On March 16, 1926, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fuel rocket from his aunt's cabbage farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. He watched it climb 41 feet and land 184 feet away. The flight lasted two and a half seconds. Forty-three years later, Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon.

Goddard built for people he never met. He died in 1945, twenty-four years before Apollo 11, and every astronaut who flew owed him a debt he never collected.

I'm starting The 100 Year Lab to argue for the people who will collect our debts. Some of the children born this year will be alive in 2126. They can't vote, write op-eds or show up to a council meeting. We make decisions about their energy, their schools, their books, their cities and their families, and they live with the results.

In each issue, I'll take one idea, one policy or one invention and ask a single question: will the people of 2126 thank us for this, or curse us?

Most of us decide things on the horizon of one election, one quarter or one news cycle. Over a year, the cost of that habit looks small. Over a century, people compound small choices into very different worlds.

Run the math on growth. If an economy grows 2% a year, the people of 2126 will produce about 7.2 times what we produce today. At 1%, they'll produce 2.7 times as much. At zero, which degrowth advocates ask rich countries to accept, they'll have what we have now, split among more retirees and fewer workers.

At 7.2 times our output, our great-grandchildren can pay for cancer cures, cheap power and a permanent presence in space. At zero, they'll argue over a pie that shrinks a little every year.

We already know what growth buys. In 1800, about 43% of children died before their fifth birthday. Today about 4% do. People now live more than twice as long, on average, as they did in 1900. Farmers, chemists, engineers and doctors bought those gains over two centuries of growth, and nobody voted them into being.

People compound neglect too. Sophocles wrote more than 120 plays. We have seven. Scribes stopped copying the rest, and readers lost them for good. Aristotle wrote polished dialogues that Cicero admired for their prose; we have none of them, only his lecture notes. When one generation stops copying, teaching and defending its best ideas, every generation after it loses them, and nobody downstream can write them again.

I'll run every issue through one tool. I call it the Century Ledger. It has four columns, and you can use it on a policy, a company or your own life.

In 1850, Frédéric Bastiat argued that bad economists look only at the effects they can see, while good economists look for the effects they can't. Most bad policy comes from people who feel deeply for the person in front of them and not at all for the people out of view.

The psychologist Gad Saad coined the term "suicidal empathy" for the extreme form of this habit: people show compassion so selectively that they harm their own society, and often the people they meant to help. A city council blocks 300 homes to spare current residents the noise, and 300 families who don't live there yet pay higher rent for decades. Regulators delay a drug because they can picture one side-effect case, while the patients who die waiting never make the news.

Germany shut its last three nuclear plants in April 2023, while it still burned coal for about a quarter of its electricity. The voters who cheered could see the reactors. Germans alive in 2060 will live with the extra emissions, and none of them could attend the rally.

Degrowth advocates want rich countries to shrink their economies on purpose. I want more energy, more housing, more labs, more factories and more launches.

People who use more energy live longer. Across countries, life expectancy rises with energy use per person, and no country has reached rich-world health on a poor-world energy budget. Builders turned the growth in the math above into antibiotics, vaccines, clean water and air conditioning.

In most Western countries, people have to prove a project is harmless before they can start it. I want to flip that: when in doubt, build, and make the people who want to stop a project show the harm.

Western culture belongs to anyone willing to learn it: the Athenian habit of open argument, the Hebrew idea that every person carries a worth no ruler can take away, the scientific method, trial by jury, a free press. None of it survives on its own. Each generation has to read it, teach it and argue for it, or the next one inherits seven plays out of 120.

Philosophy has the most to lose. Universities in the US, UK and Australia have cut or closed humanities departments to save money. Schools teach students to use tools without teaching them what the tools should serve. People who can build anything but can't say what's worth building will build the wrong things fast.

Before you call a decision good or bad, run it forward 100 years at a realistic rate.

If a policy shaves half a point off annual growth, from 2% to 1.5%, over a year, nobody notices. Over a century, it leaves the people of 2126 about 40% poorer than they would have been.

South Korea's fertility rate fell to 0.72 in 2023, against the 2.1 a population needs to replace itself. At that rate, and without migration, each generation is about a third the size of the one before. Three generations take you to roughly 2126, and to about 4% of today's births.

If you want someone arguing for the people of 2126, subscribe when it launches. 

Then forward this post to one person who builds things: an engineer, a founder, a teacher, a parent.