Earth Cup
About
The Earth Cup is arguably the most important race of the 21st century and perhaps all of the Anthropocene — the age in which human influences are reshaping the Earth. If science is right about the speed at which biodiversity and regenerative ecosystems are disappearing and climate change is escalating threatening potentially all life on Earth as we know it, we have to act quickly. Not only is our destiny as a species at stake, but we hold the keys to a sustainable future for the only known intelligent life in our universe at this time.
What is the Earth Cup Movement?
The Earth Cup movement is a global, pro-social, pro-ecology vessel, which Buckminister Fuller called “Spaceship Earth.” With all of its inhabitants acting together as a multi-organizational complex adaptive system, the Earth Cup is structured to help our home planet regenerate in its full nature — including but not limited to our humanity. The Earth Cup is focused on assisting humanity to restructure and achieve its priorities as it enters adulthood beyond its current tumultuous, violent, often destructive, and some might say existentially-threatened adolescence.
Mission
The Earth Cup movement’s ultimate mission is to identify and travel as an adult super-organism to reach planets that can support humans thriving equitably within a fully biodiverse nature of great multi-leveled interdependency. This mission has to start first on the only planet we know of with great biodiversity capable of supporting humans and many other forms of life in a complex adaptive web of organisms and other planetary systems within our solar system. Our Earth Cup mission in the 21st century starts with our ensuring that our species and the ecosystems it depends upon can survive and thrive knowledgeably and reverently within the Earth’s vast thriving complex web of life.
Vision
A global open competition where nations, space agencies, and private entities design and deploy advanced solar sailcraft in a friendly, rules-based competition to achieve collaboratively set milestones for humanity’s advancements in space and planetary management.
The Earth Cup intends to accelerate humanity’s collective capacities to master solar sail technology for planetary-scale as well as inter-planetary solutions. These solutions will include planetary climate control, solar energy collection and refraction, and deep-space exploration at speeds that may exceed 1 million miles an hour. This competition fuses innovation, resilience, regeneration, collective governance and societal achievements with a spectacular showcase of humanity’s capabilities in space.
Goal
The Earth Cup is the cradle of all life that our humanity has proof of — and can know of — in the universe today sapen sapien superorganism, in which we are but one holon amongst billions of our interconnecting ephermrealle in all of its benevolent forms and associated intelligence. The Earth Cup is more than even what we know of life on planet Earth today.
Humanity is still an infantile superorganism. We are just beginning to understand how fragile the cradle of life is and how dependent we are on this fragile Earth Cup as we make our first forays beyond the edges of our home planetary nest. Our humanity is awakening to how much of the web of life we may have already temporarily and permanently diminished, damaged, and destroyed as we have sometimes ignorantly and all too often belligerently deepened our collective entry and empowerment within the Anthropocene at the early beginnings of our childhood as a potential interplanetary species.
The goal of the Earth Cup movement is to demonstrate our collective awakening into an understanding of the homo sapen sapien superorganism, in which we are but one holon amongst billions of our interconnecting all ephermeral human beings traveling together through space-time.
History
The Earth Cup is a friendly competition open to all people of all nations. It is a race toward peaceful innovation, cooperation, collaboration, and competition between all societies and communities striving for resilience and regeneration in this time of great promise and peril. It is a race to save the Earth’s ecosystems from destruction and de-speciation. The Earth Cup is a new journey for us all to ensure a more positive future evolution of life on Earth and in terms of our own humanity — while reaching toward new horizons at accelerating rates.
The First Earth Cup
Throwing Down the Gauntlet
During 2024, the Earth Cup consortium associated with Capital Yacht Club in Washington, DC, USA is throwing down the gauntlet in a challenge to all other clubs around planet Earth. The Earth Cup at its most fundamental level is a sailing regatta like no other. It is the first solar sailing race from planet Earth to out beyond the known planets in our solar system. However, the first Earth Cup race is intended to have a much simpler and more prosaic goal of catalyzing a process of invention and collaboration amongst solar sailing syndicates from around the world to go from a starting line in low Earth orbit at 1,500 miles above the Earth to the Lagrange L1 area of neutral gravity at 975,000 miles above the Earth between the Earth and the Sun. The first 70 solar sailing space craft will be launched into space in 2025.
Earth Cup Adopting the Peaceful Competitive Spirit of The America’s Cup
The Earth Cup Solar Sailing Races build upon the good hearted spirit of competition and innovation that has been evident in the America’s Cup since it started in the 1800s over a century and a half ago. This spirited rules-based, open competition sailing race continues today. In contrast to the sailing ships of the 19th and 20th century, the sailing vessels of today’s America’s Cup races look more like flying machines than the much slower water-bound vessels that rarely exceeded 12 to 17 miles an hour in the 1800s and 1900s.
The Earth Cup is shooting for even loftier goals by achieving a speed of over 1 million miles an hour propelled only by the renewable energy of photons hitting their sails and the use of the gravitational/centrifugal forces of our solar system’s planets. These vessels within later Earth Cup races will visit and study the Cosmos in new ways on their journeys out into uncharted realms of our Milky Way galaxy. The First Earth Cup race, however, has a time sensitive mission to address more urgent goals in marks closer to the Earth and the Sun.
History of the America's Cup
On July 21, 1857, notice was sent out by the New York Yacht Club to all foreign clubs to invite ‘spirited contest for the championship and promising all challengers: ‘a liberal, hearty welcome and the strictest fair play.’
What followed that first America’s Cup challenge was a firing of competitive spirit between the English and the Americans with Ashbury, bitten by Cup fever, issuing a schedule of challenges in October 1868 to the New York Yacht Club combining ocean races, the Isle of Wight yachting season and a race for the ‘America’s Queen’s Cup of 1851.’ Asbury’s communication stated, according to The Lawson: “If I lost I would present the New York Yacht Club or the owner of the successful vessel with a cup, value 100 guineas…”
The America’s Cup is the oldest international sporting trophy. The America’s Cup is an open challenge to all other clubs around the world. The first America’s Cup was announced after the yacht “America” won the Queens Cup in the midst of the civil war in the nascent United States. The mid-1800s was a challenging and exciting time for the world’s first democracy in America as well as for humanity amidst an explosion of industry, commerce, world trade, and intensifying geopolitical competition changing life on Earth.
The Earth Today
The Earth Cup challenge today is a 21st century race on the forefront of science and invention being proposed in a time of extraordinary advancement and concern about the future. Some call this time of the first Earth Cup the Anthropocene (a proposed geological epoch, dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth up to the present day). Some refer to this time as a point of Singularity in the vast expanse of history, in other words, a time of super-exponential change reframing human horizons and the fate of life on Earth.
It is unquestionably a time of human activities demonstrating great achievement, while also falling short of solving hunger, poverty, and woeful inequities in a world of over-abundance exceeding sustainable carrying capacities. The 21st century on our small planet is turning into a space-time of extraordinary human displacement, inhumanity amongst those threatening the world with nuclear war and other conflicts around the globe. Yet, during this time, we live in a world of vast rapidly expanding understanding of new solutions and responsibilities.
Never before have we had the collective intelligence and rising intentions to overcome the downsides of climate change, devastating engagement of powerful weaponry, disinformation, artificial general intelligence and a myriad of other perils. It is also simultaneously a time of unbelievable opportunities and prosperity for some, while vulnerability is growing for billions of humans and other species. The challenges of global warming is making the path toward reducing human suffering and the regeneration of biodiversity far more difficult.
The Earth Cup and the L1 Project
One of the key objectives of the Earth Cup is to support and accelerate the goals of the L1 Project. The L1 Project focuses on reaching a healthy equilibrium of solar radiant energy hitting the Earth to remain at temperatures equivalent to those that would be happening if the Earth was not undergoing significant increases in infrared radiant energy as a result of the Greenhouse Gasses that threatens much of life on Earth. National governments and syndicates from around the world will use the best and most pertinent science, technologies, space industry, and economy stimulated by the Earth Cup competition to kindle the development of 100s of thousands of solar sailing deflector panels racing across an area approximately 6,000 km in diameter by 100,000 km deep. This solar radiation deflection cloud will modulate the heat on Earth monitored and managed within the Earth’s planetary Resilience Systems using distributed collectively intelligent (DCI) grids.
Each solar sailing deflector panel will eventually be an interconnected node with 3D printed solar PV cells, computing, and communication capacities linking it within an emerging super-organized Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) system. This SRM system composed of solar sail craft with collective intelligence mimicking the dynamics of flocks of millions of birds organized to manage the solar radiation entering the Earth’s atmosphere and biosphere supporting the needs of humanity and biodiversity.
Today, this sounds like science fiction to many. However, the solar sailing technology has already been tested and proven feasible by NASA and Japan in space. In the years to come, it will become an essential element of keeping the temperature of the Earth within the ranges compatible with species prevalent on Earth during the past 10,000 years. The Earth Cup is being organized now to drive the innovation and collaborations necessary to lead humanity and our planet back toward a new healthy dynamic equilibrium between humanity and other elements of nature on Earth, while simultaneously expanding our reach throughout and beyond our solar system.