the STEWARDSHIP CIVILIZATION Volume IV: Far Horizon: Preparing for Age of Artificial Intelligence

SERIES OVERVIEW The Stewardship Civilization is a six-volume nonfiction series by Luis Esteban Laó González, written as a comprehensive response to the most consequential technological disruption in human history: the arrival of artificial general intelligence and its cascading effects on labor, economy, governance, the body, and the deepest questions of human purpose. Volumes I and II built the economic and fiscal architecture - diagnosing the five distinct failure modes of AI-driven disruption (wealth concentration, passivity, Global South extraction, ecological overload, and the meaning crisis), and proposing a fully funded alternative order anchored by a Universal High Income, AI Surplus Taxation, and commons governance of foundational AI infrastructure. Volume III turned from the economy to the human being at its center - to radical life extension, brain-computer interfaces, the multi-vocation life, the transformation of family across longer lifespans, and the existential challenge of post-work civilization. Volume IV carries that human turn outward, to the farthest imaginable reaches of a post-scarcity civilization's ambition: the stars, the physics of cosmic travel, the conquest of death, and the freedom that even deathlessness must preserve. Volumes V and VI will provide the moral, theological, and institutional foundations that ground the entire project. >ABOUT VOLUME IV: THE FAR HORIZON Volume IV, The Far Horizon, is the most philosophically daring installment in the series. It steps beyond the near-term policy architecture of the earlier volumes and asks what a genuinely post-scarcity civilization - one that has secured abundance, stabilized governance, and begun extending human life - might reach for next. The volume is structured in two parts. Part One, The Physics of the Possible, examines the scientific and ethical landscape of interstellar expansion: the physics of faster-than-light travel, the speculative territory of extra-dimensional engineering, and the moral imperatives governing how a civilization ought to treat the worlds it might one day reach. Part Two, Eternity and Its Problems, confronts the deepest consequences of radical longevity: the technologies that might one day abolish death from aging, the philosophical challenge of finding meaning across an indefinitely extended life, and the supreme freedom - the right to choose one's own end - that any vision of endless life must include to remain humane. Throughout, the volume applies the discipline that defines the entire series: an unflinching distinction between established science, plausible extrapolation, and honest speculation. Where the physics is settled, the author says so. Where it is contested, he says that too. Where he is imagining at the edge of the conceivable, he marks the boundary. This discipline is the volume's distinguishing intellectual signature - and one of its greatest gifts to the reader.