In the hard sciences, ‘blue skies science’ or ‘fundamental research’ is where scientists engage in speculative theorising and experimentation surrounding emerging technologies that are yet to have immediate practical applications or political, commercial or military utility. As a parallel, ‘blue skies social science’ or ‘fundamental sociological research’, is where social scientists imagine alternative systems and societies to the status quo, design how these systems would function in the real-world and develop theories of change of how the first prototypes can be created. In contrast to applied social science that addresses more targeted problems in policy and business, blue skies social science adopts a first-principles systems-level approach that explores the foundations of human behaviour and social organisation in the search for ‘Civilisation X’ (a parallel to ‘Cause X’): a ‘civilisation design’ that solves for the ‘twin failure modes’ of global catastrophe and dystopian lock-in and vectors towards a ‘third attractor’ characterised by meta-utopia (pluralism of social organisation), prototopia (progress via iteration) and paretotopia (post-scarcity, both techno-material and psycho-social).