Trajectory Engineering A Prospectus | The Trajectory Engineering Papers, No. I

Trajectory Engineering: A Prospectus is No. I in The Trajectory Engineering Papers, a six-paper series whose unifying intellectual project is the operationalization of EcoDemocracy at planetary scale. The companion book is Doctor AI: Reimagining Healthcare, Rebuilding Trust, Delivering Health 4.0 (Blackstone Press, 7 April 2026). Companion Nos. II–VI are forthcoming. This paper defines Trajectory Engineering. It is the set of methods, infrastructures, and governance arrangements required to observe, model, and intervene on the propagation of disease and health through time. The unit of analysis is three interacting domains: biological, environmental, and cultural. The scale is the population; the resolution is the individual. The paper identifies three failure modes that a planetary health infrastructure must overcome — observation without intervention, reductionism without context, and systems without substrate. It proposes a financial instrument, the Health Trajectory Benefit, capable of funding root-cause interventions across generational timescales. It proposes a governance architecture, federated sovereignty, to make the data commons legitimate. The political philosophy underneath it, EcoDemocracy, was first sketched in surgical residency in 1989. Part I anchors the prospectus on the Akimel O'odham research relationship — sixty years of NIH-NIDDK epidemiological partnership, more than one thousand peer-reviewed publications, and the longitudinal study formally concluded in 2007 under written informed consent. The architectural commitment named here is the infrastructure that would return to the contributing community a benefit proportionate to what the community has given. This prospectus is intended to open, not close, the research and implementation program anchored by the Health 4.0 platform and Doctor AI architecture. The actuarial methodology, the governance compact, and the pilot cohorts named here are deliverables of the program, not of this document. No. II (Health 4.0: The System of Care) specifies the architecture of care and the H4Alliance components. No. III (Health 4.0 and the End of Zero-Sum Healthcare) develops the financing architecture. No. IV specifies the actuarial methodology for the Health Trajectory Benefit. No. V develops the global translations across Beveridge, Bismarck, NHI, and greenfield systems. No. VI takes the framework beyond health What's new in v6.0 (April 28, 2026) Two waves of revision arrive in this version. Architectural changes. The Triangle of Trust — the three-party clinical relationship at the heart of Health 4.0 — is reframed to put the Health Principal at the seat of authority, with the Health Ally and Doctor AI as partners. The three-curves test (cost, outcomes, trust) is now presented as a falsifiable specification: failure of any of the three to cross within fifteen years refutes the architecture as specified. The Twenty-Eighth Amendment is named explicitly as a multi-decadal ratification project — on the Equal Rights Amendment historical horizon — with the H4Alliance non-governmental track operating before ratification. Within the United States, the eleven cultural nations identified by Woodard's American Nations framework are now treated as the unit at which trust curves and ratification dynamics are measured, aggregated into eight continental regions plus the IHS / tribal parallel track. The companion-paper roster expands from six to ten. Calibration changes. Several medical and historical claims have been softened to match what the literature actually supports — including the rosiglitazone safety framing, the bariatric-surgery sequencing, and the Holocaust / FKBP5 intergenerational methylation finding, each in areas of ongoing scientific debate. The architectural commitment to Doctor AI as the operating layer is now explicitly conditional on the safety evidence to be developed in the AI Safety in Health 4.0 companion paper. Five figures are embedded with captions that distinguish illustration from quantitative model output. Singapore's MediSave / MediShield / MediFund three-pillar model is engaged as a structurally compatible comparator. The canonical URL — healthtrajectoryengineering.com — is added. Version 5.7 remains accessible from this record's previous-versions list; citations to v5.7 continue to resolve. What's new in v7.0 (May 2, 2026) This is a working paper that introduces Trajectory Engineering (TE) as a unified analytical and governance framework for closed-loop population health, and motivates Health 4.0 as the medical reform program implied by closing the loop. The paper sits at the head of a multi-paper series (the Trajectory Engineering Papers); the formal mathematical foundation appears in No. II — Trajectory Engineering: The Framework for Closing the Loop, and the system-of-care construction appears in No. III — Health 4.0: The System of Care. Paper I situates the medical case inside the longer methodological history — closed-loop control as understood in adjacent fields (aerospace, finance, climate, epidemiology) for a generation; the “Apollo precedent” of mission-grade architectures that bend trajectories rather than improve outcomes incrementally; the six-family typology of healthcare actors whose incentive structures shape the trajectory the system actually follows; and the Trust Instrumentation companion paper that develops the operational measurement framework for trust under closed-loop conditions. The paper anticipates two named load-bearing concepts developed in detail elsewhere in the canon: the K-coupling tensor (the cross-domain interaction structure formalized in No. II §4) and the Integrity Principle of Governance (the fiduciary-recusal standard developed in No. III §3.6.X and extended to legislative and judicial bodies). It also functions as the academic complement to the public-facing book Doctor AI: Reimagining Healthcare, Rebuilding Trust, Delivering Health 4.0 (Blackstone Press, April 7, 2026; ISBN 979-8-9986423-5-7), which makes the same argument for a general audience. v7.0 is a canon-alignment revision of the v6.0 deposit (April 28, 2026): full canonical six-item Conflict of Interest disclosure inserted; phantom Outcomes-Measurement companion reference removed; five-family → six-family typology aligned with Paper IV; Integrity Principle of Governance forward reference added. Substantive scientific content unchanged from v6.0.