Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
The Ascent: Where Abundance Meets Ambition
The Problem With Paradise
Picture this: it’s 2048. You wake up in comfortable housing you didn’t pay for. Your pantry is stocked with food you didn’t earn. Healthcare AI monitors your vitals like an anxious guardian angel. Energy flows like water—always on, never billed. Every material need you’ve ever worried about? Handled.
Now what?
This is the question that haunted John Calhoun’s mice in Universe 25—the 1968 experiment where a colony of rodents was given unlimited food, water, and safety, only to spiral into extinction through purposelessness. The “beautiful ones” groomed themselves into oblivion while the colony collapsed around them. Paradise, it turns out, can kill you.
The Foundation solves survival. That’s the 90% of life that becomes infrastructure—housing, food, healthcare, energy, education. Essential, revolutionary, necessary. But insufficient.
Here’s what Keynes missed when he predicted fifteen-hour work weeks by 2030: humans don’t just need stuff. We need struggle. Not the cruel struggle of “work or starve,” but the meaningful struggle of “climb or stagnate.” We need mountains even when the wolves stop chasing us.
Enter The Ascent.
What The Ascent Actually Is
The Ascent is the 10% of civilization that remains genuinely scarce—not because we’ve engineered artificial barriers, but because some things actually are limited by physics, risk, or capacity.
Consider what’s on offer:
A seat on the Mars colony ship. SpaceX plans to send five uncrewed Starships to Mars during the 2026 launch window, with Elon Musk estimating a 50-50 chance of meeting that deadline. Human missions could follow by 2028-2031, with plans escalating to 1,000-2,000 ships per Mars rendezvous by mid-century. But each crewed Starship carries only 100-200 passengers. Someone has to decide who goes first.
Experimental life-extension treatments. In December 2025, researchers at UC Berkeley extended lifespan by 70% in elderly mice using a combination of oxytocin and an Alk5 inhibitor—both already FDA-approved or in clinical trials. Harvard’s David Sinclair predicts an age-reversing pill within a decade. Some researchers bet we’ll see the first human to reach 150 in our lifetimes. But clinical trials have limited spots. Experimental interventions can’t be given to everyone simultaneously. Selection is inevitable.
Priority for consciousness augmentation. The Synthesis Commons in the book runs “merge sessions” where participants pool thoughts to solve problems no individual mind could tackle. Not everyone can be a neural-interface guinea pig at once. The frontier of consciousness exploration has gatekeepers—not by design, but by necessity.
Influence over civilization’s direction. Voting rights on major decisions—whether to fund interstellar exploration, how to regulate AI consciousness, what the next decade of collective effort should prioritize. In a world of eight billion voices, attention is finite. Whose voice carries weight?
This is The Ascent: the arena where ambition, creativity, and contribution compete for genuinely scarce opportunities. It’s the answer to the Stagnation Problem—the “infinite game” that gives restless humans mountains to climb after survival is solved.
What The Ascent Is NOT
Let’s kill some strawmen before they multiply.
The Ascent is not luxury goods. In the 2048 depicted in the book, luxury has been democratized. The Foundation provides high-quality living—not minimum subsistence. Your apartment has good views. Your food is excellent. Your healthcare is better than what billionaires had in 2025. The Ascent isn’t about better couches or fancier wine. Those are Foundation goods now. The Ascent is about transformative experiences—the genuinely paradigm-shifting, the actually scarce.
The Ascent is not a caste system. Participants in Ascent opportunities still live in Foundation housing. They still share Foundation dignity with everyone else. You don’t move to a special neighborhood when you earn Impact Points. You don’t wear different clothes. The Ascent is a game layered on top of universal dignity, not a class structure that determines basic respect.
The Ascent is not mandatory. If you want to spend your life painting in your Foundation apartment, reading philosophy, raising children, or watching sunsets—that’s fine. That’s protected. The Foundation guarantees you a life of genuine comfort and meaning without playing the Ascent game at all. The Ascent exists for those who want mountains to climb. It’s not a requirement for a good life.
The Ascent is not wealth accumulation. You can’t buy your way in. You can’t inherit your parents’ access. You can’t hoard position. The currency of the Ascent—Impact—is non-transferable and decaying. Today’s achievements fade; tomorrow’s contributions must be earned fresh. This is the opposite of compound interest.
The Currency: Why Your Glory Must Fade
Access to The Ascent is earned through Impact Points (IMP)—a verifiable record of contribution to human flourishing. Think karma made mathematically rigorous, or reputation you can actually audit.
Three rules define it:
Rule 1: Impact is Non-Transferable. You cannot sell your Impact. You cannot give it to your children. You cannot buy someone else’s achievements. The Walton kids don’t automatically get seats on the Mars ship because great-grandpa started Walmart. They start at zero, like everyone else.
Rule 2: Impact Decays. Your contributions have a shelf life. A 3.41% annual decay rate gives a 20-year half-life—a thousand points today becomes 500 in two decades, 250 in four. Einstein doesn’t govern physics based on papers from 1905. Contributions must stay relevant or fade.
Rule 3: Impact is Universal. The system values all forms of genuine contribution—not just what’s commercially profitable. The caregiver who spends forty years helping dementia patients die with dignity earns Impact as real as the fusion engineer who lights up a city. Poetry matters. Parenting matters. Community-building matters. The Diversity Guard validates contributions across culturally distinct councils, ensuring the “tyranny of the easily measured” doesn’t reduce human worth to engineering metrics.
This is the mechanism that prevents permanent oligarchies. Stack Overflow’s reputation system created gerontocracy—early contributors accumulated advantages that compound forever, locking out newcomers. Reddit learned that content should decay but failed to make karma decay. Impact gets both right: every contribution fades, and every contributor must keep contributing to maintain standing.
The Catalog: What People Actually Do
If the Foundation handles survival and the Ascent handles significance, what does life actually look like?
The Stewards
They guard the biosphere and the human spirit. In the Scottish Highlands, teams spend decades as “Rewilders,” replanting the Caledonian Forest not for pay, but for the return of the lynx and the wolf. “Memory Keepers” interview the last generation who remembers the “Job Age,” ensuring we don’t forget what survival anxiety felt like—lest we accidentally recreate it. “Deep Caregivers” like Elara in Chapter 2 dedicate forty years to those with rare conditions, earning Impact for the profundity of their empathy.
The Makers
They craft what machines cannot—or what machines can but somehow shouldn’t. A “Bio-Designer” engineers bioluminescent orchids to light living rooms from Tokyo to Lagos. “Retro-Engineers” restore 20th-century internal combustion engines, keeping the kinetic art of “controlled explosions pushing pistons” alive as living history. A “Luthier” spends six months carving a single violin by hand, seeking the soul in the wood that no robot has found yet. People crave art with a story behind it—brushstrokes that carry intention, mistakes that reveal the maker’s journey.
The Seekers
They push the boundaries of knowledge. A retired plumber becomes a “Citizen Astronomer,” using the public telescope network to track asteroids with human intuition that AI somehow lacks. “Analog Astronauts” live in sealed Mars simulations for years, testing human resilience for the colonies to come. “Abyss Walkers” pilot submersibles into the Mariana Trench because someone has to. “Quantum Cobblers” pursue wild unified theories of gravity that might—just might—unlock faster-than-light travel.
The Connectors
They weave the social fabric. “Algorithmic Auditors” spend their days debugging democracy, searching open-source code for hidden biases. “Conflict Mediators” broker peace between traditionalist and cyber-progressive Commons, dealing in the one currency AI cannot manufacture: trust. “Debate Champions” challenge their communities to expand their moral circles—should simulated beings have rights? Let’s argue about it.
The Players
They pursue mastery for its own sake. “Zero-G Dancers” invent new forms of ballet in orbital habitats, choreographing moves impossible in gravity. “Speedrunners” push human reaction times to their biological limits in increasingly complex simulations. “Ultra-Alpinists” scale K2 without supplemental oxygen—not because they must, but because it’s hard, and some humans are wired to need hard things.
This catalog isn’t exhaustive. It’s a glimpse. The Ascent is a machine for converting human restlessness into civilization-level complexity.
Why This Isn’t the Chinese Social Credit System
“Wait,” you’re thinking. “A system that tracks contributions and allocates opportunities based on a score? That sounds dystopian.”
Fair concern. Wrong conclusion.
The Chinese social credit system is punitive—lose points for bad behavior, get excluded from society. The Unscarcity system is enabling—earn points for contribution, gain access to new opportunities. The Foundation provides unconditional dignity regardless of Impact. You can never be punished into poverty. You can only be rewarded into significance.
More importantly, Impact is validated through the Diversity Guard, which requires consensus across demonstrably different Commons. No single authority decides what counts. If a Heritage Commons and a Synthesis Commons and an Art Collective all independently agree your contribution matters, then it matters. This is decentralized meaning-making, not top-down social engineering.
And everything is transparent. The ledger is public. The algorithms are published. Anyone can audit how decisions get made. Axiom II: Truth Must Be Seen isn’t just philosophy—it’s architecture.
The Meritocratic Queue: How Allocation Actually Works
Here’s where it gets concrete.
Say there are 500 spots in the next Mars colony mission. Tens of thousands of people want to go. How do you choose?
The old system: whoever has the most money. The billionaires buy tickets while the rest of us watch.
The Ascent system: Impact Points establish eligibility (getting you in the queue), but final allocation also considers Mission-Specific Criteria (your potential to contribute to this specific mission).
Impact Points prove you’ve contributed to civilization. That matters. But the Mars colony also needs specific skills: engineers, doctors, biologists, psychologists, artists, farmers. The selection process considers what you’d add to the mission, not just what you’ve done before.
This prevents Impact from becoming a simple “purchase” mechanism. It ensures allocation serves collective flourishing, not just backward-looking scorekeeping. The person who earned massive Impact through poetry isn’t automatically better suited for Mars than the botanist who earned moderate Impact through decades of hydroponics research.
Meritocracy, properly implemented, means matching contribution to opportunity—not just rewarding past achievements with future privileges.
The Impact Trust: Saving for Big Dreams
“But wait,” you’re asking. “If my Impact decays 3.41% every year, how do I save up for something huge? Life extension? A spot on the interstellar probe? These things take decades of accumulated contribution.”
Good question. The answer is the Impact Trust.
You can “commit” your Impact to a specific, validated life mission. When you do, your Impact stops decaying—but it also becomes locked. You can’t use it for anything else. It sits in escrow until you reach your goal.
Consider Elara from Chapter 2. She’s a caregiver, not a scientist. For forty years, she dedicated herself to specialized care of elders with complex dementia. In the old economy, she’d have been paid minimum wage, invisible, exhausted, probably forced to retire into poverty.
In her thirties, Elara committed her career to an Impact Trust—declaring her life mission (mastering dementia care to train future generations) and locking her future earnings to that goal. The Trust paused the usual decay rate, letting her accumulate a lifetime of Impact.
At 75, she applies for life extension. She wants twenty more years to train a new generation of caregivers. The treatment is genuinely scarce—we can’t offer it to everyone yet. The community reviews her application. Because her life was spent serving others, the system serves her. She gets the treatment.
The Ascent rewards patience, dedication, and the long game. It’s not designed for quick wins. It’s designed for people who commit to something larger than themselves.
The Objections (And Why They’re Incomplete)
“Won’t people just coast on the Foundation?”
This concern sounds plausible and repeatedly fails empirically. Wikipedia has no shortage of contributors. Linux has no shortage of committers. Open source projects reached nearly a billion contributions in 2024 despite paying essentially no one.
The difference between Universe 25 and human civilization isn’t biological—it’s architectural. The mice had no way to contribute meaningfully. No complex challenges. No social recognition for achievement. The Ascent creates those structures deliberately.
And social visibility matters. In a transparent system where contribution is legible, non-contribution is also visible. You can live perfectly well on the Foundation doing nothing. But your neighbors will know. In a world where status comes from what you give rather than what you own, that visibility shapes behavior—without coercion.
“What about people who genuinely can’t contribute?”
The Foundation is unconditional. Period. If you’re disabled, elderly, ill, or simply uninterested in the Ascent game—you still get full Foundation access. Full dignity. Full comfort. No exceptions.
The Ascent isn’t “contribute or suffer.” It’s “contribute if you want to matter beyond yourself.” Many people won’t play. That’s fine. That’s protected. The Foundation isn’t the consolation prize. It’s the baseline of human dignity.
“Who decides what counts as contribution?”
Everyone and no one. AI systems handle objectively measurable contributions (did this code run faster? did this research get replicated?). For subjective contributions—art, philosophy, care work—validation comes through PoD-Verified Value, requiring endorsement from multiple culturally distinct Commons.
The key insight: validation happens after contribution, not before. You don’t need permission to create. You need recognition to accumulate Impact. The barrier to entry is zero; the barrier to reward is consensus across difference.
“This sounds like work with extra steps.”
Sort of. But here’s the difference: you choose the work. You choose when. You choose how. You choose whether to play at all.
The old economy was coercion dressed as opportunity—“work or starve” isn’t really a choice. The Ascent is genuinely optional—no one forces you to climb the mountain. But for those who want to climb, the mountain exists. For those wired to need challenge, significance, and contribution, there’s a game worth playing.
Viktor Frankl wrote from the ashes of Auschwitz: “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”
The Ascent is that freely chosen task, scaled to civilization.
The Finite Game vs. The Infinite Game
James Carse’s distinction illuminates the entire project.
Finite games are played to win. They have rules, boundaries, and endings. Chess. Elections. The old economy. You play within the rules, and when someone wins, the game stops.
Infinite games are played to keep playing. The rules can change. The boundaries shift. New players can join. The goal isn’t to end the game with victory—it’s to ensure the game continues, with as many people playing as possible.
The 20th-century economy was a finite game disguised as survival. Accumulate or lose. Fear was the referee.
The Ascent is an infinite game by design. There’s no final score. No ultimate winner. No endpoint at which you’ve “made it” and can stop. There’s only the continuous opportunity to contribute, grow, and participate. The mountain never ends—but neither does the climbing.
Decay ensures turnover. New players always have a chance. Yesterday’s heroes fade unless they keep contributing. The game stays dynamic instead of calcifying into permanent hierarchy.
Why The Ascent Solves the Stagnation Problem
The Stagnation Problem is simple: when you solve survival, what prevents civilization from collapsing into comfortable meaninglessness?
The Ascent solves it through three mechanisms:
1. Endless Projects. There will always be another star to reach, another disease to cure, another mystery to solve, another art form to invent. Human curiosity is inexhaustible. The Ascent provides the structure to channel it.
2. Decaying Status. Impact decay ensures no one rests on laurels. You must keep contributing or fade. This creates perpetual renewal—yesterday’s achievements don’t entitle you to permanent privilege. Fresh voices always have a seat.
3. Universal Accessibility. Citizenship through Civic Service gives everyone a viable starting position. The Impact Point Seed granted upon completing service solves the “First Credit Problem”—ensuring even late bloomers have the capital to participate. The Ascent isn’t reserved for those whose talents manifest early.
Together, these mechanisms create what the book calls the “Mission Economy”—a post-money system for allocating transformative opportunities based on contribution rather than inheritance.
Conclusion: The Game Worth Playing
The Ascent replaces traditional labor markets and status ladders with purpose-driven missions. It aligns personal drive with collective flourishing—channeling human ambition toward civilization-scale challenges rather than zero-sum accumulation.
It’s not utopia. Humans will still be competitive, jealous, and occasionally petty. The system assumes this. It’s designed for humans as they actually are—messy, contradictory, occasionally brilliant—not as angels philosophers wish we were.
But it’s a better game. Instead of a scoreboard measuring how much you’ve taken, we have one measuring how much you’ve given. Instead of permanent aristocracies hoarding opportunity, we have continuous turnover as contributions decay and new climbers emerge. Instead of “work or starve,” we have “survive unconditionally; contribute if you want to matter.”
The mice in Universe 25 had everything except something worth doing. The Ascent exists to ensure that no matter how abundant the Foundation becomes, there will always be a next mountain.
Not because we must climb it to survive.
Because climbing is what makes us come alive.
Further Reading
- Impact: The Currency That Must Die — Why your glory must fade
- Infinite Games — The philosophical framework
- Purpose Beyond Survival — Viktor Frankl and the science of meaning
- The Foundation — Where survival is solved
- Civic Service — The pathway to participation
- Chapter 2: The Ascent — The full vision in narrative form
References
- SpaceX Mars Program Timeline: Wikipedia, Al Jazeera (May 2025)
- Life Extension Research 2025: UC Berkeley Lifespan Study, NIH Review
- David Sinclair Longevity Predictions: NAD.com
- GitHub Octoverse 2024: Open Source Statistics
- Carse, James P. (1986). Finite and Infinite Games
- Frankl, Viktor E. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning
- Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler (2012). Abundance
- NASA Artemis Program Documentation
