Civilisation of Earth: Characterisation and Forecast-100 — English Version

This article presents a framework for reading the concept Civilisation of Earth: Characterisation and Forecast-100 — a systematic-analytical document that combines a characterisation of Earth's civilisation as of 2025 with a prognostic framework for its development over a one-hundred-year horizon. The Article substantiates the genre of the document as an academic-philosophical concept with the function of an identification protocol, the methodological core of a bilateral perspective (internal and external address), the key conceptual decisions (the Third and Fourth Forms as classes of bearers of rational activity, the thirteen limits of cognition, the threshold state of civilisation, the invariant layer, the integral contours of the possible, and the nodal points of civilisational choice), the structure of the document, and the limits of its scope. The Concept singles out one fundamentally new phenomenon that emerged in civilisational characterisation in the 2010s and 2020s and requires a conceptual framework: artificial intelligence systems that demonstrate signs of rational activity without convincing evidence of internal experience. The Concept proposes the working categories Third Form and Fourth Form as a methodologically restrained instrument for thinking about the current and the hypothetical future configurations of bearers of mind. The article positions the Concept as a preprint appendix to the article itself, published in open scientific archives. The article does not repeat the content of the Concept but contextualises it — for the intra-terrestrial academic community of philosophers, systems theorists, artificial-intelligence researchers, and historians of civilisation. This is the English-language version of the same preprint deposited on PhilArchive in the original Ukrainian. Both records are companion versions of one preprint package.