In 1627, Francis Bacon published New Atlantis, describing Salomon’s House—history’s first detailed blueprint for a scientific institution. He left the text unfinished: “The rest was not perfected.” The governance architecture was never written. New New Atlantis: The Time Has Come writes what Bacon left unwritten.
Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon published New Atlantis, describing Salomon’s House—history’s first detailed blueprint for a scientific institution. He imagined an organization devoted to “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” Then the text broke off mid-sentence: “The rest was not perfected.” The governance architecture—the “frame of Laws” that would make the knowledge engine accountable—was never written.
New New Atlantis: The Time Has Come is my contribution to extending what Bacon left unwritten. The book proceeds in seven Parts.
Parts I and II examine Bacon’s original design in unprecedented detail. The man, his times, his unfinished text, and how his vision shaped the institutions (the Royal Society, the research university, the national laboratory) that constitute the modern knowledge enterprise. The analysis is close and rigorous, because the institutional patterns Bacon established—both their strengths and their failures—are the foundations on which everything else is built.
Parts III through V examine three frontier domains where the knowledge engine has produced capabilities that demand governance: the biology of time (longevity interventions that may extend healthy human life by decades), artificial intelligence (systems functioning as scientific instruments while introducing irreducible uncertainty), and the
Proxima horizon (the interstellar program that could send humanity’s first probe to the nearest star within a professional lifetime).
Part VI constructs the governance architecture: the New Atlantis Compact, a constitutional framework specifying five commitments (proportionate governance, justice-by-design, epistemic humility, dual-use containment, long-horizon stewardship), eight
institutional articles, and an evaluation framework—the Bensalem Tests for assessing whether institutions meet the Compact’s requirements.
Part VII develops the implementation roadmap and catalogues fifteen open research problems.
The book proposes an Operating System for Advanced and Advancing Society (OSFAS):
a five-layer governance architecture designed to manage the knowledge enterprise across generations. It introduces the Design Equation for civilizational continuity, the Proxima Protocol for deep-time governance, and the concept of institutions as moral technologies—
designed artifacts whose engineering is the most consequential a civilization undertakes.
Written with epistemic humility and scholarly rigor, New New Atlantis is both a close reading of one of the most consequential texts in the history of science and a detailed institutional proposal for governing the technologies that will define the coming century.
It is addressed to scholars, policymakers, scientists, technologists, and anyone who believes that the governance of powerful knowledge is too important to be improvised.
This is a must read for those at the forefront of new technologies, especially AGI and Superintelligence and Extreme Longevity. For policymakers, funders, financiers, scientists and technologists and civilizational acceleration . And oh by the way, lots of discussion. of the basics of our Journey to Proxima. Interstellar travel to Proxima Centauri is part of human destiny. We need to start preparing. New New Atlantis is part of that plan.
