Two books, one future
Daniel Suarez's Critical Mass builds the future in space. Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future fixes it on the ground. Run both plans side by side, add a few accelerants, and follow the road to 2100.
Drag the year bar, press play, or tap a dot. The bar follows you down the page, so the space diagram and gauges respond as you scroll.
Gauges are an illustrative trajectory for this scenario, not a forecast.
Every milestone
Climate
Earth is a starship tooUp there: the Suarez plan
Nathan Joyce's "phase two" turns mined asteroid material into a cislunar economy. The novel does it in four years because it starts with a stockpile already in orbit; here it gets a human timeline and keeps going. After 2070, space solar shifts from powering carbon cleanup to powering daily life.
Spin-gravity station
A rotating ring at the Moon's L2 point where people can live for years without their bodies breaking down.
Power satellites
Round-the-clock sunlight beamed to Earth. First it runs carbon removal, then it runs everything else.
Lunar mass driver
An electric launcher that throws Moon rock into orbit, so building material never climbs out of Earth's gravity.
Asset-backed money
A currency outside any one government, earned by contributing real assets, to fund work with a 20-year payback.
Most of the work is done by telepresence. The Moon is about 2.6 seconds away round trip, so a person gives the intent and the robot handles fine motion. Asteroids are minutes away, so machines work on their own while people supervise. The jobs stay on Earth; only the machines go.
Down here: the Robinson plan
Ministry for the Future is about institutions catching up to physics. Its best ideas are the ones space can't replace.
A ministry for the future
An agency whose only job is to speak for people not yet born.
The carbon coin
Central banks mint currency for every ton kept out of the air, so removal finally has a buyer.
Slowing the glaciers
Pumping meltwater from under Antarctic ice so it stops sliding into the sea.
Half-Earth
Continental wildlife corridors, with half the planet left for nature to recover.
Food, land and water
Farming and land use drive roughly a fifth of global emissions and about 70 percent of the fresh water people take from rivers and aquifers. Half-Earth only happens if farms need less land, and every other plan depends on people being fed.
Cut methane first
Methane fades in about a decade, so cutting it from cattle and flooded rice slows warming within years. It's the fastest lever on the page.
Regenerative farming
Cover crops, less tilling, rotations and managed grazing rebuild soil that holds more water and carbon. Farmers need support through the transition years, and soil carbon is hard to measure, so it pairs best with sturdier storage like basalt dust and biochar.
Water that stays put
Healthy soil acts like a sponge. Add drip irrigation, recharging aquifers in wet seasons, restored wetlands and reused wastewater. Later, cheap clean power makes desalination affordable where rain won't come.
Free up the land
Livestock uses about three-quarters of farmland for under a fifth of our calories. Cheaper alternative proteins, less food waste and an end to deforestation hand that land back to nature.
Smarter nitrogen
Precision application, microbes that feed crops their own nitrogen, and fertilizer made with clean power cut a potent greenhouse gas.
Pay the farmers
Make farmers the first carbon coin earners and redirect subsidies toward these practices. Half a billion small farms become a carbon and water network.
The Seed
Grow a Seed, by Compumachine, in development
An AI-guided aquaponic pod where fish and plants share one loop. It grows greens and protein fast, feeds its fish waste to potatoes and root crops in the soil outside, and teaches its owner the whole system as it runs. The same pod that feeds a classroom in the 2030s becomes life support at the L2 station in the 2040s, and its hardest problem, power for pumps and lights, is what beamed space solar solves later on. Intelligence sovereignty you can hold in your hands.
Accelerants
AI-accelerated science
Models that design better sorbents, catalysts, crops and materials make every other track cheaper.
Local AI and tutors
Community-owned AI and a free tutor for every kid grow the workforce this century needs and keep the gains where they're earned.
Clean air at home
Electrified homes and clean cooking tackle one of the world's largest killers. The biggest near-term health win in the plan.
Open robotics, open doors
Cheap open hardware plus remote-operation academies let anyone with a connection earn a stake in the space economy.
The automation dividend
Robot productivity returns to people as shorter work weeks and universal basic services.
Carbon removal runs on energy
Pulling CO₂ from the air takes roughly 2 to 3.5 MWh per ton. Set a scale and a carbon coin price.
Assumes 2.5 MWh per ton, about 30,000 TWh of world electricity today, and about 41 TWh a year per satellite.
How much energy is enough for each person? Earth is a starship too →
How it pays, and what blocks it
The two books meet in one loop. The carbon coin pays for every ton removed, asset-backed money funds the space hardware no quarterly investor would touch, and beamed power runs the removal until the air is fixed, then runs everything else.
Governance
Nobody agrees who owns mined resources, or who speaks for the future. A ministry for the future is one answer.
Patient capital
Decades of spending before payback. Both books solve it with new money, not just new engines.
Autonomy
Better robot autonomy turns light lag from a dealbreaker into a nuisance.
Time
Every year of delay adds heat, and Robinson shows what people do when they run out of patience.
An aggressive but physically plausible projection, not a forecast. Dates, gauges and the loop between the two books are a synthesis, not plot points from either novel. The Seed is the author's own project.