Fertile Future is a monthly series of essays from Zero Ideas, exploring what we need to do differently to restore human progress and make the coming epoch an age of human flourishing.

The next century will not be just one more in a line of some 4,000 centuries of human existence. It will be the fourth great human epoch. Until now, our species has seen three great epochs shaped by our use of energy, each accounting for about one trillion person-years on Earth: Fire (a small number of people, lasting 400,000 years); Farming (many more people, for 14,000 years); and Fossil Fuels (billions of people, for just 300 years).

The next trillion-person-year epoch will take just one human lifetime. The choices we make now will shape what that epoch becomes. That mix of impact and urgency is the inspiration for this series of essays.

We enter this new epoch at a time of existential risks and a growing sense that we are losing our agency to act on them. In most developed countries we have become conditioned by a period of stability that favoured optimization over renewal, openness over resilience, today over tomorrow. This has left us poorly prepared for the world that climate change, AI and changing geopolitics are now creating. It’s no wonder that we cling to the present, rather than engage with an apparently apocalyptic future.

And yet, collectively, we are richer, healthier, and more capable than ever before. Have we really become incapable of shaping a future better than today—of making our new epoch a Fertile Future?