Almost every country in the world has a constitution. There exist thousands of international treaties, global institutions, and mechanisms of coordination. Why, in spite of all this, does humanity have no single planetary constitution?

The answer lies neither in a shortage of ideas nor in a shortage of lawyers. A planetary constitution has not emerged because there is no subject to bear it. A constitution arises where a political subject already exists — one prepared to recognize a common supreme norm as binding upon itself. For states, that subject is the people. For humanity as a whole, no such subject has yet taken form.

It is precisely in this gap that the practical significance of both documents resides.

The Earthlings Declaration is a constitutive document. Its principal task is not to describe the future world, but to take the first practically decisive step: to bring a new subject into being.

Throughout history, people have belonged to political communities primarily by virtue of birth, territory, or state membership. Earthlings offers a different form: a person joins the people through free choice, on the basis of shared values and conscious participation.

The Declaration takes several steps of fundamental importance. It moves the human person from a condition of passive belonging to existing systems into a condition of conscious participation in a new collectivity. It creates the very act of collective self-determination — the Earthlings people arises not through descent or compulsion, but through voluntary affiliation, verifiable participation, and the recognition of common foundations. Finally, it translates an idea into a structure: signing, verification, a digital passport, and forms of coordination make Earthlings not an abstract metaphor but an emerging collective reality.

In doing so, the Declaration fulfills the role that early acts of political self-assertion historically fulfilled for peoples within states: it gathers dispersed individuals into a new space of belonging and constitutes a subject capable of carrying a higher historical function.

If the Declaration is responsible for the birth of the subject, the Constitution of Humanity is responsible for ensuring that this subject does not lose sight of the purpose of its existence.

Every new association is historically vulnerable. Even one born of the best intentions may transform into a structure of new domination, may reproduce hierarchy in place of participation, may speak of dignity while permitting covert governance. This is precisely why a constitutive act is insufficient — a supreme norm is needed, one that answers in advance the question: into what does this subject not have the right to become?

The Constitution of Humanity provides such an answer. It affirms that the supreme foundations of a future order are: the dignity of the person, freedom of conscience, the equal worth of every human being, peace as a right, the limitedness of all power, the protection of the biosphere, the subordination of technology to the human person, and responsibility toward future generations.

The Constitution performs two interrelated functions. Within the Earthlings people, it serves as the supreme criterion for any decisions regarding governance, technology, and the distribution of authority. Externally, it becomes a proposal to the world: here is what a more mature order might look like, if the human person, peoples, and institutions were to begin subordinating development not to force, but to dignity and shared responsibility.

At first glance, two such documents might appear replaceable by one. But each fulfills an indispensable and irreducible function.

The Declaration and the Constitution do not stand in relation to each other as texts of equal function, but as two successive levels of a single historical task. On the first level, it is necessary to create a voluntary and responsible form of collective self-determination. On the second, it is necessary to ensure that this collectivity develops not arbitrarily, but in accordance with a supreme norm expressing the interests of humanity as a whole.

The relationship between the two documents is realized through successive stages.

For the relationship between the two documents to remain more than abstract, it must be translated into concrete principles guiding the development of Earthlings.

It is of fundamental importance to understand what this construction is not. The Constitution of Humanity does not make Earthlings a claimant to the governance of the world. The Earthlings people is not constituted to displace states, to abolish other forms of belonging, or to impose a pre-formed system of power.

The purpose is different: to become the first form of planetary collectivity that voluntarily subordinates its development to a higher norm of human dignity, peace, freedom, and biospheric responsibility.

This is why the Constitution of Humanity must be understood not as an instrument of immediate global governance, but as a supreme orientation and a system of limits. It is needed not so that anyone might prematurely govern the entire world, but so that it may be clear, even now, toward what order a responsible subject aspires — and into what it does not have the right to become.

Without this distinction, any undertaking toward a planetary framework risks being charged with covert universalism or moral expansionism. Earthlings must demonstrate the opposite through its practice: not a new pyramid of power, but a new culture of responsibility.

Considered in isolation, the Earthlings Declaration may be received as an ambitious act of creating a new people. Considered in isolation, the Constitution of Humanity may appear as an elevated but premature text for a subject that has not yet taken form. Together, however, they constitute a historically coherent sequence.

The Declaration addresses the historical deficit of a subject. The Constitution addresses the historical deficit of a supreme norm. The Declaration gathers people capable of assuming responsibility. The Constitution indicates in whose name and for what purpose that responsibility must be assumed.

This is the practical logic of development: not to write a great text into a void, and not to create a new people without a universal horizon — but to unite the birth of a subject and a supreme norm within a single, gradual civilizational process.

If the Earthlings people proves capable of remaining faithful to its Declaration while developing in the light of the Constitution of Humanity, it may become not merely a new people, but the first living form of that moral-political core without which humanity will not be able to cross the threshold of its own maturity.