Restoring generative wandering to science: long-term, open-ended funding for 1,000 researchers.
Not all those who wander are lost …
– J.R.R. Tolkien
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny …”
– Isaac Asimov
Short-termism and objective orientation pervade our world. Still, many of us share the intuition that some pursuits need freedom from both to bloom—love, spirituality, philosophy, and great art.
What about science? The great discoveries of the past arose from wandering and wondering, patience and persistence, curiosity and creativity. Yet today, science is governed by strict milestones, rigid funding applications, enforced conformity, and distrust accompanied by excessive monitoring.
What is lost in a world where science no longer has the freedom to wander?
Growing evidence reveals a troubling trend: discoveries that open pathways to unimaginably powerful new ideas are drying up. Heliocentrism. Evolution. Relativity. Quantum mechanics. Revolutions like these cannot bloom when we force scientists to abandon big ideas, compartmentalize research into milestone-driven fragments, and seek permission from the establishment.
Now is the time for action—not just words.
Restoring Generative Wandering
Project Aeon is an evergreen funding vehicle for scientific work that can't be captured in rigid proposals, de-risked with preliminary results, or accomplished in short grant cycles.
Our ambition: fund 1,000 scientists to pursue world-changing, unorthodox ideas over long time horizons.
Our philosophy starts from a simple premise: discovery isn't linear, and systems built for predictability suffocate the ideas that matter most. Trust must be our core technology. We exist to back wandering minds—people of deep curiosity and great capability—and give them the time and freedom their explorations require.
We're one model among many that science needs—an exploration-first approach built on seven principles:
Back people, not rigid plans. We evaluate taste, tenacity, and judgment in practice: how candidates choose problems, adjust course, and reason from partial evidence. We focus on how candidates think and work, confirm with a few close collaborators, and decide quickly.
Design for open-endedness. Discovery isn't linear. We give scientists multi-year freedom to explore, celebrating anomalies and detours. The goal is to enlarge the map, not pretend we know its contours before the exploration has begun.
Unearth the overlooked. Breakthroughs rarely arise from the center, and ability is widely distributed even if opportunity is not. We look beyond prestige, searching across geographies, institutions, disciplines, and career stages to surface unfashionable problems and overlooked talent. Past success isn’t a proxy for future originality.
Pair freedom with rigor. Freedom only works when paired with discipline. We value bold hypotheses tested with care, honest updates over theater, and flexibility in the face of new signals. Progress is measured by upgraded questions, closed dead ends, and conceptual advances, not tidy reports.
Aim science at world-changing, widely shared benefit. Too often, scientific advances serve the few. We back explorations that enhance human and planetary flourishing: strengthening public goods, repairing ecosystems, broadening access to resources, and building resilience.
Shepherd ideas from curiosity to real-world application. When promising signals emerge, we help ideas cross the valley of death—providing support for translation, commercialization, and access to downstream funders.
Steward capital for long-termism and regeneration. Our capital model is built for durability: a charitable engine anchoring long-horizon exploration, paired with a return-seeking vehicle for commercialization. Lean operations ensure dollars reach the lab. Returns are reinvested into new explorations, creating a virtuous cycle.
Project Aeon won’t fund every pathbreaking scientific exploration, but it will be a home for ambitious, non-conformist ideas and a bridge from open-ended inquiry to widely shared benefit.
Why Now—and How to Help
We stand at a hinge point in history. The crises before us—ecological, technological, institutional—are not incremental problems. They are system-level tests of human ingenuity. Meeting them will require science operating at its full creative potential: free, ambitious, and generative.
Over the last 75 years, the optimization mindset that made our world efficient has made scientific exploration timid. We’ve built a system that chases incremental answers instead of cultivating big new questions—one that elevates consensus over dissent. This pushes us further from the discoveries this century demands.
But a window is open. New funding models are emerging. Scientists are restless for change. The public is hungry to believe again that science can serve all of humanity, not just the lucky few.
Project Aeon exists for this moment. By reimagining science funding and stewardship, we can unlock a new era of unprecedented discovery equal to the scale of our challenges.
If you believe the next century deserves more than incremental progress, and that trust, time, and the freedom to wander must be restored to science in order to meet that goal, come help us.
Share this vision. Lend your voice, expertise, network or capital.
How can you start?
Follow one of the links below to find out more.
Links
A short story that brings our vision to life.
Acknowledgements
Project Aeon is the result of a multi-year wandering into the deep, dark substrate of our inability to effectively tackle the greatest civilizational challenges of the late 20th and early 21st century. But we are not without guides in our wanderings. Below is a short list of people and organizations we are thankful for as torches lighting the way through the dark maze. Some are no longer with us, and some institutions have changed or closed, but their influence endures. What follows is only a partial list (with apologies to those we’ve missed):
Donald Braben
Thomas Kuhn
Kenneth Stanley
Fast Grants
Emergent Ventures
Donald Stokes
Vannevar Bush
Venkatesh Narayanamurti
Jeff Tsao
MacArthur Foundation
Matt Clancy
Y Combinator
Michael Nielsen
Kanjun Qiu
Pierre Azoulay
Lux Capital
The Astera Institute
Arc Institute
DARPA
Bell Labs
Speculative Technologies
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
First Round Capital
Builders Vision
Renaissance Philanthropy