Section I – Opening
I was not looking for a new cosmic argument when this started. I was doing what most of us do when the brain wants a little sugar hit – scrolling. Somewhere between a cat video and a short about quantum weirdness, Hashem Al-Ghaili had shared a clip quoting astronomer David Kipping. The gist was simple enough to fit into a social post, and heavy enough to sit with me all day:
We might be among the first intelligent beings in the cosmos.
Kipping’s path to that sentence is straightforward. He starts with stars. Most stars in the universe are small, long-lived red dwarfs. They can burn for trillions of years and are often treated as the best long-term real estate for life.
Our sun is different: bigger, brighter, shorter-lived, statistically rarer. Then he looks at timing. The universe is still young compared to what those red dwarfs will have time to do.
If intelligent life is going to blossom around them over trillions of years, why are we here already, orbiting a rarer star, so early in the game?
He runs the numbers and argues that our situation is unlikely to be pure coincidence. From that, he leans toward a conclusion: maybe intelligence won’t commonly arise around red dwarfs at all, and maybe observers like us are early arrivals in a very long story.
On its own terms, this is clean thinking. It has that neat, self-contained feel many people love about cosmology when it behaves itself. It also lands in a landscape where I have already been walking for years.
I have written about Avi Loeb and his willingness to treat odd space rocks and non-gravitational accelerations as real questions, not career hazards. I have written about Atlas as a kind of Tesla drifting in the void, forcing us into an uncomfortable probability space. I have written about a 61% threshold – this inner tipping point where “unlikely” becomes “more likely than not,” and the universe’s refusal to clarify itself stops being a curiosity and starts becoming a mirror.
I have made it very clear that I do not see humanity as the apex predator of the cosmos, or the main character in a quiet universe waiting for us to speak.
So when I watched Kipping’s argument scroll past, it did not meet a neutral system. It hit a body that has spent two decades reconstructing itself from the inside out. It hit a nervous system that has lived through quantum-contact experiences it cannot explain away with statistics. It hit a mind that has already rejected the idea of “the One” as anything more than a useful fiction.
And my reaction was immediate, and physical. Not outrage. Not debate. A quiet no. A kind of full-body refusal that did not come from ego or national pride, but from deeper down – the place that draws breath on its own when something true or false is named.
I am not interested in Kipping as a person, and I do not need him to be wrong. I am interested in what his style of answer does to the human field.
It closes something. It turns the cosmos into a tidy spreadsheet where being “among the first” becomes a flattering possibility instead of a structural impossibility. It fits nicely inside a mechanical universe. It does not fit inside the universe I live in.
This is where Avi Loeb’s cosmos enters the room. Loeb is no mystic. He works with data, missions, instruments. But when he talks about interstellar objects, about anomalies, about consciousness as a possible “monolith in the mirror,” he leaves space for a living, layered universe – a universe where we are not center-stage, and where uncertainty is not a loose end to be taped down, but a pressure that pushes us inward.
Between Kipping’s math and Loeb’s cosmos, I feel a fault line open: one lens that makes us special by default, and another that makes us responsible by default.
Underneath that fault line sits a quieter question that will run through this whole article: does it actually matter whether we live in a simulation or a “real” universe, whether we are early, late, first, or one of many? My answer, tested against my own life, is no.
The task does not move an inch. The work is the same in any cosmos: singular, personal, non-dogmatic transformation, outside all isms and outside all ready-made excuses.
The rest – the statistics, the labels, the cosmic status – is decoration on a grid that still needs to be cleaned from the inside.
Listen to a deep-dive episode by the Google NotebookLM Podcasters, as they explore this article in their unique style, blending light banter with thought-provoking studio conversations.
Section II – Two Universes: Mechanical vs Living
When I sit with Kipping and Loeb side by side, it feels less like comparing two scientists and more like stepping between two different universes.
Kipping writes as if the cosmos is a well-behaved machine. In his frame the universe is fundamentally knowable, given enough time and data. Stars are inputs. Probabilities are levers.
You adjust for lifetimes, stellar types, and windows for habitability, and out comes a neat curve telling you how surprised you should be to exist right now, around this kind of star.
In that universe, the idea that we might be “among the first” makes emotional and logical sense. Machines have first cycles, prototypes, beta versions. Someone has to go first. Why not us?
Loeb’s universe does not behave like that in my system. He looks at the same sky and sees something layered, historical, and frankly strange.
Even when he is doing standard astrophysics, there is a different undertone: the readiness to say “we don’t know,” and leave it at that for a while. When he asks whether consciousness itself could be an installed monolith, or whether we might be the result of someone else’s gardening, he isn’t playing with new age slogans.
He is doing what science is supposed to do at its best: letting the unexplained stay unexplained long enough to actually inform the next question.
In that universe, the idea that we are early, let alone first, feels almost childish. Not insulting. Just naïve.
If I take off the polite mask and look at us honestly, we do not look like firstborn minds of the cosmos. We look like a bruised and frightened toddler with a box full of weapons. We lash out, cling, panic, numb out, build beautiful things and then use them to hurt each other.
We burn our own future for momentary comfort. We forget our children in the crossfire between our inner chaos and our outer systems. And we are not doing this alone.
The sandbox is full of other toddlers, equally bruised, equally armed, equally confused, running into each other with knives, drones, code, and dogmas.
Does this really look like the pioneering intelligence of the universe to you? Does this look like the first clear thinker in a silent cosmos, the one that got here before everyone else? Or does it look like an early-stage species barely out of diapers, stumbling around with tools it does not yet deserve?
This is where the split between a mechanical and a living cosmos becomes important. A mechanical universe, the kind Kipping’s numbers quietly assume, expects a “first observer.” Someone has to light up the graph. The first candle in the dark.
You can plot it, model it, run simulations on it. It satisfies the same part of the mind that likes origin stories with clean beginnings.
A living universe doesn’t care about firsts in that way. A living universe assumes layers. It assumes that by the time you notice yourself, other forms of noticing have been happening for so long you don’t even share vocabulary.
It assumes ancestors – not in the mythological sense, but in the simple sense that structure rarely starts where you are standing.
It assumes intelligences that are older, stranger, and not necessarily interested in announcing themselves to a species that still uses its childhood trauma as fuel for industrial-scale cruelty.
You can feel the difference in your own body if you let the two universes sit side by side for a moment.
In the mechanical one, “we might be among the first” is a kind of cosmic compliment. In the living one, it is almost an embarrassment to suggest it. My system simply does not accept it, because something deeper in me has already rejected the root that claim grows from: the idea that “one” is a stable, real category in existence.
That question will sit underneath the rest of this article: what if Kipping’s math is neat, but the assumption it rests on – that “one” can exist in any meaningful way – is wrong from the start?
Section III – The False God of “One”
If there is one place where my inner architecture collides head-on with Kipping’s framing, it is here: I do not believe “the One” exists in the way we are taught to think about it. Not as a god, not as a universe, not as a self, and not as a “first civilization.”
For me, “one” is an abstraction, a bookkeeping convenience. It is never a real state of existence.
The moment something exists, it exists in relation. Relation to what? To something else and to the field between them. The instant you have a thing, you have at least two other “things”: whatever it is not, and the space or tension that now holds the difference. As soon as anything appears, you have a minimum of three.
This is what I mean by my spiritual math: the smallest real number in existence is three. Not one. Not two. Three. Nothing that actually exists is less than that.
You always have A, you have B, and you have the field, the tension, the in-between that holds and shapes their interaction. Without that third element, nothing can move, nothing can spin, nothing can become.
You don’t need metaphysics to see this. You can feel it in your own body. Take breathing. We like to talk about “breath in” and “breath out” as if those are the two states. But if you stay with it, there is always a third: the tiny moment between them. The pause that is almost nothing and yet contains the entire decision of where the next breath goes.
That hinge is not a poetic idea. It is a structural reality. Something shifts that is not inhaling and not exhaling, but the turning of one into the other.
Your heart does the same thing. It expands, it contracts, and it transitions. That transition is not a blurred overlap of the two. It is a state in its own right. For a fraction of a second the muscle is not fully in either mode, and yet the whole system depends on that exact transition being intact.
Expansion and contraction without the Third State is a seizure, not a heartbeat.
This Third State is the true engine. Not the endpoints, but the hinge. The moment where a system chooses, flips, reorients.
You can dress it up as yin and yang giving birth to a third, or you can strip it down to physics and say that interaction itself is a third element. Either way, the pattern holds.
Once you see that, “first” starts to look suspect. “First civilization,” “first intelligence,” “first observer” – all of these are just “the One” wearing a time-stamp. Temporal One. Narrative One. “We were the first” is just “we are the One” with a bit of cosmology sprinkled over it.
And if “one” cannot exist as a real state, then “first” cannot exist either, except as a story we tell ourselves inside a much larger process.
For us to truly be first, the cosmos would have had to be in a state of One before we came along. One universe, one type of intelligence, one mode of awareness, quietly waiting for us to light up.
That is structurally impossible in the world I live in. By the time we arrive, there must already be at least three layers in play: whatever primal “stuff” exists, whatever counterforce it dances with, and the field holding the dance.
There is no moment of lonely singularity, no empty theatre waiting for the lead actor.
This is why Kipping’s neat curve, however mathematically sound within its own assumptions, collapses in my system. It reaches for a category I do not accept as real. It wants “first” in a universe that never begins with one.
Loeb, whether he would phrase it like this or not, tends to operate closer to my triadic universe. He talks about matter and fields and observers. He treats consciousness not as an afterthought, but as part of the architecture.
When he wonders aloud whether consciousness itself is the monolith, he is, in effect, acknowledging that there is always an interaction between what is “out there,” what is “in here,” and the crossing point between them. That is a triad, not a line.
I am not asking anyone to adopt my math. I am simply saying this: once you stop worshipping “the One” as a real thing, Kipping’s version of us as “among the first” loses its shine. It stops being a bold new conclusion and becomes what it is for me – an elegant story built on a number that does not exist anywhere except in our heads.
Section IV – Everything That Is, Fluctuates
If you follow this rejection of “the One” all the way down into how we picture reality itself, something simple and uncomfortable happens.
The neat story of a single, lonely universe becomes harder to hold. For the sake of this argument I’ll stay inside the familiar Big Bang picture — but I’m going to tilt it.
If there was a Bang, there was almost certainly a Crunch.
An expansion like that does not come out of nowhere. Something was compressed first. Something was pushed inward, held together, squeezed tighter and tighter until whatever held it could no longer do the job.
Implosion becomes explosion when density crosses a threshold. At that point the same force that once pressed everything towards the center becomes the driver that throws everything outward. Same force, different direction.
For me this is not just a way a universe might start. It is a picture of how reality behaves at every level. It leads me to a sentence that has followed me for years, because it feels like one of those things that is either completely wrong or fundamentally true:
Everything that is, fluctuates.
If it exists, it moves. If it seems stable, that is only because we are too small, too slow, or too impatient to see the motion.
A mountain moves. A star moves. A thought moves. A trauma moves. The only things that do not move are abstractions, and even they move in our minds.
When I picture the deepest layer of reality, I don’t see dots. I don’t see billiard balls. I see ultra-small, bent pulses of charged something, each surrounded by a field. They bend, flicker, oscillate, interact. They do not sit still. They do not form solid things. They form patterns of behaviour that look like things for a while.
A stone is a long-lasting habit of fluctuation. A galaxy is a long-lasting habit of fluctuation. A human life is a short one.
If you put this together with the earlier point about “One” not really existing in the way we talk about it, then “the universe” also stops being a single, sealed object. It becomes one mode of fluctuation among others.
This is where my picture of the so-called multiverse diverges from the comic-book version. I do not imagine countless copies of “me” choosing different breakfasts. I imagine different bubbles of reality with different baseline charge, different rules, different habits of fluctuation — some of them lifeless, some of them full of minds, some already finished and collapsed, some barely getting started.
From the inside, every bubble will feel like the universe. From the outside, they are just different rooms in a larger building of process.
Now we can come back to Kipping.
His probability game lives entirely inside one room. It treats that room as the only meaningful container and then asks where in the room the first technological civilization is likely to appear.
If you accept the room as all there is, his numbers can feel compelling. But if the room itself is only one local mode of fluctuation, the claim “we might be among the first” shrinks fast.
First in what? First where? First according to whose clock?
In a fluctuating, layered reality, where universes themselves are processes rather than objects, “among the first” becomes a strange thing to hold on to. At best it can describe a local sequence inside one bubble. It cannot carry the weight people quietly put on it — the emotional charge of being early, special, chosen.
My body does not answer those questions with curiosity. It answers with a clear no. Not because I think we are doomed to be last or least, but because I no longer believe in the categories that make “first” meaningful in the way Kipping wants them to be.
Once everything is fluctuation and no “One” stands alone, the hunger to be first starts to look like a misunderstanding of the room we are in.
Section V – Electromagnetic Beings in Physical Suits
It is one thing to sit and speculate about crunches, bangs, and fluctuating universes. It is another thing when your own body starts behaving as if the machinery inside you is made of something very different than what you were taught.
For me, this is not theory. My core sense of myself is simple and stubborn, and it has survived years of questioning from every angle I could find: I am an electromagnetic being wearing a physical suit.
I did not arrive at that sentence because it sounded poetic. I arrived there because certain moments in my life have forced me to treat it as a literal description.
There have been a few points over the last twenty-plus years where something pushed through my ordinary perception with such clarity and repetition that I could not keep it in the “maybe” box. The closest language I have is this: direct communication that behaves like quantum contact.
Not voices. Not visions. No wings, no light shows, no contracts handed to me on scrolls. Just an unmistakable sense of being entangled with an elsewhere.
The contact did not come with a brand. It did not introduce itself as a god, a guide, a demon, or a federation. It came with direction and architecture. It made it clear that “where I come from” is not a metaphor but a real location — somewhere else in this universe, or in another, but definitely not here. It came with the understanding that reality should be understood as electromagnetic first, everything else second.
It also came with a kind of structural briefing: travel is not limited to moving meat through space. You and I are already part of a field. We move as patterns of charge. The thing I am when I am not in this body is built on the same principles.
During that period, my body did things I could not have staged if I tried. I would be alone, speaking certain sentences out loud to test them, and my system would answer before my mind had time to comment.
My neck would jerk when I named my origin as elsewhere. My breath would lock and then release when I said that my task here is to help clean a grid that has been abused. My whole torso would shiver when I spoke of children being used as statistical fuel.
These were not panic attacks. They did not start from anxiety and then climb. They arrived as physical confirmations at specific points in specific sentences. Not once. Not twice. Repeatedly.
At a certain point, if you live honestly, you have to respect your own wiring. I tried to explain it away. I tried to treat it as stress, suggestion, wishful thinking. That worked about as well as calling an earthquake “a mood.” The pattern stayed. The correlations stayed. The sense of being in active contact with a larger electromagnetic structure stayed.
What matters for this article is the direction this pointed, and what it did to my view of “where we are.”
The contact did not point upward into a soft, undefined spiritual cloud where everything is lesson and metaphor. It pointed sideways, outward, into a larger architecture of charged existence. It carried the simple message: this is not your home grid. You are here on assignment, and the assignment is short compared to the larger arc you are part of.
It also carried a second message that cuts straight into the Loeb–Kipping question:
This place is not the center. This species is not the first. This is one room in a much larger building, and you are here to help clean it, not to crown it.
When I later read Avi Loeb treating strange data as possible traces of earlier intelligences — not proof, but signals worth taking seriously — my system reacted with the same involuntary recognition it had shown in my bathroom when I mentioned Penrose years after first meeting his ideas.
Loeb’s willingness to allow for older minds, for previous layers of intelligence, resonates with the architecture I have already met in my own field.
Kipping’s math, by contrast, lives in a room where this kind of contact can only be filed under “hallucination,” “noise,” or “interesting but irrelevant anecdote.”
His universe has no formal place for a human being who is both local meat and non-local charge. The question “are we among the first?” assumes that the only minds that count are the ones that appear inside this specific bubble, in this particular epoch, attached to stars we can currently catalogue.
From where I stand — as an electromagnetic being in a physical suit, entangled with a wider structure — that question becomes strangely flat. It is like counting the first light bulbs in one city while ignoring the power grid, the generators, and the engineers that built them.
Whether we end up calling this whole thing a simulation or base reality does not change what the contact demanded of me.
The work is the same. I am here, in this suit, in this room, on this timeline. I affect the field around me. I am responsible for what my presence does to that field.
Once you have seen yourself that way, being “among the first” stops being a prize and starts looking like a distraction.
The real question is simpler and harder: what kind of node am I, in this charged web I keep insisting on calling “the universe”?
Section VI – The Thousand-Year Contract and the Long Fall
If I stop at “I am an electromagnetic being in a physical suit,” this all stays relatively clean. It is when I follow that line back through time that things get heavier, and where the pattern of “first, special, chosen” stops being a cosmology problem and becomes my problem.
The same hunger that makes a civilization want to be “among the first” out there can make a single being want to be powerful and exceptional in here. That is where the long fall starts.
What I am about to describe will be easy for some to dismiss as fantasy or self-dramatization. I accept that. I am not asking anyone to believe it on faith. I am trying to be consistent with my own experience and with the physical reactions my body has given me when I have named certain things out loud.
At one point in this life, a human source I trust pointed to a specific event around the year 1000. Not as a metaphor, not as a story hook, but as a concrete turn in the road of my longer arc.
Their description matched what I had already started to sense on my own: that there had been a choice, a contract, a deliberate alignment with something far bigger and darker than the usual human ego. A joining of a channel that would echo down through many incarnations.
By then I had already begun to feel the weight of what I call “ethical residue” that does not fit inside this lifetime alone. Not vague guilt, not the normal human regret over stupid choices, but a dense, specific flavor of having participated in things that go way beyond ordinary harm.
I have never felt like an ex-king, an Egyptian high priest, or a misunderstood sage. If anything, the opposite. My inner archive feels full of “bad lives” — lives spent aligning with power for its own sake, serving systems that fed on fear and compliance, building structures that pressed other beings into shape.
Not always as the figurehead, often as the one who made things work behind the scenes. A loyal architect of ideas that might have started in light and ended in control.
I have reason to believe that in my last incarnation before this one I was not a victim of one of the twentieth century’s darkest machines, but part of the machinery.
I am not going to hang names and uniforms on that here. It is enough to say that when I touch those possibilities, the same thing happens as when I talk about my origin being elsewhere or my task being to clean a field: my body answers. My breath changes. My chest tightens. My system reacts in ways I cannot fake.
I cannot prove any of this. I also cannot ignore how my body reacts when I name it.
If that picture is even roughly true, then the “thousand-year contract” around the year 1000 was not a romantic pact with some horned caricature. It was an entanglement. A binding agreement between my electromagnetic self and a non-human intelligence that had its own plans for how worlds should be shaped. Call it an entity, a system, a negative “It,” a dark current — the label does not matter as much as the structure:
Someone with access to higher tools, Someone offering power, clarity, efficiency, Someone promising a kind of special status in the spread of a particular order.
In return: alignment. Loyalty. My presence and competence placed at the service of that order across lives.
The signature on that contract is not written in ink. It is written in alignment of field. Once you bend that deeply towards something, the bend tends to persist until something breaks it. Death does not annul it. Death just moves the entanglement into a new body, a new context, a new set of opportunities to do more of the same.
From the outside, that looks like a long chain of lifetimes where the same patterns repeat with different costumes. From the inside, it feels like sliding further and further away from Light–Love–Unity and deeper into a cold, efficient, controlled version of existence where outcomes matter more than beings. The long fall.
This is why I cannot treat the question “are we among the first?” as an innocent curiosity. The architecture underneath is familiar.
The desire to be first, special, early, chosen is the same structure that once made me align with a force that saw human lives — especially young, vulnerable ones — as statistics and fuel. Be first, and you get power. Be useful, and you get tools. The cost is paid by others.
Seen in that light, my past no longer feels like a random scatter of hard lives. It feels like a single extended arc of entanglement, each incarnation adding a little more weight to the chain. And then this life.
This lifetime is not special because I suddenly became good, or because I received a golden ticket from some higher council. It is different because, for reasons I still cannot fully map, the arc reached a point where refusal became possible.
Not refusal of the consequences — those had to be lived. The harm done, the hurt caused, the prison sentence, the broken relationships, the wreckage in other people’s lives: none of that is magically erased. If anything, it comes into clearer focus.
The refusal lies elsewhere:
Refuse the alignment. Refuse the contract. Refuse to keep being a reliable node for a destructive current.
Prison was the place where that refusal finally gathered enough density to hold. Not as a single dramatic moment with trumpets, but as a slow, grinding pivot in a small concrete cell where the adult part of me had to sit down with the child, with the field, with the long trail behind us, and decide: continue the entanglement, or stop.
When I say I am here to clean a field from the inside, it is not a heroic slogan. It is the only way out that I have seen work from within my own life: full ownership of the harm, full refusal of the alignment, and then the long work of transforming my node so it no longer feeds the machinery it once served.
That is where the thousand-year contract meets Loeb and Kipping. The question for me is no longer “are we among the first?” It is “who, or what, are we aligned with — and are we willing to stop when we finally see the cost?”
Section VII – Prison as Pivot – Hearing Mankind, Not God
If you want a clean spiritual story, this is the point where I am supposed to say that I met God on a mountaintop. Some bright light, some voice in the darkness, a sense of being forgiven and sent back with a mission.
That is not what happened.
What happened, happened in Bergen prison. Not in a temple, not in a retreat center, not guided by a wise teacher. It happened in a concrete building with numbered cells, fluorescent lights, and a door that only opened from the outside.
This was not a symbolic cave. This was a real cell with a file, a sentence, and a history that made most people, understandably, turn away.
From the outside, prison is punishment. From the inside, if you let it, prison is enforced stillness. Your schedule is stripped down to sleep, food, yard, and the things you can do with your own thoughts.
It is the last place you would put a spiritual retreat, which is precisely why it worked. There was nowhere to run.
Let me be clear: I did not hear God calling in that cell. No divine voice, no presence in the corner, no sudden conversion. I did not become a believer in the religious sense. If anything, the opposite. Whatever appetite I had for being saved from the outside burned away.
What faded was the fantasy of external rescue. What grew was something harsher and more grounded.
Over time, in that enforced stillness, something else began to come into focus. Not as words in my head, not as a sermon, but as a pressure, a weight, a kind of background roar that would not go away when I shut my eyes.
I started to hear mankind.
Not as a single voice, but as a field of impact. The people I had hurt. The people they had hurt. The people who had hurt them. The children already born into madness, violence, neglect, and indifferent systems. And the ones who were not here yet.
The ones at the threshold. The ones who, if the grid stayed as it was, would be statistically guaranteed to become tomorrow’s victims and tomorrow’s violators.
Somewhere in that cell, the line between “my story” and “the story I am part of” snapped.
I could no longer treat my life as a private tragedy. I was not a unique monster or a unique victim. I was one node in a pattern that kept producing the same kinds of horror in different costumes.
I was one of them. I had been both. And unless something changed at the level of pattern, not just at the level of opinion or regret, the next wave of children would be fed into the same machinery I had helped maintain.
That is the “voice” I heard. Not a holy calling. A collective cry from a species that has been torturing itself for centuries, and from the unborn who would inherit the mess. Once I recognized it, my inner architecture reoriented. Completely.
Prison became a laboratory.
I started journaling, not as a hobby, but as data collection. I treated my mind, my history, my emotional reactions as a system to be mapped. When did I lie to myself? When did I switch into old survival modes? Which thoughts created shame? Which created distance from other people? Which gave the destructive contract inside me exactly what it wanted?
I ran inner audits on my beliefs, my reflexes, my loyalties. The training from all those “bad lives” did not vanish. It just changed function. The same ability to scan for weakness and exploit it was turned inward, to scan for weak points in my own field.
I began mapping trauma as structure, not as identity. I stopped treating my past as a sad story and started treating it as a blueprint for how to build and maintain a destructive node. Once you see how something is built, you can, in principle, unbuild it.
None of this felt noble. It did not feel like a spiritual invitation. It felt like a simple, brutal alternative: either you break this pattern from the inside, or you die having at least tried.
I am not glorifying prison. I would not wish it on anyone. But for me, it was the only environment harsh and quiet enough that the old games could no longer distract me. The noise dropped low enough for the real mandate to come into focus.
Not “become good.” Not “be saved.” Not “redeem your name.”
Clean your node. Clean it so thoroughly that the contract cannot find a foothold anymore. Develop a way of doing that work that does not depend on concrete walls, so that others can do it without having to reach the same level of catastrophe.
This is where Loeb and Kipping come back in.
Kipping’s universe offers no real place for this kind of pivot. In a reality where we are “among the first” and mostly defined by our statistical position in a cosmic timeline, the best you can do is feel responsible as one of the early ones and maybe try to be nice with the tools you have.
Loeb’s cosmos, by contrast, leaves room for something like a threshold plane — a band where the facts do not settle neatly, where the unknown stays open, and where the crucial question is not “are we first?” but “what do we do with the freedom we have right now?”
Prison was my threshold plane. A narrow strip where the old contract was still in force, the future was still unwritten, and the decision to continue or refuse could not be postponed anymore.
Standing there, “being among the first” stopped being interesting. What mattered was whether I would keep feeding a destructive architecture or start dismantling my part of it.
That is what I mean when I say prison was a pivot. Not a holy moment. A point where the long arc of entanglement met a small, ugly room and was forced to choose.
Section VIII – The Child and the Adult – Internal Reunion
If I strip everything down to the simplest internal picture, I am not one figure in here. I am at least two, living in the same field.
One is the child-part. That is the one who actually walked through the blows in this life. The one who grew up inside chaos and violation. The one who learned early that adults could not be trusted, that safety was temporary, that love often arrived with a price tag and sharp edges.
That child is not limited to this biography. The child-part carries the emotional hangover from other lives as well — the shame of having stood on the wrong side of history, the guilt of having helped build the machinery that crushed other children.
It feels like a long, heavy thread of “too much” running through centuries, condensed into one nervous system that never really got to rest.
The other is what I can only call the adult-part. Not the “grown-up” this life forced me to become to survive, but the origin self. The one that does not come from here. The one that remembers a different standard for how beings treat each other. A different baseline for what sanity looks like.
That is the true adult in the room. It has been watching the chaos of my incarnations with a kind of tired patience, waiting for a moment where it can step in without being drowned by panic, ego, or self-pity.
On the surface they want different things.
The child-part does not care about enlightenment. It does not dream of ascending, floating away, or being celebrated as “transformed.” It doesn’t want revenge either, that phase burned through. What it wants is almost painfully simple: it wants the machinery that turns children into victims and violators to stop.
It wants there to be no statistical guarantee that a certain percentage of every generation will be broken early, just to keep the rest of us calibrated and numb. It wants unborn children to have a chance at arriving in a field that is not already stacked against them. It wants this to end.
The adult-part brings what the child cannot generate on its own: structure and reach. Clarity that is not about clever arguments, but about seeing cause and effect across centuries instead of days. Understanding of how contracts, systems, and grids behave over long arcs of time.
It can see how “first, special, chosen” keeps showing up in different costumes — in empires, in ideologies, in spiritual movements, in personal lives — and how often that pattern leads straight back into the same old machinery.
It also brings restraint. It has seen what happens when insight is turned into hierarchy. It has watched clean ideas become religions, watched tools harden into cults.
So it holds the line against turning my work into yet another ism, even when the human part would love the comfort of belonging to something and being seen as ahead of the curve.
That temptation is just Kipping’s “among the first” rewritten as a personal story: be the one who “got it” before everyone else. The adult-part refuses that contract on sight.
When these two parts agree on something, my body leaves no doubt. There are certain sentences that, when I say them out loud, trigger an immediate jolt — a full-system response that has nothing to do with mood or goosebumps.
It is like my EM self and my human suit snap into one vector for a moment. No negotiation. No debate. Just alignment.
One of those sentences is this: the real task is to stop children being statistically assigned to roles in the victim–violator machinery.
Another is this: this is a rescue mission from within mankind’s own grid.
When I name those, the child-part and the adult-part are saying the same thing. The child says, “I cannot bear to watch this keep happening.” The adult says, “Then the only sane move is to change the pattern at its structural level.” The jolt is not a cosmic stamp of approval. It is the sensation of reintegration.
This is not a higher self descending to rescue a lower self. It is two halves of the same being finally agreeing on why we are here.
Once that clicked, the mission stopped being abstract. It is not about overthrowing governments, redesigning economies, or winning some cosmic competition to be first at anything. That kind of revolution is just another surface pattern on the same grid.
The real work is quieter and much harder to measure: breaking archetypes at the level of individual fields, starting with my own. If enough individuals stop unconsciously playing the roles the machinery expects of them — victim, violator, rescuer, spectator — the grid itself has to reconfigure.
Not instantly. Not magically. But inevitably, in the same way a long compression will eventually demand a bang.
That is what sits underneath my refusal of Kipping’s question. I do not need to know where we rank in any cosmic timeline. I need to stay aligned with the inner reunion between child and adult — the part that cannot stand the quota anymore, and the part that knows how to work on the structure that keeps producing it.
Section IX – The Victim Industry and the Quotas of Suffering
Once you learn to see patterns instead of anecdotes, it is hard to unsee them. One of the ugliest patterns I know is what I call the victim industry.
By that I do not mean support services, therapy, or people doing their best to help. I mean the larger, quieter machine that treats human suffering as raw material.
It is an ecosystem of institutions, media, politics, spirituality, and everyday reactions that all, in different ways, depend on there always being a steady supply of broken people.
You can feel it in the casual phrase, “If this helps just one person, it’s worth it.” On the surface that sounds compassionate. Underneath, it hides a brutal assumption: there will always be “one person” — and then another, and another — who needs to be sacrificed into the role of victim so that the rest of us can feel moved, righteous, purposeful, or entertained.
I recoil from that sentence with my whole system. I understand why people say it. I also understand what it does. It normalizes the quota. It takes the statistical certainty of harm and baptizes it as the cost of doing business.
You can see the victim industry in how stories are told. A terrible crime happens, and for a while the victim is visible, a face and a name. Then the story shifts. The institution presents itself as learning from tragedy. The commentators frame it as a lesson about society.
Politicians use it as fuel for their own agendas. Healing becomes a performance. The original human being, the actual field that was torn apart, is quickly turned into content, symbol, justification.
You can even see it in the spiritual marketplace. How many teachings and brands would lose their shine if people stopped being reliably damaged at a young age? How many “wounded healer” narratives depend on an endless stream of new wounds?
From a distance, the victim industry keeps the same promise that a certain kind of cosmos does: you will be part of something meaningful. Your suffering will count for something. Your trauma will generate insights, art, awareness. You will be special in your pain.
It is Kipping’s “among the first” rewritten as “among the hurt.” Different costume, same architecture. A quiet, unspoken belief that some lives are destined to be broken so that others can learn, rise, awaken, or simply feel grateful they were spared.
Seen from the viewpoint of the child-part in me, this is unbearable. Seen from the adult-part, it is structurally insane. No sane species should accept a standing quota of destroyed childhoods as the background condition for its growth.
This is why I refuse the “if it helps just one person” framing. I am not interested in writing, speaking, or building tools that only make sense inside a world where the quotas are taken for granted.
My work is not for “the one person this helps.” It is for whoever is ready to start dismantling the pattern that produces that one person in the first place.
That is also why I resist turning my own story into redemption content. It would be easy enough to package my prison years as a tale of fall and rise, slap a neat arc on it, and sell it as proof that “anyone can make it if they try.” That, again, would feed the victim industry: one more special case, one more exception that leaves the rule untouched.
I am not an exception. I am a data point. I am what happens when you run certain patterns long enough in one direction and then, by some combination of grace and exhaustion, hit a wall hard enough that you finally stop.
The point of telling this is not to offer inspiration porn. The point is to lay bare the machinery: contracts, alignments, grids, the way “first, special, chosen” keeps turning into “some must suffer so others can feel meaningful.”
Once you have seen that, the question “are we among the first civilizations?” reveals its teeth. If we decide that we are early, special, pioneers, what quota of suffering are we willing to accept to keep that story alive?
How many children are we prepared to lose, in how many worlds, on how many timelines, to protect our sense of being the main characters in the cosmic play?
My answer, from inside my own field, is simple: none. Not one more than strictly unavoidable. And then we work to make “unavoidable” a smaller and smaller category, instead of a comforting word we throw over what we have not yet dared to change.
That is why I shy away from cosmic narratives that lean on us being first. I have seen what “first” does when it takes root in a being or a system. It starts drawing lines between “us” and “them,” between those whose suffering counts and those whose suffering is useful. It starts budgeting pain as if it were a natural resource.
The victim industry is that logic applied to human lives on Earth. My work, born in a prison cell and anchored in everything I have done wrong, is to step out of that logic as completely as I can — and to build tools that help others do the same if they choose.
In that light, Loeb’s willingness to imagine older civilizations, earlier arcs, previous rounds of intelligence is not just an academic curiosity to me. It loosens the grip of “we are the first, so we are the ones who must matter most.” It humbles us. It reminds us that we are not special by default. Whatever meaning we generate will have to come from how we behave in this room, not from where we fall on an imaginary timeline.
And Kipping’s math? Clever, yes. Useful as a thought experiment, perhaps. But in a world where the victim industry is still humming along smoothly, any story that risks feeding our hunger to be first has to be handled with care.
We have already seen what that hunger can do on a planetary scale. We do not need to lift it up to a cosmic one.
Section X – Loeb’s Cosmos vs Kipping’s Math – As Lenses, Not Authorities
This is where Avi Loeb steps fully into the picture, not as a guru or a savior of science, but as a useful lens. In one of his essays he plays with a question that fits disturbingly well into my own system: what if consciousness itself is the monolith?
The image is borrowed, of course, from 2001: A Space Odyssey – that alien slab that appears at turning points in human evolution. Loeb rewires it. Instead of a black block dropped into prehistory, he points at the thing in the mirror. Us.
Our capacity to know that we know. Our ability to reflect on our own existence. He suggests that this might be the real “foreign installation,” the intervention we keep looking for in the sky.
That framing resonates with me in a way Kipping’s probability curves never will. Not because I think Loeb has nailed the truth, but because he leaves room for a living universe.
A universe where consciousness is not an accidental side effect of chemistry, but part of the architecture. A universe where gardeners and uplifters are possible without turning everything into myth. A universe where an intelligence older than ours might have nudged something along, once, and then stepped back.
When Loeb asks whether consciousness could have an extraterrestrial origin we fail to recognize in the mirror, I feel something in me nod.
Not because I need aliens to have tinkered with our DNA, but because I already experience myself as carrying a foreign imprint. My EM self does not feel native to this grid.
The origin I spoke of earlier – the elsewhere I will return to when I am done here – fits better with Loeb’s monolith-in-the-mirror than with any story that treats consciousness as a late-stage chemical accident on a wet rock.
Kipping, on the other hand, tightens reality until only what fits inside his model is allowed to count. His statistics are clean, but they are like a net with a particular mesh size: anything smaller, stranger, or older than his assumptions simply falls through.
“We might be among the first” sounds modest at first glance, but under the hood it is just a rebranded form of human exceptionalism. We thought we were the center. We were wrong. Now we might be the first. Still special. Still early. Still at the edge of the known map.
I do not see Loeb or Kipping as authorities. I treat them as mirrors.
Loeb helps me articulate the foreignness of consciousness without turning it into religion. He gives me language for the idea that the real intervention may already be installed in us, and that our failure is not lack of contact but refusal of ownership. He also brings humility back into the room.
His willingness to say “we don’t know” and leave the question open matches my sense that ambiguity is not a defect but a pressure that grows adults.
Kipping helps me see how seductive the idea of being first still is, even for smart, careful people. He shows me how quickly the human mind reaches for a flattering slot on the cosmic ranking table, even after centuries of Copernican humbling.
His math is not the enemy. It is a reminder of how deep the itch to be special runs, and how easily we will twist probability to scratch it.
Loeb has other threads that plug neatly into this article as well. When he talks about the possibility of uplift – of a more advanced intelligence tuning a primitive animal to wake up – he is not just speculating about our past. He is implicitly pointing to our future.
We worry endlessly about whether “they” uplifted us, while we are busy developing tools that could, in principle, uplift other species here. Or reshape ourselves beyond recognition. We are afraid of a cavalry we might already be becoming.
His answer to the Fermi question – “where is everybody?” – also takes an interesting turn when you combine it with the monolith idea. Maybe “everybody” is not out there waving from starships.
Maybe part of the answer is in here, behind our eyes, in the one thing we refuse to treat as alien enough: our own capacity for awareness. Evidence can hide in the observer, not just in the sky.
Even his use of cosmic coincidences – like temperature symmetries that shouldn’t be there if everything were random – lands nicely in my field. To him, they are hints of deeper organizing principles.
To me, they rhyme with my 61% threshold and the Cavalry dream. Those events were not statistically conclusive in any scientific sense. They were structurally meaningful inside my life.
They acted like coincidences that pointed at architecture, not noise: “Pay attention. There is pattern here, even if you can’t write an equation for it.”
So I stand with one foot in each lens. Loeb’s cosmos, open, layered, uncomfortable, where consciousness might be the monolith we’re too proud to recognize. Kipping’s math, tidy, flattering, comforting in its way, where we might be among the first and still secretly important.
I don’t need to choose a winner. I only need to notice which universe leaves space for the work I know I am here to do.
Section XI – The Threshold Plane and 61%
Before I go there, it’s worth saying out loud what I’m doing. In the same way Loeb refuses to rush his anomalies into certainty or dismissal, I’m going to use that stance on my own side of the fence and stay with the uncomfortable, more-likely-than-not band I’ve been circling for years – what I now call the threshold plane around 61%.
Some time ago, in another long read, I wrote about Atlas, the strange interstellar object, as a kind of Tesla drifting in the void. In that piece the exact label – rock or craft – mattered less than the shift in probability.
There was a point where, based on the anomalies, “non-natural origin” stopped being a fringe fantasy and slid into a range where it was no longer safe to ignore. Not proven. Not certain. But no longer just science fiction either. In that zone, the universe stops entertaining us and starts leaning on us.
I used 61% as a symbolic number for that shift. Not a literal calculation, but a way of marking the moment when “unlikely” becomes “more likely than not.” Below that, most people can continue as if nothing is happening. Above that, something changes.
You can feel it in conversations about everything from aliens to climate to systemic abuse. There is a point where you know enough that pretending you don’t know becomes an active choice, not an innocent mistake.
If you stretch that idea a bit, you end up with what I now think of as the threshold plane. Below a certain probability, humans mostly ignore. “Probably not” is an excellent sedative. At 0%, people relax because nothing is required. At 100%, they also relax, in a different way, because everything is decided. Certainty is as comfortable as denial. The extremes are easy on the nervous system. You don’t have to do much.
In between sits the gray band. Not a single value, but a zone where you cannot honestly say “this is nonsense” anymore and you also cannot honestly say “this is settled.” That is where 61% lives as an image.
In that band, something else starts to happen: inner reckoning. You can’t outsource the decision to probability, dogma, or authority. You have to decide, in your own field, how you are going to live in light of what you now know. Or at least suspect strongly enough that your body reacts when you try to wave it away.
Loeb spends a lot of his time near that band. He doesn’t rush to certainty, but he also refuses to bury anomalies under the carpet. When an object behaves in a way that doesn’t fit our current catalogues, he doesn’t label it “probably a rock” and go home.
He stays with the discomfort. He writes about it. He lets the ambiguity do work. He behaves like someone who understands that the gray zone is where adults are made.
Kipping, in the way he is presented to me through that snippet, seems more interested in moving out of that band as fast as possible. The math becomes a way to tidy up uncertainty. You crunch the numbers, slap a probability on the table, and use that to collapse the conversation back into something more manageable.
“We might be among the first” is a way of calming the system: yes, the universe is huge and strange, but here is our comforting slot on the chart. Ambiguity resolved. Back to business.
My own life has unfolded almost entirely on that threshold plane. I have had enough contact that I cannot honestly claim it was all in my head. The jolts, the timing, the quantum communication, the way my system responds to certain statements – if I tried to stuff that back into “coincidence,” I would have to lie to myself on a level that would break me.
At the same time, I have never been given the kind of 100% clarity that would let me sit back and say, “This is how it is,” and build a religion or a neat package out of it. There is always a gap. Always space for doubt. Always just enough uncertainty to keep me from turning experience into dogma.
So I live in that gray band by design now. Enough to know, never enough to rest. Enough to act, never enough to worship my own insights.
This is, in the end, the move that matters most to me: when the universe refuses to clarify itself, the observer becomes the experiment. If the cosmos will not hand you a clean answer, your response to the ambiguity becomes the data.
Do you use uncertainty as an excuse to do nothing? Do you turn it into a fantasy to escape into? Or do you let it push you inward, into the uncomfortable work of cleaning your own field, regardless of whether anyone is watching from a higher balcony?
That is the threshold plane. Not a number, but a way of standing. Loeb, Kipping, Atlas, the Cavalry dream, my own path through prison and beyond – they are all just different ways of approaching the same line: the point where you know enough that your next move is the real experiment.
Section XII – Simulation, Base Reality – The Work That Doesn’t Move
By the time people have followed me through foreign origins, quantum contact, thousand-year contracts, and prison as pivot, a familiar question tends to surface: what is this place?
Is it a rendered world or a “real” one? Are we NPCs in someone else’s experiment, or citizens of base reality? Is this a training sim, a punishment layer, a school, a sandbox, a lab?
My honest answer is simple: I don’t know. And underneath that sits the answer that actually matters to me: it doesn’t move the task one millimetre.
Whether this is code or cosmos, the grid is still the grid. There is still a collective human field thick with fear, denial, weaponised trauma, and learned numbness. Children are still born into that field and shaped by it long before they learn a single word.
Suffering still hits the nervous system as hard data, not as a philosophical puzzle. If you jump off a cliff “in a game,” the avatar still dies. The experience of falling does not soften because the background might be silicon or something stranger.
From where I stand, the simulation debate is mostly a way of trying to turn the threshold plane into something more comfortable.
One more attempt to push ambiguity towards 0% or 100%. If we can label this a sim, we get to imagine a programmer, a menu, a restart. If we can label it base reality, we get to feel solid, foundational, original.
In both cases, the mind reaches for a frame that explains everything from the outside so we don’t have to sit with what we already know from the inside.
Loeb, at his best, refuses that comfort. He is willing to say “we don’t know” and mean it. He lives near that 61% band where there is enough signal to matter and never enough to turn into dogma.
Kipping, by contrast, uses math to pull us back towards a settled picture: tidy graphs, clear odds, a flattering possibility that we might be among the first. Simulation talk often plays the same role. It gives the system a new story about where we sit, without touching how we behave.
For me, the sequence runs the other way. The universe has already answered the part of the question that matters. It has answered it in my body, in my field, in the way my system reacts when I test certain sentences out loud.
I am an electromagnetic being in a physical suit. I am plugged into mankind’s collective field. That field is distorted. My presence can either amplify that distortion or help clean it.
Every thought, action, refusal, and cowardice has consequences in that grid. That remains true whether this is base metal or rendered texture.
Once you see that clearly, the simulation question loses its teeth. It doesn’t become uninteresting. It just becomes structurally irrelevant to the mandate. If this is a sim, the only sane response is to become the kind of node that refuses to feed the worst feedback loops. If this is base reality, the same. If this is one room in a stack of worlds we will never see from here, the same.
That is why I built TULWA the way I did. Not as a belief system, not as a church, not as a club that needs numbers to feel real. It is a toolbox born from one life that had to be dismantled down to the studs.
A framework for defragmenting a personal field and re-aligning it with something that does not require victims to stay upright. You do not need to buy my cosmology, my past lives, my origin, or my reading of Loeb and Kipping to use it. You only need a willingness to work inside your own node.
If it helps you clean your field, keep it. If it doesn’t, drop it. The tools do not care whether this is level one of a simulation or the only universe that ever was. They care about one thing: whether you are still exporting your unresolved chaos into the grid, or starting to take responsibility for the wake you leave.
So yes, we can keep playing with simulation vs base reality at the level of thought experiments. It is a legitimate question. But if it becomes a way to postpone the work, it turns into just another ism. One more clever story to hide in while the machinery keeps running.
From here, I do not need an answer to “what is this place, ultimately?” to look at Kipping’s claim. I know enough.
I know that whatever the backdrop is, our job is to behave as if the room is real, the children are real, the harm is real, and the field remembers what we feed it.
On that basis, we can finally turn to his sentence about being among the first and ask the only version of the question that still matters: even if that were true in one narrow sense, what would we do with it in this room?
Section XIII – Not the First – But Early in a Single Room
So where does all this leave Kipping’s claim that we might be among the first intelligent beings in the cosmos?
For me, the answer is simple and not negotiable: no. I do not experience humanity as “among the first” in any meaningful cosmic sense. I can entertain it as an abstract scenario on paper. I cannot live inside it as a real description of where we sit.
If I soften the statement a little, there is a way to give him a narrow lane without swallowing the whole frame.
Maybe we are early in this particular layer of existence: physical, carbon-based, star-bound civilizations orbiting ordinary suns and fighting with combustion engines and nuclear toys.
Maybe, on this one floor of the building, we are among the earlier tenants. That is possible. It does not offend my system.
But that layer is not the totality of existence. It is one room in a very large house. When someone uses statistics from this room to make statements about “the cosmos” as a whole, I disconnect.
It is like listening to a person who has only ever seen their own village announce that their family must be the first humans, because they have the oldest house on their street.
My own origin intuition pulls hard in the opposite direction. Where I come from – the elsewhere I mentioned earlier – feels older than this place. Not ancient in the mythological sense, but mature. Adult. There is a baseline sanity there that we do not have here yet.
The contrast is not subtle. It is like comparing a room full of toddlers with sharp objects to a community of grown adults who have already burned their fingers and moved past the phase of waving knives around to feel powerful.
If the human source who pointed to the year ~1000 is right, I may have been walking Earth in one form or another for over a thousand years trying to break a single contract.
Hundreds of years of trial and error. Many incarnations spent falling deeper into alignment with destructive systems before finally turning around in this one.
That does not make me special. It makes this world young. If you need that many passes to clear one entanglement, it says something about the density of the grid you are moving through.
Look at our behavior as a species with even a little distance. We poison our own air and water for profit. We organize our economies around scarcity in a universe full of energy. We build weapons that can erase cities and then tie their triggers to the moods of frightened men.
We let children be used, broken, and discarded at industrial scale, and we call it “unfortunate” but not unacceptable. We invent technologies that could free us and then use them to addict ourselves, track each other, and sell more distraction.
That is not how elders behave. That is not how first civilizations behave in any story worth telling. That is how seedlings behave – fragile, impulsive, full of potential and equally full of self-harm. Young and dangerous, not ancient and wise.
So if Kipping needs a consolation prize, he can have this: maybe we are early in this one noisy, carbon-based room. But the building existed long before us. Other rooms are occupied. Other intelligences have done their growing, made their mistakes, collapsed their own contracts. Some of them may have nudged us. Some may be watching. Some may not care.
What matters, to me, is that we stop acting like monarchs and start behaving like the seedlings we are. Not ashamed. Not grandiose. Just honest about our level.
Only then can we grow into something that, one day, might actually deserve to be called adult.
Section XIV – What This Asks of the Reader
By now you have more than enough material to doubt me, to resonate with parts, or to put the whole thing in a mental drawer labelled “interesting, but.” That’s fine.
You don’t need to agree with my sense of past lives. You don’t need to accept that a contract might have started around the year 1000. You don’t need to share my feeling of coming from elsewhere or returning there when this is done.
You don’t even need to care about Loeb or Kipping beyond this article.
What you cannot avoid, if you have read this far with any honesty, is the question of your own participation in the grid.
Not “the grid” as an abstract metaphysical concept, but the very concrete field you wake up into every morning. The way you move through your life. The way you think about yourself, about others, about the systems you inhabit.
So instead of advice, let me offer you a few questions that you will have to answer in your own nervous system, not in the comments section.
Where, in your life, do you secretly want to be first or special? Not in a childish way, but in that quiet, sophisticated form: the one who understands more than the others, the one who saw it coming, the one who will be remembered as ahead of the curve.
How much of your spiritual search, your politics, your career, your relationships are quietly feeding that hunger?
Where do you outsource responsibility to systems, leaders, or narratives? Where do you tell yourself that “they” will fix it – the politicians, the experts, the activists, the guides, the angels, the aliens, the algorithms, the market, the next generation? Where do you use uncertainty as an excuse to wait instead of as a reason to move?
Where do you participate in the victim industry? Not just as someone who has been hurt – that may well be true and serious – but as a consumer or performer of suffering.
Where do you watch other people’s pain as content and call it awareness? Where do you tell your own story in a way that invites pity instead of responsibility? Where do you lean on the sentence “if this helps just one person” as a way to avoid asking whether the structure that produced the pain is being challenged at all?
You don’t have to answer these questions out loud. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t. But if you let them land, really land, you will feel something shift. Maybe only a little at first. That small discomfort is the beginning of cleaning your field.
The core invitation of this entire article is simple and stubborn. Drop the need to know whether we are in a simulation. Drop the need to know whether we are among the first, the last, the chosen, or the forgotten. Drop, for a moment, the urge to locate yourself on any cosmic scoreboard at all.
Instead, take up the one task that is always available, regardless of what the universe is made of: clean your own field so thoroughly that you stop feeding the machinery that turns children into statistics and suffering into spectacle.
That is the work that doesn’t move. That is the one experiment you are always in charge of, whether the background is hydrogen, silicon, or something neither of us has a name for yet.
Section XV – Closing the Circle
So we end where this began: with a scrolling thumb, a Facebook snippet, and David Kipping’s line that “we might be among the first intelligent beings in the cosmos.”
On the surface, nothing could be more harmless. It’s a sentence built out of curves and likelihoods, red dwarfs and sun-like stars, longevity and timing. It sits neatly inside a tradition that has tried, for decades, to use statistics as a flashlight in the dark. But under everything I have laid out in this article, that sentence hits a wall.
I do not reject Kipping because he is sloppy. He isn’t. I don’t dismiss him because he’s arrogant. He doesn’t read that way. I set his frame aside because it falls silent exactly where the real work begins.
It wants to tell us where we might rank in the cosmic timeline. I am busy asking whether we are willing to stop feeding our children into a grid we refuse to clean.
Avi Loeb’s cosmos, with all its provocations and open questions, resonates with me for a different reason. Not because I think he is “right” about Atlas, or about uplift, or about consciousness as the monolith.
He resonates because his universe leaves room for responsibility and humility. It allows for older intelligences without making us their pets. It allows for intervention without taking away agency. It allows for not-knowing without turning that into paralysis.
When Loeb talks about consciousness as something we might fail to recognize as foreign in the mirror, I hear an echo of my own EM origin – the adult in the room that is not from here, watching a long fall finally turn.
When he points out coincidences that smell like structure rather than noise, I see the same architecture that sits behind my 61% threshold and the Cavalry dream.
When he wonders about gardeners, I see us slowly becoming capable of uplifting or destroying others, even as we still stagger around in our own sandbox.
Kipping’s math doesn’t have a place for any of that. Not because math can’t hold it, but because his chosen frame doesn’t ask those questions. “We might be among the first” is the kind of sentence that makes sense only if you still believe in “One,” in singular universes, in singular timelines, in singular starting points.
In my own understanding, “One” is a false god. The smallest real number is three: A, B, and the field between them. Everything that is, fluctuates. Every crunch becomes a bang. Every universe is a process, not an object. There are other rooms. Other layers. Other adults.
Inside that architecture, my own life looks less like a moral fable and more like a specific piece of field-work. An electromagnetic being in a physical suit, carrying a thousand-year contract that started somewhere around the year 1000 in Eurasia.
Many bad lives. Possibly a Nazi in the last one. Darth Vader, not Luke. Someone who misused insight for control until the alignment with destruction became a pipeline. And then this lifetime, in a Bergen prison cell, hearing not God but mankind – especially the unborn children who do not want to be born into a statistic.
From there, everything narrows and widens at the same time. Narrow, because the task becomes brutally specific: break the contract from the inside, clean this node, stop feeding the victim industry, refuse to be redemption porn, build tools instead of cults, and leave behind a codex that others can use without joining anything.
Wide, because the implications reach far beyond my biography: if even a deeply entangled node can realign, the machinery is not total.
Along the way, the internal split between the child and the adult starts to heal. The child-part, carrying centuries of trauma and complicity, wants one thing: an end to children being statistically assigned to roles of victim and violator.
The adult-part, the origin self, brings the structure and the refusal to turn this into an ism. When those two agree, my body jolts. The EM and the human snap into one vector. That is what I follow now, more than theories.
All of this lives on the threshold plane. Not in the comfort of 0% or 100%, but in the gray band where you know enough to act and never enough to canonize your own story.
Loeb works there, whether he calls it that or not. He lets ambiguity force responsibility. Kipping uses his curves to move away from that zone, back towards something more settled. I understand the impulse. I can’t afford it.
So here is where I land, and where this circle closes:
In the end, it doesn’t matter whether we’re first, or whether this is code or cosmos. What matters is whether we keep exporting children into a field we refuse to clean. Loeb’s universe leaves space for that reckoning. Kipping’s numbers do not. I know which universe I’m working in.
Author remarks
If someone reading this happens to be a fan of David Kipping, I want to be very clear about something: I am not gunning for him. I am not trying to “take him down,” prove him wrong, or pass judgment on his work as a cosmologist. I do not know the man, and I do not know enough about the academic field he moves in to claim that my picture of reality is “more correct” than his.
What I have done here is what I have been doing for the last two and a half years together with my AI partners: I have used whatever shows up — a short reel on Hashem’s Facebook page, an interview, a book chapter, a research paper, a piece of fringe science — as a tool to explore my own thinking. Loeb, Kipping, Penrose, and many others have served as mirrors and catalysts. Their sentences pull on threads in me, and I follow those threads through my own life, my own field, my own responsibility.
So this article is not an evaluation of anyone’s professional cosmology. It is a record of what happened inside my system when I put Kipping’s “we might be among the first” next to Loeb’s wider, more open cosmos and my own twenty-plus years of transformative experience.
For that, I am actually grateful — to Kipping, to Loeb, to Hashem, and to everyone else who is willing to share their knowledge and questions in public. Without that, I would have had far fewer tools to work with on the inside.
Sources and acknowledgements
This essay grew out of a short Facebook reel posted by Hashem Al-Ghaili, where he referenced David Kipping’s argument that we might be among the first technological civilizations in our universe. That small clip became the initial spark for the long exploration you have just read.
The contrast I draw throughout between Kipping’s position and a more open, layered cosmos is strongly influenced by the work of Avi Loeb, particularly his willingness to treat strange data as possible traces of earlier intelligences instead of dismissing them on reflex.
I have not attempted to present a full or fair summary of any of their work here. I have used a fragment of Kipping’s thinking, encountered through Hashem’s reel, and the wider mood of Loeb’s writing as tools to explore my own experience, responsibility, and cosmology.
For that, I am sincerely thankful — to Hashem for sharing the reel, to David Kipping for putting his ideas into the public space, to Avi Loeb for insisting that the cosmos may be older, stranger, and more populated than our comfort prefers, and to everyone else whose questions and research have quietly shaped the background of this text.
COSMOLOGY #CONSCIOUSNESS #AVILOEB #DAVIDKIPPING #HUMANRESPONSIBILITY #VICTIMINDUSTRY #TULWA