Definition
The Cosmic Endowment refers to the total physical resources (matter, energy, and space) available in our reachable universe that an advanced civilization could utilize for life and computation. Max Tegmark frames this as the “billions of trillions of years on billions of trillions of planets” that humanity risks losing if it fails the Wisdom Race.
Why It Matters
It quantifies the staggering moral cost of human extinction, as it would erase the potential for billions of trillions of future lives.
Core Concepts
- Baryonic Matter: The primary fundamental resource (atoms, quarks, electrons) which advanced technology can rearrange into any desired object (computers, power plants, life).
- The Scale of the Endowment (Bostrom):
- Reachable Stars: to stars depending on travel speed (50% to 99% of ).
- How to read: “The range is from six times ten to the eighteenth to two times ten to the twentieth.”
- Meaning: Order-of-magnitude estimate of reachable stars before cosmic expansion cuts off access.
- Lives in Emulation: At least human lives (lasting 100 subjective years) could be created using the energy of the reachable universe.
- How to read: “The value is at least ten to the fifty eighth.”
- Meaning: Upper bound on human lives (emulation) achievable with reachable cosmic energy.
- Computational Power: A Dyson-sphere-driven system could generate ops/s. The total cosmic endowment is at least operations.
- How to read: “The value is ten to the forty seventh operations per second, or at least ten to the eighty fifth operations.”
- Meaning: Cosmic-scale computation budget—a Dyson-sphere system and total endowment; stakes of existential risk are literally astronomical.
- Reachable Stars: to stars depending on travel speed (50% to 99% of ).
- Teardrops of Joy Metaphor: If the happiness of a single human life is represented by a “teardrop of joy,” the endowment contains enough potential happiness to fill and refill the Earth’s oceans every second for a hundred billion billion millennia.
- Energy Extraction Methods:
- Fusion: 0.7% efficiency (hydrogen to helium).
- Spinning Black Holes: 29% efficiency (Penrose process).
- Quasars (Dyson sphere around black hole): 42% efficiency.
- Sphalerizers: ~100% efficiency (direct quark-to-lepton conversion).
- Thought Hierarchies: The speed of light imposes a “Bigger = Slower” constraint. A galaxy-sized mind would have only one thought every 100,000 years.