What are the scientific principles upon which an abundant and sustainable monetary system can be built? To find answers, let’s turn to the natural world. If we ask what makes nature abundant and sustainable, the answer is a constant flow. The finely orchestrated processes that make up life are characterized by a constant flow of energy/matter and information.

Human economies are also characterized by flows. Raw materials from all over the world flow into factories, where they are turned into products that are distributed around the world. Our society depends on a constant flow of critical services just to keep the lights on. When these stop flowing, the result is scarcity and deprivation.

A big problem with our current economic model is that the flows we create usually go only in one direction. But a discharge can’t remain constant if it moves in just one direction. A linear flow of a finite resource will invariably dry up. While this should be obvious, human systems don’t take this into account. For a flow to be genuinely sustainable in a closed system like our planet, it has to be circular.

The reason nature is abundant is because it is regenerative and because its flows are circular. Carbon and nitrogen circulate through the air, the soil and living organisms. The water that flows down a river is part of an enormous cycle, where water vapor from the oceans falls back to Earth as rain, refilling the aquifers deep in the sediment that supply the river. What makes nature regenerative and creates its flows is the energy from the Sun.

Humans, on the other hand, have a habit of extracting vital resources without any consideration of how they will be replenished. The quantities of natural resources can be so massive and their natural cycles so vast and slow that we fail to perceive the circularity inherent in them. Instead of returning used-up natural resources to nature or recycling them into new products, we discard them in landfills and continue our extraction.

This can only go on for so long. Used like this, the critical resources our lives depend on will run out. This can have devastating consequences. A sudden fall in an essential resource, like the topsoil that we need to grow our food, has set in motion numerous civilization collapses over the past 10,000 years.

A central failing of human systems is the lack of circular flow.

For our economies to be sustainable, all supply must be based on regeneration. If something isn’t a product of regeneration or recycling, its consumption is unsustainable in the long term. All human needs, all the well-being we want to create for our fellow citizens and ourselves, have to be supplied through regeneration.

This is a big challenge. In economic terms, this means that we have to learn to live on the interest without touching the principal. If we continue to eat our principal, as we do now, our civilization will face collapse. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but the day will come. We can’t bend the laws of physics.

The evolutionary transition we are currently undergoing has to be built on regeneration. This means that our cooperation has to be based on the ability to create a circular flow. This calls for a whole new social contract because circular flow only works if everybody plays along. If somebody only takes but doesn’t pass on, the flow stops. Participation in these circles should be contingent on your willingness to be a part of the flow. But what is the best way to create a circular economy?

We should start by first creating a circular monetary system. Money is our means of exchange, which lubricates most transactions and enables most of the flows we see around us. If we intend to supply our metabolic needs through regeneration, we need to create a regenerative monetary system that flows in circles. This is what we have already designed in the previous chapters. When money flows only in one direction, it has predictable results. It creates inequality. It extracts from one side but never replenishes the source.

Circular flow provides a frictionless way for daily transactions to transpire, and it accurately reflects how all living organisms naturally function. The optimized system we aspire to build incorporates the flow state as a default setting. The circular flow model can be downright transformative. First, it leads us to wiser use of our resources. Then it opens the possibility of a world of abundance. By creating closed systems that retain their resources, the prosperity we generate can be sustainable and regenerative.

Nothing we see in the human economy comes even close to the effectiveness we see inside biological organisms. Our body’s ability to supply vital resources to over 36 trillion cells is an unparalleled economic achievement. What you see is a highly effective system of resource allocation, which can easily prioritize vital functions even during times of severe scarcity.

A key economic innovation of biological organisms is circulation, which allows a steady flow of glucose, oxygen and other vital resources to travel through the whole system and supply even the most remote cells in the body at a steady pace. The monetary system we create should emulate the circular flow of our blood, where the amount and velocity of our money stay constant. A circular flow of money means that it is scarce and abundant at the same time, both qualities that are necessary for a well-functioning currency.

If we look for an equivalent to the cryptocurrency we are creating, it should be the ATP that powers all life. Plants create glucose through photosynthesis by first converting photons into ATP energy and then into glucose. When mitochondria break down the glucose, it releases the ATP energy for the cell to perform work. Money serves a very similar function in the human economy.

The circulatory system serves the same function for the body as the market does in human societies; it connects supply with demand. Our blood, which circulates around our body at a constant pace, acts like the circular conveyor belts we find at airports. Baggage handlers load our luggage onto the conveyor belt on one side, and on the other side, passengers offload them as their luggage comes along. In this analogy, the baggage represents the glucose, the conveyor belt represents the blood transporting it and the passengers represent individual cells.

It doesn’t matter how many or how few pieces of luggage are placed on it; the flow of the conveyor belt remains constant. This is also true of our blood. The flow is interrupted only by death. If we exercise, our heart will start pumping faster to deliver more energy/matter and oxygen to the cells. Technically we could do the same thing in an emergency by adjusting the amount of UBI that is paid to every citizen and the basic expense percentage.

The market economy has nothing that would transport and distribute energy and resources as effectively as our circulation does. Human exchange requires a medium of exchange, or money, the equivalent of which we don’t find anywhere in the body–simply because within our body, there is full trust between all cells and thus no need for exchange.

To achieve this constant flow, the money we create needs to become a neutral and almost invisible resource that puts the focus on where it belongs: our physical resources. Goods and services are the true forms of value in our economy. Money should find its rightful place as only the allocator of that value, not the value itself.

But although we can draw much inspiration from nature, we have to remember that we can’t always copy its solutions directly when it comes to modern human society. We need to understand how nature achieves its incredible results and then use our creativity to build solutions that are compatible both with natural systems and our human needs.

This means that when we create our future economy, we might want to incorporate both markets and circulation into our system due to their obvious benefits. This would create a two-sided circulation system in which money flows in one direction and goods and services in the other. In a system like this, the amount of money in the economy would be stable, and it would circulate at a constant and predictable pace. The flow of money pulls the conveyor belt in the opposite direction of the goods and services that hop on and off the belt with every transaction.

As technology and human ethics advance, it would not be inconceivable that one day humans would even forgo money and exchange altogether and instead follow the solution found in organisms: circulation based on 100 percent trust. And while it sounds like a minefield, it’s also not inconceivable that one day central planning performed by AI could create more well-being than we humans ever can using markets.