The City of the Future - a New Society
My Human Cosmos philosophy didn’t come to me all at once. I didn’t wake up one day like Mendeleev and come up with a revolutionary concept. It all started unremarkably, because of my interest in architecture.
My passion was urban planning, and I spent a long time working on urban development of cities across Russia. The monocity Krasnoturiinsk, the Moscow River land area, the Bolshoi Usuriiskii peninsula - these were all projects my team and I conceived and implemented. My main inspirations were Tommaso Campanella’s “The City of the Sun” about the development of future generations, and Jacque Fresco’s “Venus Project”.
I wanted to put all my knowledge and experience of urban planning and building into something bigger, something far-reaching.
Even then, I understood the need to move forward and think on a global scale - to create something that would help humanity transform itself and evolve. And that’s how the idea of building the first orbital city of the future was born.
To say that this was a crazy fantasy - designing and building an orbital city - is putting it mildly. But you can’t stop an idea whose time has come. So I went to work. But the truth is that my main objective wasn’t to just construct a huge flying spacecraft, but to found a new space society.
Ether, the city of the future, is a single organism in which every crew member has a specific function. I’m talking about creating a new paradigm of social relations based not on trade and exchange of money, but rather on collaboration and teamwork. A new ideology based on the value of a person’s contribution to the common good will take hold when material wealth is no longer the measure of success. In orbit, personal wealth will be meaningless, as everyone arriving in outer space will start out on equal footing in equal conditions.
Society on Ether will not be divided into cliques or groups or social classes. Life in the new world will be based on the laws of cooperation and individual contribution to the greater common good. Everyone will work in their area of interest and expertise, and have specific responsibilities within their family circle.
The social concept of life on Ether is not to be a copy of Earth hierarchies, but instead to create a society of equal opportunities and an environment fostering unimpeded creative output. In these conditions, people will be able to fully develop their potential and follow their passion. They will nurture themselves, and thereby automatically help others. The microcosm will become one with the macrocosm.
This idea may seem utopian at first glance.. But we must recognize that our society has long needed to be reconfigured, as shown by the events of 2020. Our modus operandi has worn itself out, it’s time to come up with a new one. Ether is the next step in human development. It is at the heart of the Human Cosmos philosophy.