Mission on Earth Project: pausing the public campaign

Over the last 2 months, you’ve heard from us often about the planned smart city and Mission on Earth project we’re involved in – and all well before the official launch of this project. The participation itself did not involve any fundraising or active engagement of our audience, so without any concerns, several articles and interviews were released, podcasts were conducted answering questions with information we knew.

We had been working on this directly for over 10 years, negotiating with the then living Jacque Fresco about the possibility of building an experimental city based on the original ideas of his The Venus Project. It all froze, but only on our side – Andrey Kolodyuk, a venture capitalist and the main initiator of the project – continued to work in this direction all this time. And we learned about the project’s upcoming launch during a recent trip to the Smart City Expo and Oxygen Summit in New York City in May 2024.

The “Mission on Earth” project itself involves the creation of an experimental site and a smart city, where joined IT and technology companies will work on the development of smart city direction, aiming to present it all as a single system, rethinking many things we are used to, including economic and political models of society. All of this is planned with the support of major foundations, cities that have signed on as part of the Oxygen Summit initiative, and recognizable players in the market. In theory, this will give us a good opportunity to set the right direction: to influence the evolution of our cities into highly automated city-systems, which will be the transition to a post-scarcity sustainable world.

Andrey Kolodyuk on the “Mission on Earth” project

Everything looks promising, but we can’t give 100% assurance yet about what exactly we will see at launch, and whether it will be as we tell you. The format of our involvement and participation is not fully understood. There are certain fears and risks that we will present it in the wrong way and the realization will be completely different, because there is no information about this project on the Internet yet.

We are freezing the public work in this direction until everything is clearer and we see more official details about the project in public sources, media and on the project website – to understand where this is going, and our answers would be based on verified publicly available information. We wouldn’t want to mislead anyone, or give the wrong expectations.

So don’t expect any news yet. Although the work in this direction will continue outside the public plane. We’ll be putting the whole picture together piece by piece, and when the time comes, new articles, videos and podcasts on the topic will be released.

This is the project on which we have put the main stakes, fit into a program. It remains the main option for how we could have a significant impact on the development of world society, with a minimum of resources on our part – but in no way defining or limiting the work of our organization Designing The Future. We have about six months left until the official launch, maybe more – and during this time we will be more active in the basic areas that will help us to remain independent and adhere to the basic principles of the original direction – popularizing and implementing Jacque Fresco’s proposals about the prospects of transition to a post-scarcity system already in our lifetime.

If you want to help us in this – join us, support us. We need a good theoretical and material base, a responsible team and volunteers, recognition and a good reputation. This foundation is not done quickly, but as soon as it is ready, we will build the main direction and results at a tangible pace.