A field guide forTHE FREE EARTHNew Earth Catalog · 01
Campaign record · closed 16 September 2026
The campaign has closed.
The Kickstarter sought A$28,000 to develop and produce The Free Earth Manual: a practical, hopeful field guide to a world of abundant energy, intelligent machines, personal agents, advanced fabrication and wider human freedom. The campaign ended on 16 September 2026.
This page preserves the proposal and its context as a completed project record.
The wider ideaAI-generated editorial cartoonEveryday lifeAI-generated illustrative scene, not documentary photography
Why this exists
The future is not just a technology question.
AI and robotics may make answers, images, plans and routine production cheap. Energy and fabrication may become more abundant. Medicine and transport may change what bodies can do and where people can live.
But capability is not the same as a good life. The interesting question is what people will actually choose to do with the new room: make things, care for someone, learn, explore, repair, play, fall in love, build a community, pursue a difficult project, or simply rest.
The Free Earth Manual is an attempt to think about that world in practical terms. It is not a promise that technology will solve everything, and it is not a demand that everyone adopt one ideal lifestyle. It is a field guide to possibilities.
A galaxy of activities
Many ways to be fully alive.
MakeDiscoverBelongExploreTendChoose
The catalogue is not a list of approved lifestyles. It is a wide field: automated homes, workshops, gardens, laboratories, artists’ studios, caring families, local communities, expeditions, quiet rooms and lives that do not fit a category yet.
The larger project
From one manual to a living catalogue.
The Free Earth Manual is the first project in the New Earth Catalog — a successor in spirit to the original Whole Earth Catalog. The larger catalogue will gather tools, systems, evidence, field reports and ideas that help people judge what becomes possible.
It will look at complete systems, not just attractive objects: energy, maintenance, repair, cost, law, risk, hidden infrastructure and the human work that keeps a life running. It will separate what is verified from what is proposed or speculative.
