Within 20 years or less, we expect that the first humans will be living in space, from the Moon to Mars and even beyond. 2211.world is the planet’s first open source platform dedicated to creating the philosophy for the opening of the space environment to humanity. Founded by well-known space leaders Dylan Taylor, Rick Tumlinson, and Frank White, 2211 is designed to encourage conversations about the “Why?” of the human expansion beyond the Earth.
The name
2211.world raises the question of
what life will look like 250 years after the famous flight of Russian
Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961. This flight, which was part of a Cold War “space
race” between two governments, culminated with humans walking on
the Moon more than 50 years ago – and once the race was won, it seems
to many to have led nowhere.
“We’ve been exploring space for over 50 years and it’s time we had a discussion about why we are doing it and how we will shape it,” said Dylan Taylor, global executive, Co-Founder of the Space Angels investment group and of Space For Humanity. “Opening space is about more than science and engineering. It’s about people, life, and our human future.”
The Founders of 2211 believe that humanity needs to develop a set of core principles as we begin the human expansion outward. “We need
a system of fundamental principles and ideas to guide us as we
migrate into the solar system,” said Frank White, author of the
seminal book, The Overview Effect: Space
Exploration and Human Evolution, in which he
made an early call for a philosophy of space exploration, citing the
Wolfe comment. “In
this new Space Age, we need to be very clear on ‘Why’ we are
going, as that will determine how we go and what the end result will
be. If we are to avoid mistakes that have been made on terrestrial
frontiers, this is the moment in history to have that conversation.”
There are scores
of questions to be answered about both why we are going and how we
will act when we are out there. There are high-level guiding
concepts such as: What is the relationship between science,
exploration, and settlement? What are the roles of the world’s
governments, militaries, and the laws of Earth? Each of these opens
up further discussions. For example, how do we treat alien life, how do we
treat each other, who has what rights and what are they?
“The
last wave of exploration of the new worlds of Earth was about
government and commercial exploitation, and while these will be
involved, we have the chance right now to change the context in which
it occurs, and to define what we want the outcome to be.” said
Tumlinson, founder of the Space Frontier Foundation, Deep Space
Industries, and one of the leaders of the commercial space
revolution. “We are engaged in an act of creation. We can make this
next chapter of human life about anything we want. For example,
imagine if our motivation was to spread life to the dead worlds of
space. How would it feel to be part of a culture with that as its
driving goal?”
While the
Founders of 2211 believe government bodies are important in setting
the rules and laws that manage our interactions, they feel that
philosophical principles need to be in place that guide those
governments, ideas that transcend governments and that have not been
set for the space environment. At this moment in time, space has no
borders, no governments, and only a minimal legal order. In the past,
the voices of Voltaire, Jefferson, and the others whose ideas helped
inform policies and the creation of new forms of government and the
culture of today were easily available to thinkers and decision
makers, but in today’s world such ideas are scattered across a
thousand platforms and publications. 2211.world
hopes to give them a home.
From Elon
Musk to Jeff Bezos building their own spacecraft, to NASA, ESA, and
the Chinese planning settlements and villages on the Moon, to
private space station and asteroid mining companies planning their
first missions and facilities, the human expansion into the solar
system is already underway. The founders of 2211.World believe that
this marks the beginning of a spacefaring civilisation. The new
website offers all of us a place to think and talk through how we are
going to shape this historic moment. Like 2211.world, space is a blank slate where new ideas and concepts can be tested
and tried and old ideas can evolve in novel ways.
