Stellar Thinking with Jamie Arbib
Jamie explaining how we can all become Stellar
September 2025
Featuring: Jamie Arbib, futurist, systems thinker and co-author (with Tony Seba) of Stellar: A World Beyond Limits, and How to Get There. Co-hosted by Blue Earth, at Mother London in Shoreditch.
On a warm September evening, Will Hayler, Co-Founder and CEO of Blue Earth, invited us in the futuristic and funky offices of Mother London and we gathered for a conversation that stretched the edges of possibility.
In conversation with Fiona Howarth, Jamie Arbib invited us to imagine a world no longer governed by scarcity, extraction, and endless growth, but by energy abundance, decentralised intelligence, and radically different rules.
The vision laid out in Stellar is audacious, disorienting, and quietly hopeful. It proposes that we are on the verge of a civilisational shift as profound as the agricultural revolution: one in which solar, wind and battery technologies, combined with AI and robotics, create a system that no longer relies on land, labour or capital. A new logic: radiance.
But this transformation, Jamie insists, is not inevitable. It is technologically possible, economically viable - but socially and politically fragile. And if we get it wrong, the dystopian version may make today’s inequalities look quaint.
⚙️ From Extraction to Radiance
At the heart of Stellar lies a provocative claim: that human civilisation since the Neolithic era has been shaped by a single organising principle : extraction.
“It’s like a fire,” Jamie explained. “You constantly need new inputs - land, labour, capital - to keep it burning. And with the warmth comes smoke and ash. Pollution, exploitation, waste. It’s built in.”
Extraction doesn’t just shape economies. It shapes behaviour. Systems that reward aggression, competition, short-termism, and domination become the evolutionary winners. What we call “human nature” also known as greed, hierarchy, fear, may be less innate than we assume.
And this paradigm is not just ecologically unsustainable, Jamie argued - it is philosophically incomplete. “We’ve mistaken the features of the extractive economy for facts about the human condition.”
🔋 Supersizing Solar: The Economics of Abundance
The next part of the conversation turned to energy. What if we’re asking the wrong questions about solar and wind?
Rather than treating clean energy as a like-for-like swap with fossil fuels, Stellar proposes a radical design principle: build clean energy systems for the darkest day of winter, and overbuild them massively. Why? Because once solar and wind become cheap enough (as they are rapidly doing), oversupply is cheaper than storage.
The result is what Arbib and Seba call superpower, an annual oversupply of 3–4x what a country like the UK would typically need. This transforms not just energy markets, but the possibility space of what’s economically viable:
Precision fermentation and cultured proteins
Vertical farming (80% energy cost)
On-demand materials manufacturing
Desalination, carbon removal, and more
The butterfly is not a faster caterpillar. It’s a different species.
🤖 Artificial Labour, Stellar Technologies, and the End of Input
Jamie outlined the second major disruptor: artificial labour. Combine robotics with machine intelligence, and you eventually reach a point where machines can perform most productive tasks - without rest, payment, or exploitation.
“A Stellar technology,” Jamie explained, “is like a star. It takes huge energy and resources to build. But once it's ignited, it produces outputs indefinitely — without further input.”
Imagine solar panels and AI-robotic systems that no longer require new land, labour, or capital. This shift - from extractive inputs to embodied systems - breaks the economic logic of scarcity.
But here, Jamie sounded a note of warning: without new ownership models, abundance won’t guarantee equity.
“If we allow a few to privately own the world’s artificial labour, we will entrench levels of inequality we can’t yet imagine.”
The book offers provocative ideas such as patent expiry models and shared ownership systems to show how we might use capitalism to reach the Stellar world, without allowing it to calcify into plutocracy.
🐛 On Chimera Systems and "Caterpillars with Wings"
Jamie was honest about the challenges. Right now, we’re trying to retrofit abundance into scarcity-era systems: tacking solar onto fossil infrastructure, plugging AI into bureaucratic hierarchies, attempting top-down change through legacy institutions.
“What we’re building today is a chimera. A caterpillar with wings stuck on. It’s never going to fly.”
True transformation, he argued, happens at the edge not from the centre. He called for the creation of Stellar Nurseries - small-scale models of what this new paradigm could look like, ambitious regions, cities or towns could be pioneers.
🧠 Cultural Operating Systems and the Age of the Dreamer
The biggest barrier? Not technology. Not even politics.
“It’s us. Our minds. We are the fish, and extraction is our water.”
Fiona asked how such a fundamental shift in worldview could occur without war or collapse, historically the mechanisms for transformation at this scale.
Jamie offered a hopeful framing: we don’t need everyone to change all at once. What we need are working examples. Demonstrable models that outperform the old system. In energy. In transport. In ownership. In purpose.
“This is the age of the dreamer,” Fiona said. “But it’s also the age of the builder.”
✨ So What Now?
At the end of the conversation, Jamie reminded us that Stellar is not a prediction. It’s a map of what’s possible: a North Star.
Technological change is coming. Whether it leads to liberty or lock-in depends on us: where we invest, what we build, what we imagine.
If you were given access to superabundant, near-zero-cost green energy, what would you do?
This was the question left hanging in the room as the evening wound down and the drinks and post-conversation buzz continued.
📘 Stellar is available for sale at all good book outlets. And the audiobook is coming soon!
