What May Happen Next

Everything listed below can be used right now, and no one's permission is required for it.

The UN Universal Periodic Review. Once every four and a half years the situation in each state is examined in the Human Rights Council, and written submissions are accepted there from any civil society organization. This is not a privilege and not a status - it is an open submission procedure.

UN special procedures. Special rapporteurs on particular subjects accept communications from anyone. A reply is not guaranteed, but the communication is registered.

Observer statuses at venues. The Internet Governance Forum, the conferences of the parties to climate agreements, the Conference of International Non-Governmental Organisations of the Council of Europe. The condition is a registered legal entity and demonstrable activity.

Consultative status with ECOSOC. Attainable through a bearer legal entity. This is how the Saami Council participates - even though no one considers the Sami people a non-governmental organization. The condition is several years of documented work, reporting, and durability.

A first citation. The day an academic article, a human rights report, or a submission in proceedings cites the Earthlings people as an example of a particular form is already an event of legal cognizability. It requires nothing of us except that there be something to cite.

All five are of one kind. They give no status and do not by themselves bring recognition closer. What they give is presence in the record: traces that can later be produced as practice.

The move from a submission to a request. The difference between "we sent materials" and "our position was asked for" is cognizability in its pure form. The condition: several years of presence at a venue and a reputation as a party that speaks to the point.

A municipality as the first interlocutor. Cities are more accessible than states, experiment more often, and are not bound by questions of sovereignty. A cooperation agreement with a city on a specific task - climate, migration, culture - is more realistic than any interstate step and creates the same type of precedent.

The passport as a means of identification. Two things that are usually conflated need to be separated here.

Identification means establishing who a person is by linking them to an entry in a civil registry: name, date of birth, citizenship. Authentication of the person means establishing that the bearer is the very person to whom the document is tied.

The earthling passport does the second and deliberately does not do the first: the document data are checked at the moment of verification and are not retained.

It does not follow that it cannot become a means of identification. The category "identification without citizenship and without a link to a national registry" exists and serves more people than any other: India's Aadhaar - a number plus biometrics - establishes no citizenship, and the Supreme Court of India said so directly, yet it is accepted as identification for an enormous range of purposes.

Three things stand in the way, and all three are solvable.

The chain to civil identity exists at the point of verification - a person presents a state document - but it is destroyed. That is the design, not a defect: it is precisely what makes the passport private.

A responsible issuer is needed, one that can be held to account for an error. The interface legal entity fills that role; what is missing is a standard and an audit.

A framework of recognition on the accepting side is needed. It already exists in two forms: eIDAS, where a private organization obtains the status of a qualified trust service provider and its signature acquires legal force, and FATF Recommendation 17, which allows a financial institution to rely on customer due diligence performed by a third party.

The way out that preserves both privacy and the possibility of recognition is separating the two layers. The uniqueness layer stays with the people: behind the record stands a living human being, and there is only one of them. The identity layer is held by a licensed provider or by the person themselves in their own wallet, and it is disclosed selectively, by the holder's decision: to a bank, yes; to a platform, no. This is how the European digital identity wallet and the W3C verifiable credentials standard are built.

There is also an internal reason why it cannot be otherwise: Article 12 of the Declaration forbids the people's infrastructure from becoming surveillance and forbids the registry from holding identifying data. An identity layer inside the people would breach it directly; the same layer outside, under the person's control, breaches nothing.

This is worth understanding separately: recognition of the passport and recognition of the people are different questions, and the first is far shorter. A bank does not care whether we are a people or an association: what it needs is a reliable source of verification and someone to hold to account. Of everything listed here this is perhaps the shortest path - it runs into neither a requirement of territory nor the absence of precedent.

The first case will most likely be not border control but a financial institution or a platform that needs verified uniqueness and a confirmed identity at the same time.

An economy that has reached actual things. Cells producing results that are paid for outside the people. A unit of account serving real work rather than internal bookkeeping. This is not a legal event, but it is the matter without which legal events do not occur.

Here is what no existing organization can do - and not for want of will, but because it does not have both conditions at once.

A genuine planetary survey. Not a sample with a margin of error, not a vote where one person can cast a thousand votes, but the counted position of millions of confirmed people on a question that concerns everyone. No such artefact exists today for anyone: not for states, not for international organizations, not for polling companies. It is impossible without verification of uniqueness and impossible without scale.

The people may have it before any recognition - and it will probably be the first thing that makes others reckon with the people.

A fund subordinate to no state. And here there is a possibility precise to the point of irony: to fund exactly what a budget committee refused. The post of envoy for future generations cost a sum negligible for an eighty-year-old organization, and what was refused was not the expenditure but the precedent - a permanent place accountable to someone other than states. The people can establish such a position of its own.

This is not a gesture. It is exactly the practice out of which, as the history of indigenous rights shows, written norms grow over time: the duty to consult travelled from complete absence to an article of a convention within a single generation, and it began not with a norm but with persistence.

Mutual recognition between communities. A finding need not come from above. It can begin among equals: other non-territorial communities, diasporas, peoples without a state. Every such contact is an entry in the practice.

Presence in every country with representation in none. Thirty million people spread across every jurisdiction is the possibility of acting where no organization can: distributed fact-checking, distributed funding, aid that does not cross borders because it is already on both sides.

It is worth saying plainly who needs this most. Not a comfortable resident of a country with working institutions - they already have all of it.

There are more than a hundred and twenty million forcibly displaced people in the world and millions of stateless persons. For them, a demonstrable "I am a living human being, there is only one of me, and anyone can verify it" is not an abstraction but the thing they do not have and that their states do not give them. A registry kept outside the servers of a single organization and surviving a change of operator means more to a person without documents than to everyone else put together.

If anything in this project ever turns out to be genuinely needed, this is most likely where it will be.

Beyond that: resolution of disputes between participants by a procedure independent of jurisdiction; participation in a common economy regardless of access to banking services; and a vote that cannot be taken away for one's views, for disagreement, or by decision of a majority.

Here the Earthlings people is in a position no one else is in, and it follows not from intention but from design: the core forbids shifting the cost of a decision onto those who had no voice in it, including those not yet born. This is not a wish in a preamble but a norm that cannot be repealed by a vote.

Out of it a standing procedure may grow: an assessment of every significant decision for its effect on those who come after - with a published opinion and the right of any participant to demand it. No such procedure exists today in any state or in any international organization.

And if the people ever acquires a voice anywhere outside, it will be the only party at the table whose founding rule expressly forbids it to win at the expense of the generations that follow.

This section is not there for balance. Every outcome listed is possible, and some are more likely than the good ones.

The people stays small. Tens of thousands instead of millions. All the possibilities remain open and unused, because there is no one to use them. The project becomes a curious case in someone's dissertation.

The legal question is decided against us - either directly or by a silence a generation long. There is no direct precedent, the most authoritative definition of a people presupposes a link with territory, and we do not regard that objection as removed.

The registry is seen as a threat rather than a resource. A verified base of millions of unique people is something a state may consider a security problem. There is precedent: similar projects verifying uniqueness have been restricted and suspended in several jurisdictions. Our architecture answers those objections - raw biometrics are not retained, there is no reward for verification - but that is no guarantee.

Apathy. The mechanism exists; participation does not. Votes do not reach a quorum, Cells do not fill up, and initiative comes from a handful of people. This is the most likely of the bad outcomes and the quietest.

Capture or ossification. The people becomes what it was created against: an apparatus with procedures, quorums, and people who benefit from nothing changing. The design is protected against this more strongly than usual - the core is outside voting, mandates are revocable, one can always leave - but not absolutely.

Technology becomes obsolete or turns out to be compromised. The infrastructure is replaceable by design, but replacement costs time and trust.

There are no dates here. Not one of these possibilities says "in three years", because that would be an invention: the pace is set by the number of participants and the practice accumulated, not by our plan.

There are no probabilities here. We do not know which of them will open first, or whether any will.

And there is not one statement here on which anything depends today. The people exists because people founded it, not because possibilities lie ahead. Possibilities will add reach to what the people does. They add no meaning to it and are not a condition of its existence.