“I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things, and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences.”
Francis Bacon, De Interpretatione Naturae Prooemium, c. 1603
In the second century of the Common Era, Lucian of Samosata wrote A True History—a narrative in which travelers are swept by a waterspout to the Moon, encounter its inhabitants, and observe a war between the King of the Moon and the King of the Sun over colonization rights to the Morning Star. Lucian was honest about what he was doing: “I write of things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard of from another, and which do not in fact exist and could not ever exist. Therefore let no one believe them.” The work was an explicit fantasy, a satire of travelers’ tales and historians who lie. No one, least of all Lucian, imagined that a human being would actually stand on the Moon.
Eighteen centuries later, one did.
The trajectory from Lucian’s fantasy to Armstrong’s footstep is not a story about prophetic accuracy; Lucian predicted nothing. It is a story about the relationship between imagination and institutional capability. What was absolute fantasy in the second century became engineering ambition in the twentieth—not because the physics changed but because the institutions changed. Between Lucian and Apollo stood Bacon’s Great Instauration: the argument that organized inquiry, properly institutionalized, could systematically enlarge the bounds of the possible.
This book is written in the conviction that we stand at a similar threshold—not for a single achievement like lunar landing but for a cluster of transformations whose convergence demands a new kind of institutional imagination. We can now edit the human genome with precision that would have seemed magical a generation ago. We have built artificial systems that reason, generate hypotheses, and produce knowledge at scales no human institution can match. We have identified the nearest star system that might harbor a world amenable to life, and we have conceived—in credible engineering terms, not fantasy—the means to send a probe there within a professional lifetime.
Each of these capabilities was, within living memory, a fantasy. Gene editing was science fiction. Machine intelligence was a philosophical thought experiment. Interstellar travel was Lucian-grade imagination. They are now research programs with budgets, laboratories, clinical trials, and engineering specifications. The question this book addresses is not whether these capabilities will mature—they will, barring civilizational catastrophe—but whether the governance institutions will mature alongside them. History offers a clear pattern: they usually do not. Nuclear weapons were built before nuclear governance. Social media was deployed before content governance. CRISPR was applied before gene-editing governance. The most powerful capabilities have consistently been deployed into governance vacuums, and the consequences have consistently been paid by populations that had no voice in the deployment decision.
Francis Bacon foresaw this pattern four centuries ago, though he could not have known the specific technologies that would instantiate it. His New Atlantis (1627) described an institution—Salomon’s House—designed to produce all possible knowledge for the benefit of humanity. But the text breaks off before Bacon could describe the governance architecture: “The rest was not perfected.” He left unfinished the very part that would prove most consequential: the “frame of Laws” that would make the knowledge engine accountable to the civilization it serves.
New New Atlantis: The Time Has Come is my contribution to addressing what Bacon left unwritten.
What this book does. The book proceeds in seven Parts.
Parts I and II examine Bacon’s original design and its intellectual afterlife: the man, his times, his 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 detailed, because the institutional patterns Bacon established—both their strengths and their failures—are the foundations on which everything else in the book is built.
Parts III through V examine three frontier domains where the knowledge engine Bacon envisioned has produced capabilities that demand governance: the biology of time (longevity interventions that may extend healthy human life by decades or more), artificial intelligence (non-biological systems that function as scientific instruments, epistemic infrastructure, and sources of irreducible uncertainty), and the Proxima horizon (the interstellar program that would send humanity’s first probe to the nearest star). Each domain is analyzed not merely as a scientific enterprise but as a governance challenge: what institutions are required, what principles should guide them, and what failure modes must be prevented.
Part VI constructs the governance architecture: the New Atlantis Compact, a constitutional framework specifying five minimal 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 are meeting the Compact’s requirements.
Part VII develops the implementation roadmap—a four-layer sequence built on the principle that institutions must precede the capabilities they govern—and catalogues the open problems whose resolution the roadmap requires.
The book proposes an Operating System for Advanced and Advancing Society (OSFAS): a five-layer governance architecture (epistemic infrastructure, governance architecture, ethical firmware, incentive and accountability mechanisms, cultural and educational substrate) designed to manage the knowledge enterprise across the deep timescales its most ambitious projects demand.
What this book acknowledges. Epistemic humility is not merely one of the Compact’s five commitments; it is the disposition in which this entire book is written.
We know vastly more than Bacon did. Many of the “fables” he speculated about—the prolongation of life, the acceleration of natural processes, the transformation of species, instruments for seeing distant and minute objects—are not fables any longer. They are active research programs with measurable progress, clinical endpoints, and engineering specifications. The hallmarks of aging are identified. The transformer architecture has produced artificial systems of remarkable capability. The physics of directed-energy propulsion is understood. Bacon’s intuitions about what organized inquiry might achieve have been vindicated far beyond what he could have imagined.
And yet the dark matter of our knowledge—what we do not know, what we do not know we do not know, and what we may be structurally incapable of knowing—is vast. We do not understand consciousness. We cannot fully interpret the internal representations of the artificial systems we have built. We do not know whether Proxima b has an atmosphere, let alone whether it harbors life. We cannot predict how extended human lifespan would transform the social, economic, and psychological structures that depend on finitude. We do not know how many major epistemic transitions lie ahead—how many times the foundations of our understanding will shift as fundamentally as they shifted between Newton and Einstein, between Darwin and the Modern Synthesis, between Turing and the transformer.
The recognition of this dark matter is not a weakness of the analysis; it is the analysis’s most important finding. The governance framework this book proposes is designed not for a world in which we know enough to govern confidently but for a world in which we know enough to know that confident governance is impossible—and must govern anyway, under conditions of irreducible uncertainty, with institutions humble enough to acknowledge their limits and flexible enough to adapt when those limits are revealed.
The cognitive aperture. Between Lucian’s fantasy and Armstrong’s reality lay not merely eighteen centuries of technological development but a transformation in what might be called the cognitive aperture—the range of possibilities that a civilization considers worth investigating seriously.
Lucian’s contemporaries could imagine travel to the Moon. They could not imagine building institutions capable of getting there. The cognitive aperture was wide enough for fantasy but too narrow for institutional design. Bacon widened it: he argued that organized inquiry could systematically enlarge the bounds of the possible, and he provided the institutional blueprint. The Royal Society, the Académie des Sciences, and their successors widened it further: they demonstrated that Bacon’s blueprint worked.
We must widen it again.
The cognitive aperture required for the challenges this book addresses is broader than any single discipline provides. It spans molecular biology and constitutional law, transformer architectures and Athenian democracy, stellar physics and the phenomenology of consciousness. It requires thinking across timescales that range from the nanoseconds of a neural-network forward pass to the centuries of an interstellar mission. It requires holding in mind simultaneously the technical details that make capabilities real and the institutional designs that make capabilities governable.
This book attempts to model that aperture. It is, necessarily, imperfect in the attempt. No single work can command all the domains it touches with equal authority. The biology chapters are written by someone who is not a bench biologist; the AI chapters, by someone who is not a machine-learning researcher; the space chapters, by someone who is not a propulsion engineer. What the book offers is not disciplinary authority but architectural vision: the argument that these domains are connected, that their governance challenges are structurally similar, and that the institutional framework for managing them must be designed as a whole rather than piecemeal.
New fantasies that are not far-fetched. Lucian’s moon voyage was absolute fantasy. Bacon’s Salomon’s House was speculative institutional design. Goddard’s interplanetary rockets were ridiculed by the New York Times. Each became reality not because fantasists were vindicated but because institutions were built that could convert imagination into engineering.
This book articulates fantasies of its own. They are not far-fetched:
A human life that extends in health to 150 years and beyond—not through magical elixirs but through the systematic application of senolytic therapies, damage-repair mechanisms, and controlled cellular reprogramming, governed by institutions that ensure equitable access and monitor long-term consequences.
Artificial systems that function as genuine partners in scientific discovery—not as oracles or replacements for human judgment but as instruments of extraordinary capability, governed by frameworks that maintain human oversight, require auditable provenance, and acknowledge the dark variables we cannot yet resolve.
A probe that reaches the nearest star within a professional lifetime and returns data that transforms our understanding of the cosmos—not through science fiction but through directed-energy propulsion using technology whose individual components already exist, governed by international frameworks that prevent the underlying infrastructure from becoming a weapon.
A governance architecture that sustains coherent institutional purpose across generations—not through authoritarian continuity but through democratic institutions explicitly designed for deep time, with mechanisms for generational renewal, amendment, and the formal representation of the interests of people not yet born.
Each of these is further from realization than Armstrong’s footstep was when Kennedy spoke. Each is closer to realization than Armstrong’s footstep was when Lucian wrote. The distance between fantasy and engineering is measured not in years but in institutions—and building the right institutions is the subject of this book.
Debts and limitations. This book draws on companion volumes I am currently working on. These inform its analysis at every level: Epistemic Frontiers, which provides the decision-gate methodology, the non-negotiable requirements for credible knowledge programs, and the governance-paradox analysis; Epistemic Explorations, which provides the OAP measurement framework (OAP: As Objective As Possible), the scale-type taxonomy, and the moral-information-value concept; and Between Word and Void, which examines the ethics and institutions of communication under extreme conditions. Where these works are drawn upon, they are cited; where they are extended, the extensions are identified.
The book has been developed through an extended collaboration with large language models—the very technology it examines in Part IV. This is not ironic; it is appropriate. If the argument of Part IV is correct—that AI systems function best as instruments within governed institutional frameworks—then using AI as an instrument in the production of this book is a test of the argument. The test is imperfect, as all tests are. The AI contributed synthesis, articulation, and structural coherence; it did not contribute the ideas, the values, or the judgment that the synthesis serves. The responsibility for the book’s claims, and for its errors, is entirely the author’s.
The rest was not perfected. Bacon’s final sentence applies to this book as fully as it applied to his. The Compact is a first draft, not a final document. The Bensalem Tests are a proposed framework, not a validated instrument. The roadmap is a design, not a plan. The open problems are genuine: we do not know how to control biological trajectories with formal safety guarantees, how to verify safety properties of frontier AI systems, how to decelerate a relativistic probe at its destination, or how to sustain institutional purpose across centuries.
But we know more than we did in past eras. The chain of incompletions that began with Plato’s Critias (which broke off before Zeus’s judgment), continued through Bacon’s New Atlantis (which broke off before the frame of Laws), and extended through the Royal Society, the Enlightenment, and the twentieth century’s ambivalent relationship with organized knowledge, now includes this volume. We have added what we can: a Compact with five commitments and eight articles, an evaluation framework, an implementation roadmap, a catalogue of what remains unknown, and the argument that institutions are the moral technology on which everything else depends.
The design is now detailed enough that the next generation can build on it, test it, and improve it. That is all this generation can offer, and it is enough.
We do not know how many major epistemic transitions lie ahead. We do not know what dark variables will be illuminated, what new dark variables will emerge, or what capabilities will arise that make the ones examined here seem as quaint as Bacon’s “engine-houses” seem to us. What we do know is that each transition will require governance—institutional architecture designed for the capabilities it manages—and that the habit of building governance before capabilities outpace it is the most valuable habit a civilization can cultivate.
The time has come to cultivate it.
Elan Moritz
2026