I shared this article from the Strelka Institute, "Backcasting Kardashev One," in the Discord for the jam: https://www.backcasting-kardashev.one/. It presents four "future visions" of the Earth, organized in four timelines that are ultimately "backcasted" to the present. Backcasting is just the opposite of forecasting: take a speculative future, and then work backward from it to plot the steps necessary to get there. This exercise is intended to help us plot courses toward more desirable futures and away from less desirable futures (which is necessarily a political exercise as well), specifically in terms of "energy, civilisation and planetarity."

The accompanying essay provides some additional theory and context: https://strelkamag.com/en/article/backcasting-kardashev-one. I'll excerpt the core motivation for their argument here:

"we propose repurposing the Kardashev scale to assess what planetary civilization means here on Earth. In that context, we ask: Where are we on the scale, and what does that say about our level of advancement? What might be the thermodynamic and civilizational consequences of advancement on the Kardashev scale? What is the scope of our agency as we head towards many possible futures, and what might those futures look like? And finally, working backwards from them, what might we learn about inhabitation of Earth during our current anthropogenic crisis of energy metabolism?"

I hope this resource can get the creativity flowing for more of you, as it already has for a few of us in the Discord! Build a setting from one of the timelines, use "backcasting" as a game mechanic (makes me think of Everest Pipkin's The Ground Itself), build a whole civilization simulator using the framework—or something else entirely! There's a lot of room to work here.

Thanks to thegiftofgabs for encouraging me to post this here! If you have ideas and want to discuss them with other jam participants, come join us in the Discord!