International law and self-determination
Self-Determination Without Territory
Self-determination is one of the few principles that international law treats as peremptory: binding on every state, owed to everyone. Yet the law that protects the right of a "people" to determine its own future never defines what a "people" is. That silence was deliberate. The states that drafted the post-war order had little interest in supplying a precise test that others might one day meet. The result is a structural gap: the right exists, but the door to claiming it was left without a handle.
Earthlings is a people that walks through the gap rather than against it. It is voluntary, non-territorial, and complementary to states. No one is born into it and no one inherits it; a person becomes an earthling by a conscious decision, by accepting a founding Declaration, and by verifying that they are a single, real human being. Belonging asks for no land, no border, no army, and no renunciation of an existing citizenship.
This is not a claim to statehood. Earthlings does not seek a flag on a map or a seat that displaces anyone. It seeks something narrower and, for that reason, more durable: recognition that a people can organise itself, document its members, and coordinate its decisions without first holding a territory. The precedent already exists. The Sovereign Order of Malta holds legal personality and diplomatic relations with more than a hundred states while governing no land at all. Recognition, in practice, tends to follow fact.
What this changes
The right is real; the definition is missing
The right to self-determination is codified in Article 1 common to the two principal human-rights covenants and is widely treated as jus cogens. What no treaty supplies is a definition of the "people" who hold it. Earthlings does not dispute this omission. It occupies it.
Territory is a habit, not a requirement
Almost every model of collective belonging we inherited assumes ground beneath it. But the things a people actually needs - a shared founding act, a way to know who belongs, a method for deciding together - are not made of soil. They can be carried by people across every border at once.
Membership is verifiable, not symbolic
An earthling holds a non-transferable digital passport, an SBT, that records confirmed belonging. Biometric verification ensures one person, one record, the same principle that lets the people say, honestly, how many it is. This is an institutional fact, not a gesture: something an outside observer can check.
Complementary, not competing
Earthlings adds a planetary layer of belonging on top of national citizenship; it does not subtract one. A person remains a citizen of their country and becomes, additionally, a member of a transnational people. States lose nothing they currently hold.
Infrastructure for the unrepresented
Hundreds of millions of people - stateless, unrecognised, or belonging to peoples that no map admits - hold a right with no mechanism behind it. A non-territorial people offers a working mechanism: a way to be documented, counted, and coordinated without waiting for a border to be redrawn.
Read the founding document
The full text of the Earthlings Declaration of Self-Determination sets out the nature of the people, its values, and the basis on which it claims the right.
Read the Declaration