Lords of the Cosmos

Dedicated to David Deutsch, whose explanations transformed my world. (Arjun)

Dedicated to the memory of Riva McLernon, who taught me what kindness is, and to Nan Berkman, who taught me what a conversation is. (Logan)

The universe was utterly monotonous for most of its history until only a few hundred years ago, containing just a few kinds of objects—stars, planets, black holes, and little else. The dawn of life on Earth at last brought genuine novelty into the world, but mankind contributed very little to it until the Enlightenment during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. For most of our history, our cultures were static. Then, with the philosophical advances of the Enlightenment, the West figured out how to make continuous progress—it became a dynamic society. While the Enemies of Civilization had dominated static societies of the past, they continue to hamper progress to this day. All of them fail to appreciate that problems are due to lack of knowledge—and, therefore, that speed, creativity, and freedom are necessary for progress, rather than political and intellectual tyranny, reducing resource consumption, and ridding the Earth of humanity. As we continue to solve problems, we will come to dominate the entire cosmos. Welcome to the Anthropocene.

The book version of Lords of the Cosmos is an expansion of the script that we wrote for Arjun Khemani’s documentary of the same name. The script was heavily inspired by Oxford physicist David Deutsch’s masterpiece, The Beginning of Infinity. The ideas in Deutsch’s book have the potential to change the world for the better, but few have brought them to life in long-form, visual format. In 2024, Arjun decided to do just that. After a few preliminary conversations with Logan Chipkin, we agreed to collaborate on packaging some of the ideas from The Beginning of Infinity into a narrative for a television-like audience. A book is simply not the same medium as a documentary, and we went on to plot out and then write the story that we wanted to tell. We hope we succeeded in creating a narrative that explains Deutsch’s ideas both accurately and originally.

Much of this book is a lightly edited transcript of the documentary’s original script, which tells the story of humanity in light of our deepest theories of progress—what it entails, the role of human progress in the cosmic scheme of things, and the conditions under which it takes place.

This book’s primary addition to the script is a brief review of some of the most significant bottlenecks in the history of the universe, ranging from the Big Bang to abiogenesis to the emergence of money to the invention of the universal computer.