THE SEPTILLION SOCIETY
OUR MISCONCEPTION
Despite a constant barrage of news and information to the contrary, as collective earth inhabitants, we have the capacity to produce everything we need for all of us to lead happy, healthy lives.
The Septillion Society believes that the primary, fundamental barrier to a universal healthy and happy population is the misconception that such a planetary reality is impossible.
This misconception is perpetuated by an historic emphasis on physical borders, language differences, cultural and social preferences and distinctions, and religious sects and institutions.
OUR CONTEXT
For a vast majority of the time that “intelligent” life has inhabited our earth (500,000 years), our planet was thought to be flat, where traveling to the edge might result in “falling off” into the unknown abyss.
Our scientific knowledge has evolved from a “flat earth” conception to an understanding of our miniscule presence in the vastness of the cosmos.
Our Sun is one of a septillion (10²⁴) of stars (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) in the known universe, more than all the grains of sand on earth.
The nearest star to our Sun is Proxima Centauri, a small red dwarf star located about 4.24 light-years away from our earth in the constellation Centaurus. The light from this star, traveling at 186,000 miles per second to our earth, left that body of light some 40 years ago.
Our planet… our spaceship is like a single grain of sand out of all the beaches and deserts on earth… orbiting our sun… orbiting OUR star…
Science informs us that our earth, our planet, is essentially a closed system spaceship orbiting around the Sun at around 67,000 mph (108,000 km/h), every twenty-four hours.
The Sun and Earth together orbit the Milky Way's center at roughly 483,000 mph (777,000 km/h), and our galaxy itself is moving through the universe at over 1.3 million mph (2,092,147 km/h); but our constant, incredibly rapid motion is… “imperceptible”.
We spend a tremendous amount of global resources trying to figure out how to leave our planet rather than making it the jewel of health and happiness it could be.
Global space spending reached a record $613 billion in 2024, with governments spending about $132 billion (22%) and the commercial sector taking the lion's share of $481 billion (78%).
So, as we fly through the cosmos at 1.3 million miles per hour, how are we faring on providing these needs for our population of 8.2 billion humans?
As our earth orbits our Sun, our central star… one of a septillion of stars in the known universe, are we as a species supporting ourselves with these most basic of human requirements?
If other life forms in the universe are looking at us, or they discover our earth spaceship in the future, how will we as a planet, as a species, look to them?
Currently 2.8 billion of us lack adequate housing; 2.3 billion of us deal with daily food insecurity; and 80–84% of our planet’s energy comes from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), which pollute our spaceship’s environment and cost billions through global warming.
How did we get here?
If there is similar life in the universe looking for other, similar life, is this the example we the inhabitants of earth would like other life to discover?
In 2025, what is keeping us from making sure that ALL of our fellow inhabitants have access to the basic needs of life: food, shelter, and clean dependable energy?
OUR CHALLENGE
It is far more likely that intelligent life in the universe will find us than we will find it.
Instead of spending billions of our precious resources each year trying to figure out how to escape our failures as a species, let’s do the far more affordable and possible task of making earth a model of universal health and happiness for the rest of the universe to discover and emulate.
Let’s use our resources to fully support our unique, beautiful, diverse gem of a spaceship and ALL of us who live here.
2025, the founding year of the Septillion Society, marks a paradigm shift in our understanding of our universe and our planet earth’s position and location in it.
Launched in December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is equipped with high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments, enabling investigations across many fields of astronomy and cosmology, such as observation of the first stars and the formation of the first galaxies, and detailed atmospheric characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets.
AI has spawned the development of personal communication tools which enable instant translation of most of our spoken languages in devices as small as the frames of our eyeglasses.
No longer are languages a barrier to communication, and we are at the infancy of this technology.
We know that basic healthy plants grown without pesticides and other chemical intervention supplies the best nutrition for human beings and yet we overly process our foods making them more expensive and less nutritious.
We know now that raising and consuming animal protein is less healthy for our bodies and for the planet’s environment.
Shelter too has become more defined by economic status, “nimby”, and commercial profitability and less about universal security, health and social interaction.
By zoning most of our cities in the 21st century, and other restrictions, we assured the rejection of a large portion of our fellow humans from proper, affordable shelter and the potential for home ownership.
SOME FUTURISTS
A new book published by The McKinsey Global Institute, A Century of Plenty, imagines a world in which everyone enjoys the prosperity of today’s richest nations.
Getting there by their target of 2100 will require growing the global economy by a factor of eight—a tall order, until you consider the sixfold growth in per capita incomes we’ve seen globally since the early 1920s.
“We can deliver the energy, food, resources, and economic dynamism necessary to reach this level of prosperity all while protecting the planet. It won’t be easy, and it will require both cooperation and compromise. But progress is a choice.”
— Bob Sternfels, global managing partner of McKinsey & Co., Time Magazine, December 2025.
In the 2025 bestseller Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson point out that:
“We are attached to a story of American decline that is centered around ideological disagreement… The story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities. Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen—that we could choose otherwise—is thrilling.”
Nelson Mandela, in his address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 1992 said:
“The new world that is being born foresees the dawn of the age of peace, in which wars within nations, between countries and among peoples will be a thing of the past. Motivated by nothing other than the fact of our common humanity and informed by the realization of the common destiny of the peoples of all continents, let us then do together what we can and must do together in the interests of all humanity, while each one of us also does what he or she must do in pursuit of their enlightened self-interest but recognizing, in the end, that no man is an island.”
OUR FOUNDING PRINCIPLES
The Septillion Society is founded on this fundamental principle:
Planet Earth today has the natural and human resources to assure that all its inhabitants have access to adequate food, shelter, and energy necessary to lead a happy and healthy life.
What is missing is that its inhabitants make the choice that these fundamentals are essential to our world… essential to our spaceship becoming the jewel of the universe.
Our planet receives enough sunlight every day to provide all the electricity necessary to power any endeavor humankind can conceive of, and the cost of capturing and distributing that energy is far less than the cost of extracting, processing, and distributing carbon-based fuels and cleaning their residue—and the price is improving daily.
We also know that our earth can provide enough healthy and minimally processed foods for all human beings to be nourished every day, promoting health and well-being.
We know as well that “basic shelter”… shelter that provides security, shelter that’s a barrier to weather extremes, and shelter that promotes social interaction is entirely possible to develop economically on most of earth’s solid surfaces.
OUR MISSION
The Septillion Society was formed to be an online forum and focused resource for positive ideas, information and discussions around how we become this jewel-like, prosperous planet for the rest of the universe to discover and emulate.