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Introduction
The following article is adapted from the first third of a pamphlet that I self-published at age 26, Our New Planet: An Economic Vision for a United States of Earth (1999). [Since 2004, after serving as interim president of Citizens for Global Solutions (formerly, World Federalist Association), Washington, D.C. Chapter, my views on world federalism have become more constructively critical and I have continued to serve as an officer with a more nuanced precursor organization, Association to Unite the Democracies since 2014.] Updates relevant to world events since 1999 are given in sentence form through footnotes along with regular sources. The later two thirds of my pamphlet will be published as two further articles on this blogsite. An autobiographical article from August 14, 2025 provides more social context from the 1980 timeframe and serves as an introduction to this three-part article.2
Overview: Money is not a force of nature
Money and all economic exchanges inhibit true free enterprise. We all have a passion that we want to study and contribute to civilization. However, most of us have to work at something other than our passion to survive, whether we live under capitalism, socialism or even if we barter.
We must eventually replace our present economic system based on money with a system that makes full use of human potential. My conclusions have been reached through many intense discussions with hundreds of people who posed questions that represent our current belief system. These conversations led me to write this pamphlet in a discussion format in the hope that a global dialogue will be sparked.
We can and should do everything that we can think of while we exist in the universe. Money does not have to make our current and only world go around. It is not a force of nature. We invented the tool of money and we can invent something better. That is what being human is all about. This message is about our new planets.
The reader is invited to consider the notion that too many of our world’s problems have a single common denominator, the lack of money. It really is that simple. What is not simple is untangling the web that we have woven since the dawn of civilization. I want to literally tear up our tangle-prone material, money and exchange itself and boost civilization into a new reality of interchange.
Scarcity-based tools: money, exchange, barter, capitalism and socialism
Conventional Wisdom (CW): The reason the world is so unjust is because people are greedy and power hungry.
Martin Schwab (MS): Human beings are not naturally greedy and power hungry. We become this way because making money is the only way that we can pursue significance. In capitalism, everybody is free to clamor after money, which has to be scarce for the system to function.
Socialism works from the same assumption of scarcity. Since the socialists think greed is bad, they only let a few power-hungry and greedy people at the top run everything under the guise of equality for the masses. Even in barter there is the temptation to gain some advantage in the exchange.
CW: You are implying that money is the root of all evil. Money is only a medium of exchange. The love of money and gaining an exchange advantage is the root of all evil.
MS: Money is not evil itself. However, its benefit to civilization relies on it being scarce, so the inevitable lack of it will always hurt someone. Even if all the money in the world was equally distributed, inflation would most likely occur. Even as capitalism operates at its best, there is always the legitimate fear of cyclical downturns.
Money is really an ineffectual tool because it does not let us do everything that we want to do. Money and exchange, based on economic scarcity unnecessarily force us to prioritize and budget. This is true in government, business and our personal lives. It is true that scarcity makes for creativity, but just think how much more creative we could be if we didn’t hold ourselves back with budgets that are based on scarcity. This pamphlet will show how this can be done.
CW: Isn’t challenging the money system unrealistic?
MS: Many people believe that. However, most ideas that have shaped history at first seemed unrealistic. For example, in the beginning of the twentieth century the early automobile was considered a novelty compared to the reliable horse and buggy.
The idea of heavier than air powered flight was a crazy dream held only by a few around the planet. The fact that I grew up near Dayton, Ohio where Wilbur and Orville Wright advanced the science of flight has influenced me to take on this seemingly impossible task.
If the Wright brothers can liberate humanity from gravity, we can start the process of liberating humankind from money and all self imposed economic systems based on the exchange of scarcity. Again, this includes socialism.
Delivering this message may make me look like I think I have all the answers, but I do not. We all have a lot of serious talking to do. We need to think about this message and talk to one another about its merits and deficiencies. Only through this process will our co-invention, an exchange-free economy come to fruition.
There are those who think that rich people will not give up status and power by giving up money. This pamphlet will show that even so-called rich people can have an exponentially higher standard of living if they give up the self-defeating structure of money and exchange. Why? Because the quality of goods and services will increase when people are following their passions beyond what our artificial scarcity-based budgets can yield.3
Plato’s cave allegory4 and civilizational vision
In Republic, Plato writes an allegory about the process and social obligation of attaining true knowledge. This allegory applies to all of us because at some point in our lives, we all see how something on our homeplanet could be much better.5 Human civilization needs to do a better job of listening to and evaluating unconventional ideas because this is how we will advance the quality of life for our species.
Plato implied that our lack of knowledge based on perception deficits is like being chained from birth in a cave. Our heads have been locked in place, so that all we see are shadows on the wall of the cave, cast by a fire behind us. Near the fire are others walking and making shadows with cut-out forms. Plato then has us imagine that one of the chained prisoners is taken from the chains to the fire, which he has never directly seen. At first, the prisoner is blinded and fights to go back to his chains. Gradually his eyes adjust to the fire.
Then the prisoner is forced out of the cave. Again, the prisoner is blinded and fights to go back into the cave. Outside the cave, the prisoner looks down at the ground because it is the only thing that resembles the cave wall. As night comes, he begins to look up at the starlight. When the day returns, he looks into a clear stream and sees the reflection of flowers. Then he looks up and realizes what he has been missing and what his fellow prisoners have been missing.
The released prisoner is then allowed to go back into the cave to convince the others to go out of the cave. The released prisoner is blinded again as his eyes reenter the darkness. The others notice that he can’t see the shadows as well as they can, so they conclude that going outside of the cave has ruined his eyesight and they pledge to kill anyone who tries to force them to go out of the cave.
The ideas expressed in this pamphlet should be seen as a way out of unnecessary pain and infuriating frustration for those who realize that our economic structures, capitalist and socialist can be discarded for a structure that is truly optimal, not just improved based on flawed functional designs from past centuries.
CW: But people can never agree on anything or understand any message in the same way. Violence usually results from some sort of disagreement or lack of understanding. People are not angels. That’s why we have government and laws. How will this message be easily interpreted?
To those who still have faith in the positive potential of humanity
MS: We have the potential for evil within us, but there is also the potential for good. If you believe that human beings are naturally and totally evil and must be coerced by institutions, money and government to do the right thing, we might as well part ways. I would like to convince those human beings who still have faith in humanity to do their part in creating the right conditions to allow for the good part of humanity to flourish.
Then, under those conditions, we would not need as much government. Perhaps some day we would not need any government or laws in the way that we define them today. True self-government, guided by individual conscience and self-discipline should be our ultimate goal.
CW: Well, that all sounds nice, but how do you get from here to there?6
Buckminster Fuller’s global electric grid and the interchange loop
MS: There are people who already interchange their time. They are the highly successful artists, writers, musicians, athletes, some computer programmers and the type of scientists who work on projects that are so interesting that time accelerates past the moment of super focus.
We do not have to depend on luck to be one of these people. We all should be engaged in our work as elite professionals are, as opposed to economic elitists, without the concern of the money system taxing (literally) our creativity.
This philosophy of interchange has its precedents. Today, the Salvation Army, Goodwill Industries, Volunteers of America and our public libraries interchange goods and services. Of course, they do not always offer the greatest selection of goods. However, the point is that structures can enable interchange between a supply and a demand without always engaging in any direct exchange with their customers. So, the economic structure that I advocate can function like the above organizations but with better goods and services than we find across all of human civilization today.
An interchange loop can begin with energy abundance, which is now possible. Decades ago, Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) proposed harnessing renewable energy available to us from the sun, wind, waterfalls and waves.
It is always sunny and windy at some point on the planet just as there are waterfalls and waves at some points. Fuller had the idea of building a global power grid connecting all continents via the Bering Straits where Alaska meets Russia.
Energy abundance could drive the automation of many of the undesirable and tedious tasks that humans need not spend their time doing. If a task cannot be automated, there is no reason that task still couldn’t be performed by people working for short periods of time for the sole reward of honor. Honor is what could drive us to care for the mentally ill and the elderly, also for short shifts with many taking turns to serve. Energy abundance and automation simply open up our options.
Energy abundance and automation in general could free all people to be able to do the type of creative jobs that if money were no option, people would do. These include engineering automobiles, planning cities, designing clothing, growing and cooking food, etc.7
So far, no one has figured out how to charge people for the oxygen we breathe. Why? Because it is everywhere, a truly abundant source of energy to anyone who is alive. This is the same dynamic that would occur with Buckminster Fuller’s global electric grid which offers us freedom in the form of abundant energy.
In part, this pamphlet was re-inspired by the possibilities that Buckminster Fuller gave to the homeplanet. More will be written about how to establish Fuller’s grid concept because it is the first of three goals that this pamphlet outlines as a way to transcend class and bring human beings together – the true spirit of this work and Fuller’s work.
The reader is referred to look up the works of Buckminster Fuller and to locate the Buckminster Fuller Institute or the Global Energy Network Institute (GENI), either at your local library or over the internet for a more detailed account of this exciting concept.8
The global carrying capacity as the only regulation on true free enterprise and the significance of recycling and water desalination
We should be allowed to consume or use automated or creatively constructed goods and services with zeal with our trash and vehicles being fed back into the creativity loop through automated recycling. Under the scarcity-based economic systems of capitalism and socialism, recycling is not optimized because in many instances, it is cheaper for manufacturers to make new materials than to buy recycled material.9
For the first time in history, every human could choose to enjoy an abundance of industrial materialism while being regulated only by global carrying capacity and sensible zoning laws. (Global carrying capacity is a term for that which a planet’s natural resources can provide for its current and future inhabitants.10)
Like recycling, desalination of Earth’s ocean water is not a feasible option within global capitalism, because under the constraints of both scarcity-based economic systems, it is too expensive for most nations of the planet. Within the context of an emerging multi-planet human civilization over the coming centuries, desalination could be a feasible option to the projected water shortage for our growing population in many areas of our homeplanet.
CW: If nobody had to worry about providing for themselves, wouldn’t this just encourage people to have more children? Isn’t that just a recipe for overpopulation?
Population control
MS: In order to live in accordance with nature and the global carrying capacity, the population on Earth will have to reach a plateau. Actually, an effect of Fuller’s grid concept noted above is that when societies have electricity for medicine and food, both infant mortality and compensatory over reproduction go down. To me, population concentration is our challenge, not overpopulation.11 Total human population can be spread out more evenly, meaning less densely over and when necessary, under a more physically connected homeplanet via high speed rail. This will be discussed in more depth in the section on land use planning at the beginning of part three of three in this article series.
Remember, given our already large and potentially though not inevitably growing human population, there is and can remain enough variety of interest and capability to account for all that is currently being produced. Since all humans could be working intensely at what we enjoy doing instead of that which we somehow find to get paid to do, all of us could enjoy resulting higher quality goods and services. No one need suffer from being over-stressed because people could be encouraged to work for only as long as passions dictate, predicted to be far more high quality hours than current workforces record.
CW: Besides honor, what would stop people from just watching television?12
The discoveries of Dr. Maria Montessori (1870-1952)
MS: Human beings want to pursue that which contributes to their own significance. This, not unlimited leisure time, is what makes us happy. We don’t want to be statues. Nobody wants to be a “freeloader.”
Given the right not to work, people might travel and find themselves, then like retired persons do now, would naturally want to contribute out of self interest without concern for profit. Having been educated by and having taught in the Montessori method, I believe in its design.13 It takes grades out of the reward structure. It takes us out of Plato’s cave allegory as previously discussed.
If the Montessori method can work without grades for an educational system, then our homeplanet can function without money as a reward for a system of economics. I have also extrapolated Montessori’s method to offer my view of our core motivations:
1) To explore our surroundings
2) To create technology and art
3) To belong by earning appreciation through contribution to others
The aim of every worthy human life is to bring about this trilogy through self-pacing, self-motivation and self-discipline, the latter of which is the only element that must be modeled. The rest is discovery work. This is why modeling self-discipline to our children at an early age in an environment where they can explore, create and earn appreciation through contributing to others is vital to continued human self-preservation.
To do this effectively, Montessori teachers are taught to follow the principles of order, simplicity and aesthetics in how they set up the work environment. This is how we can set up work environments in our fledgling multi-planetary civilization. We can eliminate unnecessary complexities with which our money exchange systems clutter our minds such as insurance, student loan payments and 30 year mortgage plans.
CW: There is still something about your “interchange loop” that smacks of socialism. Maybe because it sounds like no one could fail.
MS: Across our new planets, anticipated and honorable loss of human life would occur while ensuring that the human endeavor continues by physically expanding across emerging reality.
How interchange and true free enterprise are different from socialism, capitalism and all systems of exchange, including barter
From the Oxford Color Dictionary/Thesaurus (1996): Exchange (verb): Give or receive in place of another thing. Interchange (verb): Cause to change places. Alternate (noun): Road junction where streams of traffic do not cross on the same level.
MS: Think of an economic interchange as similar to driving a car on a freeway in light traffic. Forget for a moment the taxes we pay for freeways within our artificial scarcity-based economic paradigm. Visualize the experience. When driving, we occupy our own spaces and times on the road which represents human civilization. We are “captains of our own [road] ships.” We are free to enter and exit the freeway as we choose. The whole point of a freeway is to change places, to see new vistas and experience new things. In an interchange economy, changing jobs would occur more frequently to accommodate the interests and changing abilities of the drivers of civilization, all individual humans thinking and striving in concert toward common goals, though with different approaches.
Imagine if NASA (United States), JAXA (Japan), Roscosmos (Russia), ISRO (India) and CNSA (China) personnel could carry on with unparalleled vigor and imagination while their needs and consumption desires are provided for by the economic interchange traffic pattern. Their food might be grown by those who love to work in organic gardens. Their houses might be built by those who love to work with straw-bale or adobe construction. Their children might be educated by librarians, museum curators and retired astronauts.
Conversely, an economic exchange is inevitably enmeshed, on the same level, hands and thoughts entangled, jammed. Most people are never truly comfortable coughing up money to pay for something. There is usually a sense of guilt that one should be saving their money for a rainy day. In an economic interchange there is no this for that. Instead, there is this, that and many other distinct and separate possibilities for consumption and production. There is always somebody on some stretch of road by his or her own choice. No demand would ever go unsupplied.
Like a freeway system, in economic interchange there would be order, simplicity and aesthetics. Imagine having to pay somebody to pass him or her on a freeway. Imagine how absurd it would be to roll down your window to hand over the money and get a receipt. This is how absurd our current economic exchanges inhibit our flow of achievement.
Free enterprise means taking individual initiative to offer a solution to a problem and earning respect and recognition, not money from others. This basic need inherent in all humans will ensure quality products on Earth and across space.
Interchange would use private employment agencies and guidance counselors or perhaps even rely on the internet to find out what we as human beings naturally want to explore and create and then find ways for each of us to earn respect by matching ourselves to projects that we as civilization want to achieve. Instead of transactions, trades, buying and selling, there could be just actions, placing yourself in the employment of your interests while ordering whatever you desire in accordance with the global carrying capacity.
Free enterprise is often associated with capitalism. Capitalism, which has to be scarce for the musical-chair-like game of capitalism to function slows down the natural course of all players to play free enterprise. Under capitalism, to follow your dreams – to open a business, to acquire a house you are subject to the mercy of a capitalist in a bank.
On a personal note, two of my four half brothers are bankers. These relatives want to get money to deserving free enterprisers so they can follow their dreams but they cannot get money to everyone. Part of my message is that in true free enterprise, we need only prove ourselves to our customers/consumers, which in the right conditions is a natural motivation. The current system does function, but too slowly and without enough intrinsic ambition, avarice being distinct from and not even a low form of ambition. A society structured by Fuller’s energy abundance, the potentials of automation, the global carrying capacity and simply adequate multi-planetary leadership could allow for us to fulfill all of our passions over the course of our life expectations.
The tool of money was invented for convenience beyond barter and it can still be convenient in times of actual scarcity in localized emergency situations. For the system of money and exchange to function, an environment of scarcity is needed and in my view was created artificially by ancient oligarchs and maintained by their imitators ever since, seduced by the allure of maintaining social hierarchy for its own sake instead of catalyzing intrinsic mass human achievement; individual, civilizational and multi-generational.14
In our present economic systems, whenever there is a slight abundance of currency, inflation occurs. By now, human civilization should be at a point where energy scarcity is no more and technologically we are able to do this. However, our common adaptation to artificial scarcity over millennia since the invention of money in ancient Mesopotamia after the Agricultural Revolution and associated status consciousness have prevented us up to this point in time from inventing and adopting an economic structure based on practical and natural energy abundance thus decelerating the human endeavor.
Natural abundance-based interchange could achieve coordinated production, distribution and consumption of goods and services [definition of economics, Webster’s College Dictionary (1992)] at astronomically high levels without the side effects of budget limitations and class divisions. Note that Webster’s definition says nothing about exchange being necessary for an economy to exist.
With simple scheduling, instead of receiving money for work or even a barter exchange, we could work on a variety of projects for part of the day and spend most of our time with family or following whatever other bliss we want. Eventually, work on projects such as space stations, sky cars, growing healthy food in our home gardens and historic home preservation might become our time-absorbing bliss and individual legacies of lives well-lived in the context of perpetual multi-generational human achievement.
Under the artificial exchange-of-scarcity structured economies of socialism and capitalism, most people have to work to live. Within an interchange economy, combined with automation to do the really undesirable work, all humans can say that he or she lives to work in whatever field that he or she is most interested.
CW: Isn’t your proposal just another utopia?
Not another utopian failure: The potential of interchange and true free enterprise
MS: My outline here is designed to foster achievable options for preventing human extinction and by so doing, enhancing human civilization across the solar system and beyond. Buckminster Fuller wrote a book called Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (1969). In the sense that he uses the word “utopia,” that may indeed be our choice in the ever-present. Beyond the direct translation from Greek of utopia meaning “no place” or socially unrealistic, the long tradition of utopian literature, beginning in ancient Greece is to construct an ideal for current times in order to challenge and reveal the moral deficiencies of governing structures.15
If we can free ourselves from our artificial scarcity-based budgets since ancient Mesopotamia, there is already much to keep everyone busy and interested in life. Again, experiences through all of life could be similar to how life is experienced for those of us who become lucky enough to enjoy retirement now. Many retirees say they keep themselves busier and potentially more productive/effective in retirement than during their years working to accumulate sufficient capital.
We could build a series of space stations from at least Earth to Mars by 2100, terraform Mars, build every human being a sky car or access to high speed rail and underground rail tubes that can safely get to any point on Earth within a matter of hours or less, design luxury apartments within our deteriorating historic districts and engage in the most important project of all, learning how to live with nature and not against it, initially across our homeplanet.
CW: Nothing is free. There is always a catch. What is your catch? How do you avoid the creation of a police state under the name of a multi-planetary democratic government? Life is about gaining power. If we didn’t use money for power, we would use something else.
Quid pro quo (quid provokes woe)
MS: We would simply be more free, just as we gained freedom when the United States declared independence from English monarchy in 1776 and achieved it in 1783. We didn’t need monarchy to keep order then and we do not need money to keep order now. Is money perhaps the real police state that we are all rebelling against now? In 1992, after the Los Angeles riots, Rodney King, who had been at the center of the controversy leading to the riots, exclaimed famously, “can’t we all just get along?”
We commonly say that money can ruin friendships. If this is taken as a truth, then we are letting money come between sincere human interactions in our civilization. Just think if it were not for the ever-present “me first” mind-set that is perpetuated in all of us who are forced to play the money exchange game. We could all be friends of a kind; we could all get along more easily. Our tool of money pits everyone against each other for a piece of scarce goods, again, as in a childish and demeaning game of musical chairs.
A humorist friend of mine made me a bumper sticker with the slogan “quid pro quo (quid provokes woe)” after hearing me talk about the ideas presented here. “Quid” is a British term for their currency, the British Pound, like “buck” is for the United Stated Dollar. It is a clever and sophisticated slogan because it is not just our money that provokes woe or troubles but often times the expectations that go along with any form of exchange of this for that or quid pro quo.
The nature of power
1) The power over others is not as great as the power with others to achieve goals
2) The power over nature is not as great as power with nature
3) The power of anger is not as great as the power of kindness
Team sports is analogous to human civilization. The “ball hog” is to the detriment of the team as the greedy profiteer is to a harmonious civilization. This message is about choosing an alternative to the current necessity of being a profiteer to survive. An advanced alien civilization observing our economic systems would most likely regard us with frustration, just as we regard our five year olds when they play soccer. In both cases, everybody is pursuing the scarce “ball” without any sense of teamwork, thus usually and ironically missing their chance to handle the ball and exercise a productive role towards the team effort.
CW: But exchanging resources is one of the things that makes us unique from other animals. It has enabled us to build civilizations.
Painting of violent tigers in London office of Salomon Brothers International
MS: In the fall of 1993, as an undergraduate intern with the Federal Trust for Education and Research, a think tank in London, I attended an economic conference at the London office of Salomon Brothers International (now Salomon Smith Barney, a member of Citigroup), a United States trading firm, concerning the Maastricht treaty of 1992. This treaty set out the guidelines for the European Economic Union to move towards a common currency, the ECU (European Currency Unit), later becoming the Euro in 1999 for use by institutions and by citizens in 2002.16
On a wall was a painting of two tigers prominently displayed. One tiger was ripping its claws into the other tiger, drawing blood while the other tiger snarled its teeth. This is clearly the mindset of many capitalists who claim they make the world go around with their capital.
What may really make us unique from other animals is that we can change our social order mechanisms. Because we are human beings, we can go from exchanging ancient and artificial tokens of scarcity originally designed to better facilitate prostitution to interchanging all of our talents in true free enterprise by modernizing the original world situation of practical energy abundance – not a mythic Garden of Eden but a revamped hunter-gatherer society on a multi-global scale, followed by a multi-galactic scale by future humans as part of our multi-generational civilization.17
We could also choose to live more simply not as a matter of necessity but as a matter of taste. That will be discussed later in the section on reconnecting with our common human indigenous cultures. However, people should never be forced to live simply. The practice could be encouraged, but we could also have fun with energy abundance and mass recycling in accordance with the global carrying capacity. There could be widespread consumption without guilt, followed later by a transformation to live simply and strive toward emotional and spiritual goals as more intrinsically rewarding.
CW: We have rich people and poor people. They distrust each other. How do you plan to overcome that distrust?
The second article in this three-part series will answer the above question based on Marx’s (1818-1883) diagnosis minus his prescription.18
REFERENCES
1. Charles Q. Choi, “Water on Mars: The story so far,” Astrobiology at NASA, October 14, 2016 (last update August 30, 2025). https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/water-on-mars-the-story-so-far/. See also, Robert Sanders, “Ancient beaches testify to long-ago ocean on Mars: Chinese rover finds underground evidence of beach sediments likely deposited 4 billion years ago,” UC Berkeley News, February 24, 2025. https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/02/24/ancient-beaches-testify-to-long-ago-ocean-on-mars/. See also, “Study: Chinese Rover Finds Evidence of Ancient Ocean on Mars,” VOA Learning English, November 17, 2024. https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/study-chinese-rover-finds-evidence-of-ancient-ocean-on-mars/7864381.html. See also, “Terraforming Mars,” in Robert Zubrin and Richard Wagner, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must (2011, 1996). https://archive.org/details/caseformarsplant00zubr/page/n7/mode/2up and https://elmoukrie.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/the-case-for-mars_resized.pdf. “The Case for Mars” (book), Wikipedia, webpage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars. See also, Christopher P. McKay, Owen B. Toon and James F. Kasting, “Making Mars habitable,” Nature 352 (August 1991): 489-96. https://www.nature.com/articles/352489a0. See also, Erika Alden DeBenedictis, Edwin S. Kite, Robin D. Wordsworth, Nina L. Lanza, Charles S. Cockell, Pamela A. Silver, Ramses M. Ramirez, John Cumbers, Hooman Mohseni, Christopher E. Mason, Woodward W. Fischer and Christopher P. McKay, “The case for Mars terraforming research,” Nature Astronomy 9 (May 2025), 634-39. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02548-0. All retrieved September 2, 2025.
2. Martin Schwab, “An optimal form of economics, in the making since 1980,” 3×3 Global Drills, August 14, 2025. https://3x3globaldrills.com/2025/08/14/an-optimal-form-of-economics-in-the-making-since-1980/. Retrieved August 27, 2025.
3. A comparable argument based on defacto natural abundance is made by financial economist, Armen Papazian though his motivation seems more focused on current economic system preservation through adaptation than systemic evolution or transformation as is mine. See, “‘A product that can save a system’ – Armen Papazian,” Chair for Ethics and Financial Norms (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), posted February 4, 2016 (1:51:02): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_vXWf2-kLQ. See also, Armen Papazian, Space Exploration and Money Mechanics: An Evolutionary Challenge (2012). http://www.isdhub.com/seammaec011112final.pdf. See also, Armen V. Papazian, The Space Value of Money: Rethinking Finance Beyond Risk & Time (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/978-1-137-59489-1. See also, Martin Schwab (Vimeo), “Abundance-based interchange economics for preventing human extinction,” recorded July 19, 2018 (4:50): https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/282428436. See also, Martin Schwab (YouTube), “Abundance-based Global Currency” 1-4, 3×3 Global Drills Worksheet Series, August-September 2017. https://www.youtube.com/user/martinschwab1/. All retrieved August 14, 2025.
4. “Allegory of the cave,” Wikipedia, webpage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave. Retrieved September 4, 2025.
5. Martin A. Schwab, Homeplanet Defense: Synergizing the Global Populace to Subdue a Brutal Universe (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: FriesenPress, 2014). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22267791-homeplanet-defense. See also, Martin A. Schwab, Prospects for Collaborative Power in a Brutal Universe, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawaii, 2012. https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/f71abd7c-66fb-4d25-898f-e61f357cc386/content. See also, Martin A. Schwab, Homeplanet Defense: Strategic Thought for a World in Crisis (West Conshoshocken, Pennsylvania: Infinity Publishing, 2005). http://www.buybooksontheweb.com/product.aspx?ISBN=0-7414-2597-1. All retrieved August 14, 2025.
6. “Social Theory of International Politics” (1999 book by Alexander Wendt, Ohio State University), Wikipedia, webpage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Theory_of_International_Politics. Retrieved September 4, 2025.
7. In 1999, the term automation was used in this work to imply mechanistic means other than rudimentary artificial intelligence that are still under human control and maintenance, not always so with artificial intelligence since 2022.
8. Buckminster Fuller Institute. https://www.bfi.org/. Global Energy Network Institute (GENI). https://www.geni.org/. Both retrieved August 28, 2025.
9. Jennifer Sutton, “Why is it cheaper to make new plastic bottles than to recycle old ones?” MIT School of Engineering, December 15, 2009. https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/why-is-it-cheaper-to-make-new-plastic-bottles-than-to-recycle-old-ones/. Retrieved September 5, 2025.
10. “Carrying capacity,” Wikipedia, webpage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity. See also, Joel E. Cohen, “How many people can the Earth support?” The Journal of Population and Sustainability 2, no. 1 (Autumn 2017), 37-42. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353942585_How_many_people_can_the_Earth_support. See also, Federico Pulselli and Luca Coscieme (2023), “Earth’s carrying capacity.” In Filomina Maggino, editor, Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research, Second Edition, Springer Nature, 1939-41. https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-031-17299-1_800#citeas. See also, James Quilligan, “What Earth supplies and what we need: Carrying capacity as a guide for regional and planetary governance and sustainability,” Resillience, webpage. March 21, 2025. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-03-21/what-earth-supplies-and-what-we-need-carrying-capacity-as-a-guide-for-regional-and-planetary-governance-and-sustainability/. All retrieved August 27, 2025.
11. Since 1999, I have changed my mind on the need for population plateau across Earth, independent of reasons to explore beyond Earth and our solar system. Over the years, I concluded that it was reasonable that Earth’s carrying capacity alone can support exponential human population increase if we do not assume current consumption levels and carbon output from all heavily concentrated population centers, not just those in China – a point I stressed forcefully across a seminar table to a fellow graduate student from China at the University of Hawaii in about 2010. After careful reflection during this same timeframe, it became clear to me that a cadre of self-absorbed aging Baby Boomer professionals had been entranced for decades by static-tribal and establishment-left thinking, epitomized by Paul R. Erlich, The Population Bomb (1968), wedded to the romantic, novel and seemingly progressive-sophisticated idea during that timeframe that humans are inherently more of a threat to nature than vice versa.
12. “Television,” given as a pejorative in 1999 and decades earlier for non-engagement with our time-limited gifts of life can be extended in 2025 to include other addictions, such as to: internet scrolling, sugar, tobacco, starchy and/or processed “comfort foods,” methamphetamine, fentanyl, alcohol, gamification including to game theory as applied to international relations and money manipulation; all originating in hindsight to “gateway escapisms,” including but not limited to romantic novels, card games, ornate gardening, pool sharking, roller coasters, zoos, golf, tennis, fishing, watch collecting, art collecting, gambling, prostitution, online shopping, identity dysfunction through organized youth sports, marbles, checkers, chess and go – all perverted forms of ancient Rome’s bread and circus pacification of populations, including of elite gladiators.
13. Nightingale Montessori; Springfield, Ohio, United States. www.nightingaleschool.org. See also, Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind (Adyar and Madras, India: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1949). https://archive.org/details/absorbentmind031961mbp/page/n7/mode/2up. Both retrieved September 8, 2025.
14. See Robert Wokler, Rousseau: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 65-66. See also, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” Philosophy – human development section, Wikipedia, webpage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau. Retrieved September 20, 2025. Of all political philosophy, Western, Eastern and now in consideration of southern and northern identities, this contribution most resembles Rousseau’s thinking in that he loathed political hierarchy itself as opposed to arguing who should command political hierarchy or which policies should be enacted by hierarchies. However, Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) is still based on a competitive model between governors and governed. The mental model of this work is not competitive within nations nor among nations as Hans Morgenthau (1904-80) conceived in his time but rather synergistic among all individual humans, all given as noble per Rousseau’s understanding but playing their lives out to the same sheet of music – our common interest of human self-preservation in a brutal universe, a concept Rousseau might appreciate as he was also a music composer. The concept of synergy might be more appreciated by Rousseau’s father who was a watchmaker in Geneva.
15. In Gordon S. Haight’s introduction of Bacon’s Essays and New Atlantis (New York: Walter J. Black, Inc., 1942), xvi, he writes of New Atlantis: “It is one of the famous utopias, those accounts of an ideal world in which authors reveal what is wrong with their own.” See also, “List of utopian literature,” Wikipedia, webpage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_utopian_literature. See also, “Utopia,” Wikipedia, webpage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia. Both retrieved September 10, 2025.
16. “euro (currency unit),” Britannica Money, webpage. https://www.britannica.com/money/euro. Retrieved August 28, 2025.
17. See also, Buzz Aldrin and Leonard David, Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Books, 2013. https://buzzaldrin.com/mission-to-mars-my-vision-for-space-exploration/. See also, Robert Zubrin, Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999). https://archive.org/details/enteringspacecre00zubr/page/n5/mode/2up. See also, Guillermo Sohnlein, “Why I am Shifting My Focus Toward Venus,” Guillermo Sohnlein, October 1, 2021. https://www.sohnlein.com/why-i-am-shifting-my-focus-toward-venus/. See also, 100 Year Starship. 100yss.org. All retrieved September 11, 2025.
18. “Karl Marx,” Wikipedia, webpage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx. Retrieved November 25, 2025.
3x3 GLOBAL DRILLS 