Fifteen years are easy to promise. It is much harder to actually start counting them down, because that is the moment when a promise acquires its final second.
That is why, today, our clock stands still.
15 years · 0 months · 0 days · 00:00:00
Only one necessary legal step separates us from the beginning of the countdown. The Ellipsis Foundation must be officially established and have its working foundation in place.
As soon as that happens, there will be nothing left to wait for. We will step forward, say “we are ready now,” and the fifteen year countdown will begin.
In fairy tales, time can stop, stretch across a hundred years or disappear between two pages. Ours will be real.
And throughout those fifteen years, we want to remain in public view. Not disappear after a grand launch and return one day with the result, but make this journey openly. To show what we are researching and building, what questions we are asking, where we are wrong, which ideas we leave behind and what is gradually becoming real.
Not because society needs another report. But because this story is happening together with it.
With every second, those fifteen years will grow shorter, and the distance between what is written here and what exists in reality must grow smaller. We will have to research and make mistakes, find answers and ask new questions, bring people together, work with cities and governments, design and build.
We do not know how much our thinking will change over those years. Some of the ideas we believe in today may prove wrong, and the most important solutions may not even have occurred to us yet. But one thing will no longer change: the time we have given ourselves.
When only the final seconds remain on the clock, what will matter is not the size of The Ellipsis Foundation, the number of studies we have published or how many people know its name. Only one thing will matter: whether that other path now exists in the real world, a path Monica can actually walk.
But before the countdown begins, our fairy tale must take its first step into reality.