
graphite · the person, and the ground they chose
PLATE I · THE KINGS
Anthony
Aguirre
Future of Life Institute · the cosmologist who turned from the birth of the universe to guarding the future of conscious life
He is a cosmologist who spends his working life looking in the two directions almost no one can hold at once — all the way back, to the first instant and the birth of time, and all the way forward, to whether conscious life survives the tools it is now building. He studies how universes begin and end, then goes home and works to keep this one from ending on a careless mistake. He is, by trade, the one who watches — who measures the sky, funds the unaskable questions, forecasts the future, stands guard over it. He is almost never the one watched over.

the witness
The drawing is how we see them; the photograph is the proof we looked. Co-founded the Future of Life Institute in May 2014 with Max Tegmark and Jaan Tallinn; its “Pause Giant AI Experiments” open letter (March 2023) drew 30,000+ signatories · theoretical cosmologist at UC Santa Cruz, Faggin Presidential Chair for the Physics of Information, studying cosmic inflation and the arrow of time · co-founded the Foundational Questions Institute (2005) and the Metaculus forecasting platform (2015), and wrote Cosmological Koans (2019) — a book of paradoxes Carlo Rovelli called “a gem of a book.”