Moyan Brenn/Flickr Scott Santens doesn't just want May 1st to be bigger than July 4th; he knows it will be.

This May Day, Santens, an advocate for universal basic income and moderator of the basic income subreddit, launched his third annual Thunderclap campaign to spread the gospel about the most popular economic policy of the last year.

Eventually, Santens hopes that people think of May Day as a day to celebrate basic income.

At 10 am EST, everyone who signed up for the campaign will share the same message on either Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr: "Let us celebrate the past, acknowledge the present, and embrace the future of labor — with #basicincome! #MayDay."

In essence, basic income is a form of income distribution in which people receive a monthly check on top of their usual salary. The extra cash is meant to subsidize costs related to shelter, food, and clothing, but no one polices exactly how people use the money. It's an idea that's quickly gaining traction around the world.

Switzerland announced a plan to hold a basic income referendum in June of 2016, and other basic income experiments are set to start in the Netherlands, Finland, and Canada sometime in 2017. New Zealand and the United States might not be far behind.

Santens believes the idea to turn May Day into "Basic Income Day" is one that future historians will come to see as inevitable.

"The attainment of basic income will be celebrated for what it is, a level of freedom and independence of which our ancestors could only dream and didn't realize they were working towards all along," he tells Tech Insider.

Economists and futurists alike agree that sometime in the next 20 or 30 years a huge chunk of the American workforce will be replaced by robots and software. Jobs that today need human hands to complete — long-haul truck driving, fast-food serving, certain types of factory work — will get replaced by driverless cars and artificial intelligence.

When that happens, many people see basic income stepping in as the first line of defense.

"This is not some half-baked idea that people haven't thought through all the way," Santens says. "This is an idea that has been considered for generations, and has been tested to varying degrees and observed in varying forms all over the world."

Santens is mostly correct. Basic income has been tried out in various forms since the 1960s, and with promising results. But no long-term studies have been done to evaluate just how much prosperity people gain from earning a basic income or what large-scale consequences might arise.

The good news is that such a study is coming: Later this year, the nonprofit GiveDirectly will launch a 10- to 15-year experiment in Kenya that involves more than 6,000 people. It'll be the world's largest trial in history and the best evidence to-date gauging basic income's effectiveness.

Santens hopes the Thunderclap campaign reaches 1 million people (at the time of writing, 488,000 people have signed up to spread the word). At such an early stage, awareness is still a huge challenge.

"Simply put, the biggest obstacle to the implementation of basic income at this point in time is simply the fact that most people have yet to learn of its existence," he says.

But he's also confident that once the masses do learn about basic income, its appeal will spread fast and wide.

"We remember the day we took 'one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind,' and we will forever remember that next giant leap forward called universal basic income, whenever that day comes," he says, "because that's exactly what it is — our next collective moonshot."