Restaurant From The Future is a distributed dinner-theatre experience inspired by The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and designed as a playful fringe to the Space Congress. It links small and large events around the world into a single, networked “show” where participants share food, story and governance games across time zones.
Each local event is both a performance and a node in a global assembly, connected through The Substrate and aligned with major space conferences and Orbital Hubs.
# Core Concept Restaurant From The Future imagines that: - Every participating venue is a “satellite restaurant” looking out onto the end or rebirth of the universe. - Guests are not just spectators, but provisional delegates in a planetary governance story. - The menu, performance and interactive mechanics are grounded in real space science, code and law, with a Hitchhiker-style sense of humour.
The aim is to make space governance accessible and emotionally vivid for people who may never attend a formal conference, while feeding perspectives back into the wider Space Commons conversation.
# Relationship To Space Congress Restaurant From The Future serves as: - A **fringe festival** for the Space Congress, orbiting around major editions and Orbital Hubs. - A **bridge** between conference delegates and surrounding communities, in the same city and in completely different regions. - A **story channel** where ideas from the Space Law Committee and governance games are translated into scenes, jokes and shared rituals. In the lead-up to each Space Congress, satellite restaurants can be attached to events such as UNOOSA meetings, IISL colloquia, IAF congresses or other space gatherings.
# Event Formats Restaurant From The Future supports a range of formats, from intimate to spectacular. - Intimate VR dinners Small groups in ordinary restaurants or homes use VR headsets, AR overlays or simple projection to “re-skin” the space. The story unfolds via shared prompts, scripted moments and live or remote performers. - Mid-scale themed nights Local venues run special menus, lighting and projection, with one or two performers acting as hosts, bots, or time-travelled waiters. Guests take part in structured conversations, debates or light governance games. - Large dinner-theatre productions Full productions with chefs, performers, conference speakers and cinematic projection. The venue is staged to approximate a Hitchhiker-esque restaurant overlooking cosmic events, with live links to other cities. - Pop-up fringe sessions Late-night “dessert assemblies” during major space conferences, where a side room in the main venue becomes a temporary Restaurant From The Future node. All formats share a common narrative backbone so that each local event feels like an episode in the same unfolding show.
# Networked Virtual Congress Layer Behind the scenes, all locations are linked into a single virtual Congress layer. - Shared cosmic “timeline” Each event is scheduled against a shared fictional timeline (supernova, heat death, cosmological bounce, orbital mishap), giving a loose sense of simultaneity. - Live segments Certain scripted beats involve live cross-links: a toast, a short intervention by a speaker in another city, or a rapid-fire poll spanning multiple venues. - Debate, vote or game Each restaurant runs a local version of a simple Governance Game: a choice, design challenge or treaty clause. Results are transmitted via The Substrate and combined into a global outcome. - Persistent artefacts Stories, sketches, menu designs, mini-manifestos and voting results are captured and published as part of the Space Commons record for that year. The virtual layer turns dispersed dinners into a planetary performance, without requiring continuous live video everywhere.
# Themes And Storylines Restaurant From The Future can host recurring themes that mirror Space Congress topics. - Space Commons and resource sharing Dishes and scenes that play with scarcity and abundance, trading, rationing and co-ownership of orbital assets. - Orbital debris and timelines Visuals and stories where guests must decide which satellites, habitats or beacons to keep alive as the universe “ends” or reboots. - Non-spacefaring states and new entrants Sequences focused on guests from countries without big space programmes, exploring how they might join commons-based missions. - Legal glitches and narrative clauses Moments where characters “read out” or distort treaty clauses, forcing guests to negotiate better versions on the spot. The tone remains playful and ironic, but each storyline can be annotated and reused by legal fellows and workshop designers.
# Roles And Participants Different actors contribute to Restaurant From The Future. - Local hosts Restaurants, cultural centres, community kitchens, conference organisers and independent producers who stage the events. - Chefs and food designers Creators who translate cosmic themes into menus, sensory experiences and playful plating. - Performers and facilitators Actors, MCs, musicians and facilitators who weave together script, participatory activities and remote interventions. - Fellows and researchers Members of the Space Congress fellowship network who collect stories, organise recordings and connect the dinner outputs to formal processes. - Remote guests People joining via VR, livestream or low-bandwidth tools, including those in locations without physical events.
# Integration With The Substrate Restaurant From The Future runs on The Substrate as a special layer of the Space Congress infrastructure. - Event registry Each dinner is registered with basic metadata: host, time, theme, language, capacity and connection details. - Narrative toolkit Scripts, prompts, governance game cards, menu ideas and visual assets are stored as remixable components. - Data capture Decisions, votes, notes, photos (where consent is given) and interviews are uploaded and tagged for later synthesis. - Feedback loops Insights from dinner-theatre assemblies can be fed into the design of future Space Congress sessions, legal clinics and training materials.
# Bootstrapping Restaurant From The Future Early steps to bring the concept to life include: - Prototyping a **single pilot dinner** linked to an existing space or governance event. - Developing a **minimal script** and governance game that can be run with or without VR. - Recruiting a small circle of **chef-hosts and performer-facilitators** in different regions. - Creating a simple **Substrate template** for registering dinners and collecting outcomes. - Testing **low-tech connectivity options** for coordinated toasts, polls or mini-debates between two or three venues. Over time, Restaurant From The Future can grow into a familiar, recurring fringe pattern: whenever major space conferences convene, and whenever a Space Congress orbit comes around, there is always a constellation of restaurants where the universe is ending, beginning, and being renegotiated over dinner.
# See - Space Congress - Orbital Hubs - The Substrate - Space Law Committee - Governance Game - Space Commons