Remember the Future: An Earth Day Love Letter
Today is Earth Day. Six years ago today, on the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, I launched United Planet from the living room of Civana House in San Francisco — a historic mansion built on the ancient gathering well of the Ohlone People. Eight of us, locked down, unable to function as the prototype Planetary Embassy we had become, decided to do the only thing that made sense: throw a festival for the future.
We reached out to our network and within four days organised 100 speakers, performers, and musicians across four virtual stages. We live-streamed a lunch from 2030 to an audience of 40,000+ people. Charles Eisenstein, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheal, Amanda Sage and others joined. I spoke about a Planetary Hat-trick — three plays that would shape the Golden Decade: the United Planet Game, a new Gaian Language, and the Greatest Celebration of All Time.
I launched the Gaian Oath:
We are a United Planet. I am Gaian. On my honour, I commit to a thriving civilisation in harmony with all life.
That was six years ago. What follows is where we are now, how we got here, and where this is all going.
I. The Threshold
I want to do something different with this Earth Day. I want to remember the present — to look at this exact moment with the same clarity we might look back on it from the future, and ask: what was actually happening here? What was being born?
We are living through what I believe is a civilisation threshold — not an ending, but a phase shift. In a single generation, we have watched the ice caps recede, artificial intelligence surpass human performance on tasks we thought were ours alone, and trust in every major institution drop to levels not seen since the invention of polling. The dystopian and separation culture has reached new heights. I see more clearly than ever the fragility of extractive late-stage capitalism and the hollowness of the mainstream narrative that conquers the collective with fear.
And yet.
Something else is happening that doesn’t make the headlines. All over the world — in bioregions and boardrooms, in ecovillages and engineering labs — people are building something new. Not incrementally reforming the old. Building. We’re designing regenerative food systems in Ibiza and cooperative economies in Costa Rica. We’re prototyping planetary intelligence in Baja and Gross National Happiness in Bhutan. We’re crossing the Atlantic with Earth One’s ship discussing what civilisation could be, and gathering in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid to play the UP Game and remember the future.
I know this because I’ve spent the last six years in the middle of it.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
— Buckminster Fuller
We took Fuller at his word. Instead of fighting what’s broken, we decided to build what’s next — and to do it through the most powerful technology humanity has ever invented: collective imagination in action.
And the tool we found to unlock it was hiding in plain sight.
II. How We Got Here
The story begins before United Planet. It begins with time.
In January 2019, I threw a “Remember the Future” celebration in Davos — set in 2030 — inviting leaders to come into the future and celebrate the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. People queued around the block. The evening made it into the New York Times. And I realised almost instantly that time itself was a powerful tool to flip the script.
In a world conquered by dystopia, the narrative is the front line. And time — the fourth dimension we take for granted — might be the missing ingredient to create what Fuller called the Design Science Decade. I began exploring how a game could be used to redesign our world. Creating what Fuller had called the World Game. We call it the UP Game.
I had been studying the non-linear nature of time for years. The Ancient Greeks understood this intimately. They didn’t have one word for time — they had several. Chronos is clock time, the linear ticking that governs our schedules. Kairos is the right moment — the infinite potential now, where past, present, and future exist at once. The Greeks used a rite of passage called the Eleusinian Mysteries for nearly 2,000 years that would take every leader in Athens through an experience of stepping outside of time in order to design the optimal society based on eternal truths.
I use the analogy of time as an Ancient Future river. By seeing the whole river rather than one part of it, we gain the foresight of the past and the hindsight of the future. Imagine time as a long line stretching from past to present to future. Now turn that line on its head and look down at it through a single point — where past, present, and future converge. This is the Ancient Future perspective. It is the vantage point at the basis of everything we do.
Einstein wrote that “the only distinction between the past, present and the future is a stubbornly persistent illusion.” He also said you don’t solve problems with the same level of thinking that created them. What he was pointing towards was dimensional thinking. When we include the fourth dimension of time in our thinking, we see with new perspectives entirely.
This is the hypothesis behind our theory of change, which I call Quantum Time: reverse-engineering the future from a clear vision of desired outcomes is more effective than incrementally improving the present state of crises. Rather than optimising a broken system, we inhabit the achieved future, then work backwards to identify the milestones and actions that made it real.
We don’t predict the future. We remember it. We call this immersive experience Design Play.
From Civana House to 36 Games Across 26 Countries
Those early experiments were raw. After the lockdowns cancelled our Esalen retreat in March 2020, I meditated on what to do and put together an initial plan for the first United Planet (UP) Game the next day. We kicked off with daily sessions — Yin inner practice followed by Yang collective visioning. We formed councils and alliances around regenerative futures. I ran sprints on Sound for Health, Food for Health, Community Impact and many more topics. I hosted Dinner Portals where we live-streamed conversations from Civana House to audiences of over a thousand people.
Then in 2021, during what would have been Burning Man week at the beginning of September, the game went physical. And everything changed. I invited 60 leading changemakers to Ibiza to live in the future for six days — and we stayed for a month. An explosion of creativity was launched.
What happens when you take 30–60 visionary leaders — founders, artists, elders, musicians, investors, indigenous wisdom keepers, scientists, and troublemakers — and drop them into a stunning bioregion for six days with a simple invitation: remember the future?
Not predict it. Not plan for it. Remember it — as if it had already happened, and your job was to recall how we got there.
The experiment worked. Spectacularly. Over five years, we’ve now run 36 UP Games across 26 countries on 6 continents:
Decentralised Burn (Ibiza) · Regenerative Communities (Costa Rica) · Time Ritual (Damanhur, Italy) · The Premiere (Ibiza) · Gaian Symphony (Ibiza) · Decompressing Dreams (Ibiza) · Planetary Nation (Ibiza) · Ancient Future (Egypt) · Neverending Story (Davos) · Fractal Universe (Bali) · Paradise Found (Formentera) · Golden Age (Switzerland) · Tanit’s Theatre (Ibiza) · Borderless Futures (Puerto Rico) · Arabian Dreams (Dubai) · Antarctica’s Atlas (Antarctica) · Magic Mountain (Davos) · Divine Play (Rajasthan) · Regenerative Village (Anandwan, India) · Portugal Portal (Portugal) · Kismet Unions (Ibiza) · The Regeneration (Ibiza) · Gaian Airship (Burning Man) · Climate Week (New York) · Earth Ship (Atlantic Crossing) · Pura Vida (Costa Rica) · Gaian Civilisation (Davos) · Light Alliance (Dominican Republic) · Ubuntu Land (South Africa) · Ibizan Inspiration (Ibiza) · Planetary Peace (Ireland) · Tomorrow Today (Burning Man) · Planetary Happiness (Bhutan) · Starseed Universe (Guatemala) · Gaian Vision (Switzerland) · Planetary Intelligence (Mexico).
More than 1,000 Gaians from over 100 nations. Over 220 days of immersive future-making. More than 3,000 hours of filmed content — the world’s largest positive story of the future. We’ve played in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid and on the ice of Antarctica. We designed futures while whale watching off Baja and hiking through the sacred mountains of Bhutan. We’ve filmed four UP Games in Davos during the World Economic Forum — and each time, played a fundamentally different game than the one happening inside the Congress Centre.
My father, Count Arthur Tarnowski, died when I was 28. He taught me that privilege is not a possession but a responsibility — a debt to the future that compounds with each generation that fails to pay it. When my daughter Leonie was born, I understood that everything I was building had to be worthy of the world she would inherit. United Planet is my answer to that debt. It is my attempt to live as a great ancestor.
How the Game Works
Each UP Game follows an elemental architecture developed from ancient future wisdom — inspired by the Eleusinian Mysteries, the four directions, and initiatory practices that have guided civilisations for millennia. The game opens on Time Day — a deliberate shedding of Chronos. We focus on starting from a place where time itself is on our side rather than what we are racing against. We imagine time as a river where we can travel upstream in order to flow downstream with the current. We then form four elemental teams out of everyone participating in the UP Game. Gaians choose their team based on their mission. Each elemental team has a living mythology that has been storied by the 36 teams gone before them. Each has Gaian Goals that anchor the immersive experiences created each day. The four teams are:
💧 Water — Community abundance, wealthy commons, regenerative living, clean water. The architecture of belonging.
🔥 Fire — Gender harmony, peace & justice, systemic transformation, circular economics. The furnace of culture.
🌬 Air — Health & wellbeing, societal thriving, unleashing potential, nourishing food. The breath of all life.
🌍 Earth — Planetary health, ocean stewardship, ubiquitous energy, land stewardship. Our living foundation.
The sixth day culminates as Aether Day, when the four teams become one — embodying the Ubuntu spirit: I am because we are.
The closing ceremony invites Gaians to re-enter linear time as conscious ancestors to the seven generations that follow. We close by embodying our seventh-generation descendants in 2180, celebrating the life of their ancestor — ourselves — and the role we played on the transition team.
Teams enter the intelligent field together. The game rewards collective flow, not individual performance. The core principle: coherence through harmonic flow, unlocking the potential that was always there.
The Science Behind the Game
This isn’t retreat programming. This isn’t a conference with breakout sessions. This is a technology of transformation — grounded in science that most leadership programmes don’t embody.
Inter-brain synchrony. Research by Reinero, Dikker, and Van Bavel demonstrates that teams achieving neural synchronisation cooperate more effectively and significantly outperform average individual problem-solving. The UP Game’s six-day structure is specifically designed to build this synchrony — through shared movement, music, storytelling, and embodied challenge. We are literally tuning our brains to each other.
Prospective simulation. Neuroscience shows that the brain’s default mode network uses the same neural machinery for remembering the past and simulating the future. When we ask participants to “remember” the future rather than “predict” it, we activate the brain’s most powerful creative system — episodic simulation. The felt experience of a remembered future is neurologically indistinguishable from a real memory. The body doesn’t know the difference. Research on embodied cognition suggests this kind of immersive simulation is orders of magnitude more effective at shifting behaviour than passive information transfer — because it rewires not just what we think, but what we feel and how we act.
Collective intelligence at the edge of chaos. Stuart Kauffman’s work on self-organisation shows that complex adaptive systems produce emergent properties irreducible to their parts. The UP Game creates edge-of-chaos conditions: enough structure for coherence (Chronos), enough freedom for surprise (Kairos), enough diversity for genuine novelty.
Hyperstition — the provable phenomenon that when a group of people share a compelling story about the future, they create feedback loops that accelerate their vision into reality. In the UP Game, teams narrativise solutions in the present tense from the vantage point of the achieved future. The results follow the narrative. The narrative is the front line.
“The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.”
— Otto Scharmer, Theory U
This is Design Play — where design thinking turns into design play. A participatory operating system for collective intelligence, refined over 36 iterations, producing genuine shifts in how people see, feel, relate, and act.
III. The Three Pillars of United Planet
United Planet operates across three interconnected pillars — the experience, the story, and the intelligence. Together they form a self-reinforcing engine for civilisational transformation.
Pillar 1: The UP Game
The UP Game is the experiential heartbeat — the six-day immersive Design Play rite of passage described above. It is where collective intelligence is generated, where futures are remembered, and where Gaians are initiated. 36 games. 26 countries. 6 continents. 1,000+ leaders. This is the source code.
Each game generates new visions, new alliances, new demonstrations of what human co-creation looks like at its most alive. And every moment is filmed.
Pillar 2: The United Planet Story
Over five years we’ve accumulated more than 3,000 hours of filmed collective intelligence — the world’s largest archive of positive stories about the future. This is not marketing content. This is civilisational raw material — the visions, strategies, breakthroughs, and wisdom of over 1,000 leaders from 100+ nations, all imagining and designing a thriving planetary civilisation.
We call this project protopic — combining prototype and utopia to describe futures that are both imaginable and actively being built. It is a deliberate boycott of dystopia.
The story ecosystem includes:
A United Planet Feature Film — drawing from the full archive to tell the story of the UP Game and its theory of change across five years and six continents. The definitive document of the movement.
An Episodic Docuseries — one episode per UP Game, from Decentralised Burn in Ibiza to Planetary Intelligence in Mexico. 36 episodes of collective future-making in the world’s most extraordinary locations.
A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Promptable Story World — the entire 3,000+ hour archive made searchable and navigable through Gaia AI. Imagine being able to ask: “Show me every vision of regenerative food systems across all 36 games” or “What did the Water teams design for clean water access?” and receiving a curated, AI-assembled narrative drawn from thousands of hours of collective intelligence. This is the “mother of all prompts” — the highest-fidelity picture of the thriving horizon of civilisation ever assembled, made interactive.
UPgrades — short, financeable stories of a thriving future that can become funded real-world Quests through Star Bonds.
In my Golden Decade Memes essays on Medium, I describe the narrative work of United Planet as inseparable from its strategic work: we cannot build what we cannot imagine, and the greatest leverage point for civilisational change is the story we collectively tell about what’s possible.
Pillar 3: Gaian Intelligence — Gaia AI & Stars
The third pillar bridges storytelling and action through a deliberate application of artificial intelligence rooted in collective human wisdom, and a planetary currency designed to finance the futures we remember.
Gaia AI is structured across three layers:
A Wisdom Layer — drawing on ancient texts, indigenous knowledge systems, and civilisational memory spanning millennia.
A Vision Layer — built on our 3,000+ hours of UP Games footage, the visions and strategies of over 1,000 future-designers.
A Consciousness Layer — embedding omni-consideration: awareness of and care for all beings, species, and futures.
We believe this makes it the first AI project trained from the future. Not a chatbot. Not a productivity tool. A planetary intelligence designed to serve life.
Each new UP Game generates more collective intelligence — new visions, new demonstrations of human co-creation. This feeds Gaia AI, making it progressively more intelligent. Gaia AI, in turn, enhances each new game — connecting participants to the broader Gaian vision, surfacing relevant wisdom traditions, generating concrete next steps. It’s a virtuous cycle. More games, richer intelligence, more games. This is the Infinite UP Game.
Stars is the decentralised planetary currency — a financial instrument designed not just to hold value, but to hold values. Pegged to the US Dollar based on the total M2 money supply on January 1st, 2020 ($15.314 trillion), Stars increase in value proportionately as nation-state governments print more money. An ethical planetary currency that preserves purchasing power while encoding intention, wisdom, and consciousness into every transaction.
Star Bonds extend the vision — outcome-based, time-bound planetary goals programmed to create collective rewards for the ecosystems that collaborated to achieve shared purpose. A baby between smart contracts, social impact bonds, and the X-Prize. A planetary commons-wealth engine that finances the outcomes we must achieve.
The Marketplace of Ideal Futures is where Stars, Gaia AI, and Gaian collective intelligence converge — the mechanism through which the community decides, together, what future to build, and then actually funds and builds it.
If AI will enable us to create whatever reality we want, we have created the highest-fidelity prompt for the reality we actually want. The question of our time is not whether AI will reshape civilisation, but whose vision of civilisation it will serve.
Why Now: The Convergence
Three forces are converging that make the next five years the most consequential in our planet’s history.
The imagination deficit. We have more analytical intelligence than ever. More data, more models, more dashboards. And yet we are collectively failing to imagine — and therefore to build — the futures we actually want. I call this the Tragedy of the Horizon. The climate movement knows what to avoid but struggles to articulate what to create. Business leaders know the old model is dying but can’t see what replaces it. The real risk isn’t disruption. The real risk is leading with yesterday’s imagination. We cannot build what we cannot imagine. And we cannot imagine alone.
The intelligence explosion. AI is fragmenting into many possible futures. Some concentrate power in ways that make the current system look democratic. Others could distribute intelligence to every community on Earth. If we don’t have a compelling, lived, high-fidelity vision of a thriving future, AI will default to optimising the present — which is another way of saying it will accelerate everything that’s already failing.
The belonging crisis. Loneliness is the epidemic nobody wants to name. Trust in institutions is at historic lows. Meaning hunger is driving people into conspiracy, extremism, and despair. What the UP Game offers — genuine community, shared purpose, embodied experience, intergenerational connection — isn’t a luxury. It’s the missing infrastructure of a functional civilisation. It is the Community Commons: the wealth that emerges when people come together with shared intention and mutual care.
The technologies, communities, narratives, and instruments now exist. What remains is the collective decision to remember the future.
Who This Is For
The UP Game is for people who’ve read the books, attended the conferences, and know in their bones that the future requires something different. Not more analysis. Not more despair. Not more comfortable retreat weekends. Something that demands your whole self — your intellect, your body, your creativity, your courage, your lineage — dare I say your soul purpose.
You might be a founder building a company that means something. An investor searching for conviction beyond the numbers. An artist who wants their work to matter at civilisational scale. A policymaker exhausted by incrementalism. A community leader ready to connect to a global movement. A student on fire with a vision. An elder with wisdom to share. An indigenous leader carrying the prophecies into being.
If you see yourself as a system shaper — not a passenger, but an architect of what comes next. If you’re ready to move from linear strategy to lived experience. If the phrase “we don’t predict the future, we remember it” makes something in you light up —
You’re a Gaian too. And the future is a team sport. Join us and help us find the others.
What’s Coming
Our 36th game — Planetary Intelligence in Baja, Mexico — concluded last month. We sailed with whales. We crossed the desert to the Bay of Dreams. We designed the future of life-centric AI on the Sea of Cortez. We listened to the intelligence of horses synchronising with their heart field.
Now, the rest of 2026 unfolds — the most ambitious year in United Planet’s history, with eight games spanning five countries and four continents:
🇵🇹 FiVth Gathering — Portugal · May 3–9
🇵🇹 Holo Wave — Portugal · May 31 – June 6
🇪🇸 Nutritious Futures — Ibiza · June 28 – July 4
🇪🇸 Planetary Eclipse — Ibiza · August 9–15
🔥 Gaian Airship — USA · Aug 30 – Sep 6
🇧🇹 Mindful Happiness — Bhutan · October 18–25
🇹🇷 Climate Regeneration — Türkiye · November 22–28
🇨🇷 Gaian Nation — Costa Rica · December 13–19
Eight more games. Four continents. Hundreds more Gaians joining the largest positive story ever told. And with each game, Gaia AI grows wiser, the archive grows richer, and the vision grows more real.
A Theory of Change in One Sentence
The fastest way to create the future is to reverse-engineer it from coherence — through shared story, identity, practice, and harmonic flow — unlocking the collective potential that was always there, waiting to be remembered.
That’s what we do. That’s what the UP Game does. That’s what the Story captures. That’s what Gaia AI scales. That’s what Stars finances.
Not commentary. Not criticism. Not waiting.
Design play. From the future. Now.
In my 20’s I understood myself to be a vehicle of change. In my 30’s I sought to be a vessel of change. Now in my 40’s, I intend to be an instrument of change. United Planet is the instrument. The UP Game is how we play it. Gaia AI is how it learns. And the Gaians — all of us — are the orchestra.
I believe the purpose of life is to live a life of purpose. To live as a great ancestor to the future. To dedicate ourselves to the transition of the planetary age with no compromise.
On this Earth Day, six years after we launched from that living room in San Francisco, I can tell you: Gaia is listening. She has always been listening.
The question is whether we’re ready to remember what she’s been teaching us.
I am. Are you?
Happy Earth Day.
For the personal story behind United Planet — from family karma to planetary dharma — read the companion piece.
Count Lucian Tarnowski
Founding Curator, United Planet, UP.Game, Gaia AI
unitedplan.et · up.game
Apply for an UP Game: up.game/apply