# Is the potential astronomical waste in our universe too small to care about?

In the not too distant past, people [thought](http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.txt) that our universe might be capable of supporting an unlimited amount of computation. Today our [best guess](http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0404510.pdf) at the cosmology of our universe is that it stops being able to support any kind of life or deliberate computation after a finite amount of time, during which only a finite amount of computation can be done (on the order of something like 10^120 operations).

Consider two hypothetical people, Tom, a total utilitarian with a near zero discount rate, and Eve, an egoist with a relatively high discount rate, a few years ago when they thought there was .5 probability the universe could support doing at least 3^^^3 ops and .5 probability the universe could only support 10^120 ops. (These numbers are obviously made up for convenience and illustration.) It would have been mutually beneficial for these two people to make a deal: if it turns out that the universe can only support 10^120 ops, then Tom will give everything he owns to Eve, which happens to be $1 million, but if it turns out the universe can support 3^^^3 ops, then Eve will give $100,000 to Tom. (This may seem like a lopsided deal, but Tom is happy to take it since the potential utility of a universe that can do 3^^^3 ops is so great for him that he really wants any additional resources he can get in order to help increase the probability of a positive Singularity in that universe.)

You and I are not total utilitarians or egoists, but instead are people with [moral uncertainty](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Moral_uncertainty). Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord [proposed](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html) the Parliamentary Model for dealing with moral uncertainty, which works as follows:

> Suppose that you have a set of mutually exclusive moral theories, and that you assign each of these some probability.  Now imagine that each of these theories gets to send some number of delegates to The Parliament.  The number of delegates each theory gets to send is proportional to the probability of the theory.  Then the delegates bargain with one another for support on various issues; and the Parliament reaches a decision by the delegates voting.  What you should do is act according to the decisions of this imaginary Parliament.

It occurred to me recently that in such a Parliament, the delegates would makes deals similar to the one between Tom and Eve above, where they would trade their votes/support in one kind of universe for votes/support in another kind of universe. If I had a Moral Parliament active back when I thought there was a good chance the universe could support unlimited computation, all the delegates that really care about [astronomical waste](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Astronomical_waste) would have traded away their votes in the kind of universe where we actually seem to live for votes in universes with a lot more potential astronomical waste. So today my Moral Parliament would be effectively controlled by delegates that care little about astronomical waste.

I actually still seem to care about astronomical waste (even if I pretend that I was _certain_ that the universe could only do at most 10^120 operations). (Either my Moral Parliament wasn't active back then, or my delegates weren't smart enough to make the appropriate deals.) Should I nevertheless follow UDT-like reasoning and conclude that I should act as if they had made such deals, and therefore I should stop caring about the relatively small amount of astronomical waste that could occur in our universe? If the answer to this question is "no", what about the future going forward, given that there is still uncertainty about cosmology and the nature of physical computation. Should the delegates to my Moral Parliament be making these kinds of deals from now on?