma of intelligible communication over deep-time intervals, while also promoting social discourse on the long-term archaeological impact of our actions that will far outlast our near-future conceptualisation of ‘Earth’.
THINKING 'BEYOND THE EARTH'
Thinking ‘beyond the Earth’ from a deep-time perspective is a tradition familiar to many disciplinary orientations, especially within the fields of environmental ethics, risk management, astrobiology, heritage conservation and stewardship praxis, that varyingly operate on geological, cosmic or ‘long-now’ timescales.
However, this circumspection infrequently translates across the realms of our sociopolitical interactions, material culture practices and technological proliferation, all of which collectively re-shape our modern-day civilisations. We hope to change this, and help place long-term sustainable decision making at the forefront of deep-time stewardship planning, while cultivating a pre-emptive, mitigation strategy.
THE FOUNDATION
The foundation is an international collective of astrobiologists, ethicists, anthropologists, artists, futurists, scientists, academics and other professionals who possess an enduring concern for the future habitability of the Earth system. We aspire to responsibly ensure that the preservation and commensurability of essential information is maintained for future generations — to give posterity a factual opportunity to commit informed decisions on behalf of their inherited world.