Tsogt "Todd" Enkhbat
Founder & Visionary
Todd conceived this project during Columbia University's "Origins and Meaning" course under Professor Brian Greene, where physics meets philosophy and the cosmic scale meets the human. Blending his passion for astrophysics, artificial intelligence, and existential philosophy, he set out to transform philosophical insights into a speculative institutional design.
Driven by the question of how to preserve human meaning against cosmic impermanence, Todd approaches the project not with naive optimism, but with what he calls "defiant hope" — a lucid recognition of entropy coupled with fierce commitment to meaning-making.
Intellectual Foundations
Inspirations
The thinkers, writers, and scientists whose work laid the foundation for this vision.
Ernest Becker
Cultural Anthropologist
Author of The Denial of Death. His concept of "immortality projects" — the symbolic systems humans create to transcend mortality — is the philosophical cornerstone of this endeavor.
Leo Tolstoy
Novelist & Philosopher
His exploration of life's meaning in the face of death, particularly in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, poses the essential question: how can we live knowing we must die?
Albert Camus
Philosopher
The absurdist who taught us to find meaning through rebellion. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" — this defiance against meaninglessness guides our entire attitude.
Jorge Luis Borges
Author
His visions of infinite libraries and labyrinths of time — particularly the Library of Babel — inspire our approach to knowledge preservation across cosmic timescales.
Carl Sagan
Astronomer & Communicator
Creator of the Voyager Golden Record — a message in a cosmic bottle. His vision of humanity as "starstuff" and his cosmic perspective permeate our space exploration pillar.
Brian Greene
Physicist & Educator
Professor of the "Origins and Meaning" course that sparked this project. His ability to bridge cosmology and meaning demonstrates how science and philosophy can illuminate each other.
Bertrand Russell
Philosopher & Mathematician
His "A Free Man's Worship" articulates the vision of humans creating meaning in an indifferent universe — the philosophical backbone of our defiant optimism.
Thomas Nagel
Philosopher
His essay "The Absurd" illuminates the collision between our subjective sense of meaning and objective cosmic insignificance — the tension at the heart of our project.
Ted Chiang
Author
Stories like "Exhalation" — where a being writes a testament before his universe winds down — influence our vision of leaving meaning at the end of time.