An Address to Everyone

While politicians spend months and years reconciling positions, thousands of people die under bombs, and millions live in want, hunger and disease. Wars that until recently seemed impossible go on for years, and no international organization can stop them. A conflict in one part of the world raises the price of fuel and bread on the other side of the planet. The arms race has returned, and nuclear powers are once again taking part in it. And the companies that create artificial intelligence themselves admit that they may lose control over what they are creating, and ask for rules that still do not exist.

Together these troubles add up to a picture that is hard not to see: the world is losing the ability to solve problems.

We do not think that bad people at the top are to blame for everything. The trouble runs deeper. The institutions that govern the world today are not coping with their functions.

Politics within states lives from one election to the next, while the problems demand decisions for decades ahead. Decisions depend more and more on the money of those who finance campaigns, pay lobbyists and own the mass media. The higher a person rises, the further they are from those whose lives their decisions change. We see the capacity for empathy declining among elites and the obsession with excess profit growing.

The very bond between a person and the state has grown outdated too. A person receives citizenship by place of birth and can change it only with difficulty. Millions of people live, work and raise children somewhere other than where they were born, and many do not share the politics and ideology of their state. But no one can give up every citizenship without losing protection: a stateless person is left without documents, without protection and without the right to move freely.

We believe that politics in its present form has exhausted its historical mission. It cannot be rebuilt from within: anyone who tries will run into the very rules that need to be changed. Among politicians and officials there are honest people who see this, but they have no instruments to change it.

Our civilization is heading straight for an iceberg. On the bridge they argue about who should stand at the wheel, and no one has been holding the wheel for a long time.

This system lacks the voice of people themselves. The UN Charter opens with the words "We the peoples of the United Nations", but at the UN only states speak. People from different countries want the same thing but cannot say it together, because they are counted separately, each in their own country. Millions of people on both sides of a border who do not want war do not add up to an opinion that anyone is obliged to take into account.

Petitions, marches and polls do not close this gap. They are easy to ignore, easy to fake and easy to brand as paid for. No one is obliged to believe that living people stand behind the figure, and no one is obliged to reckon with that figure.

We searched for a long time for a form of association that could create a common voice. Parties, movements, foundations and civic networks do important work, but none of these forms carries the weight of a people: a party is locked inside one country, a movement rests on a single idea, a foundation depends on donors' money, and civic networks have no verifiable number of people behind them.

A people is the bearer of the right to self-determination. International law recognizes the right of peoples to decide their own fate. The voice of a people has to be reckoned with differently from the voice of an organization. An organization can be shut down, banned or bought, but a people exists as long as the people who make it up exist. That is why what we are founding is a people, transnational and voluntary.

The Earthlings people is not tied to a territory and lays claim to no one's land. It belongs to no state and sets the rules for its own internal life. People join it by their own choice, keeping their citizenship, their faith and their culture. Each person in it has one equal vote, which cannot be bought, accumulated or taken away. In this people there is no power of some people over others, so there is no one to seize this people from within and nothing to seize it with.

Earthlings does not engage in politics: we do not fight for power, do not nominate candidates, do not claim a single seat in any government and do not want to replace states. We do not call for any coup.

We are creating a people in order to bring into the international and national agenda a legitimate and influential civic voice that is absent from it today. By founding a people, we are laying down a new institution: a direct transnational voice of people, with a verified living person behind it and a result that anyone can recount. This institution will become international when it begins to be reckoned with.

When confirmed people from many countries say one thing and governments decide another, everyone will see the discrepancy, and it will no longer be possible to write it off as the opinion of who knows whom. When such a voice backs a sensible proposal on peace, on hunger, on climate or on the control of technology, politicians who would themselves like to adopt it will gain support they do not have today. And when this voice gains enough weight, even those who would prefer not to hear it will have to reckon with it.

This institution already has a foundation: identity verification, a registry of passports and a digital platform with bodies of self-governance and a common treasury whose movements of funds are visible to everyone.

Humanity today has no common project for the future and no instrument for designing one together. The Earthlings people can become such an instrument. In the "Working Agenda" we openly examine how a society might be arranged in which the state is a bundle of functions rather than a fate handed out at birth.

One of the questions we want to work out together concerns people who do not want to belong to any state. Today a stateless person loses protection, so we do not call on anyone to give up their citizenship. But part of the reason we are founding a people is that a people has a prospect that no organization has. In time the Earthlings people may be recognized as a subject of international law, and then its passport can become a document that states recognize, as they once recognized the Nansen passport, introduced by the League of Nations for people left without a state. It can be a passport without citizenship: it will certify a person's identity and their belonging to the people without tying them to any country. And within the people itself, planetary solidarity has yet to be turned into working institutions of social support that a person can rely on in illness, old age and misfortune.

We, the authors of the documents, promise none of this: we have no right to make promises on behalf of the people. Our task is to explain why a people, and to lay the foundation. Recognition is granted by states, but everything it depends on is in the hands of the people itself: the number of people, honest practice and working institutions. That will be the work of every earthling.

For centuries people united into peoples by blood, language and land. We propose uniting on a different basis: on shared values and on responsibility for a common future. We believe that a new transnational people is able to do what present institutions cannot, because it depends neither on elections, nor on money, nor on anyone's permission. We believe that it can, step by step, begin to set things right. We see no other force that could do this, and we can no longer wait for someone else to create one.

This is only the beginning: from 22 November 2026 any person may propose changes to any document, by email to team@earth-lings.org or in the open registry on GitHub. You do not need to join, verify your identity or pay anything to do this. It is not we, the authors of the documents, who found this people, but those who will vote.

If you see what we see, read "The Earthlings Declaration" and "The Founding Period" and decide whether this speaks to you. And if this address has felt important to you, pass it on to someone it may speak to as well.