A planetary balance of matter and energy.
Humanity manages companies, states and economies through money, securities, laws and borders. These systems shape our lives, but they are human-made abstractions: they exist because we collectively recognize them.
Beneath them lies a deeper reality that does not depend on our agreements: life, matter, energy, space and time. Matter does not recognize national borders. Energy does not obey financial statements. The laws of physics cannot be changed by political decision, and the physical quantity of a resource cannot be increased by assigning it a higher price.
Life is a rare and fragile organization of matter in a universe indifferent to our survival. Humanity's future depends on learning to use matter and energy carefully, efficiently and with an understanding of the consequences.
Aftertime is an open project to build a planetary accounting system for this physical reality.
The project aims to describe:
- what matter exists, in what quantity and physical form;
- where it is located and how concentrated or recoverable it is;
- who owns it and who exercises political or effective control over it;
- how it moves through territories, infrastructure and supply chains;
- how industrial and natural processes transform it;
- what energy those transformations consume, release or dissipate;
- what emissions, waste and future liabilities they create;
- how today's choices change humanity's ability to survive and thrive.
The governing physical idea is simple: matter does not appear from nowhere or vanish. It moves and transforms. Energy also changes form, while some of its capacity to perform useful work is lost through dissipation. A financial balance shows how society assigns and distributes value. Aftertime should show what physically happens to the world as a result. It adds a missing physical layer rather than replacing economics.
For a material, place and period:
Opening stock + inflows − outflows ± transformations = closing stock
For energy:
Energy input = useful work + stored energy + dissipated energy
Mass alone is not enough. The model must also represent composition, concentration, location, accessibility, ownership, control, uncertainty and the energy required to recover or reuse a resource.
Aftertime is a long-term public-interest infrastructure project: a shared model, open methodology and, eventually, an operational planetary accounting system. It is not a ship-tracking product. Vessel data is one possible observation source for material flows, alongside mines, factories, ports, pipelines, power systems, trade records, satellites, environmental sensors and scientific datasets.
The project is at the concept and foundation stage. The immediate work is to:
- formalize the ontology and accounting rules;
- define provenance, uncertainty and verification standards;
- select a narrow pilot material and geography;
- connect several independent public datasets;
- demonstrate an auditable opening-to-closing balance;
- establish a transparent community and governance process.
Aftertime needs people from many fields: physics, chemistry, energy systems, industrial ecology, material-flow analysis, geology, climate science, economics, data engineering, geospatial systems, public policy, law, design and open-source community building.
You can help by challenging the model, proposing a pilot, mapping datasets, building software, translating documents, funding public work or connecting the project with research and institutional partners.
Start a GitHub Discussion or open an Issue describing the problem, evidence and proposed contribution. Please do not submit sensitive, proprietary or unlawfully obtained data.
Aftertime is intended to remain open and independently auditable. The repository license and the future data-license policy are important governance decisions and have not yet been selected. Until a license is added, copyright law applies to the repository contents. License selection is an explicit first-phase task.
What remains after our time?
Aftertime exists to help humanity see the physical consequences of its decisions early enough to choose a survivable future.