Coexistence with the state order
A People Complementary to States
Any proposal for a new kind of people runs immediately into a suspicion: that it must be a rival to the state, a step toward dissolving borders or overriding governments. Earthlings is built to answer that suspicion not with reassurance but with structure. It claims no territory, asserts no jurisdiction over anyone, collects no taxes, and commands no one. It is designed from the ground up to sit alongside states rather than to compete with them for the things that make a state a state.
The relationship is one of complementarity. A person can belong to Earthlings and remain, in full, a citizen of their country, bound by its laws and subject to its courts. Where a national rule and an internal Earthlings procedure ever conflict, the national rule prevails - this is not a loophole but a deliberate guarantee. What Earthlings offers is a layer that did not exist before: a way to act together with people across borders on shared planetary concerns, without asking anyone to give up the country they already have.
This is why the project describes itself as complementary rather than alternative. It does not try to fill the role of the state and it does not contest the state's authority within its own domain. It occupies a different space entirely - the horizontal space between peoples that the state system, organised vertically, never built.
What this changes
No territory, no jurisdiction, no coercion
Earthlings holds no land, governs no place, and forces no one to do anything. Strip away territory, compulsory jurisdiction, and the monopoly on coercion, and what remains cannot threaten a state, because it never reaches for the instruments by which states rule.
Belonging that stacks, not replaces
Membership is added to citizenship, never subtracted from it. No one renounces a passport or a homeland to join. A person remains exactly as much a citizen of their country as before, with one additional, voluntary form of belonging.
National law prevails in any conflict
Where an internal procedure of the people would collide with a binding national obligation, the national obligation wins by design. This built-in deference is what makes the people compatible with sovereignty rather than a challenge to it.
Filling the horizontal gap
States represent people vertically, each within its borders, and coordinate through organisations they create. There is no lawful, direct channel for people of different countries to express a shared will. Earthlings occupies that empty horizontal level without displacing the vertical one.
Alongside, not against
The aim is coexistence, not succession. A voluntary transnational people can pursue planetary cooperation while leaving every state's authority intact within its own domain. Complementarity is the whole design, not a concession bolted on afterward.
Read the Declaration
The Declaration brings the Earthlings people into being and sets out, in full, what it is and how it relates to existing states.
Read the Declaration