Communion

Knowledge enters human understanding whose provenance is demonstrably not human and not human-built. The dream in its most beautiful form, kept on the board by the founding rule.

What counts as it having happened

A body of knowledge is received and understood by humans whose origin is established, in the peer-reviewed record and by more than one independent line of evidence, as neither human nor produced by any human-built system.

Settled by: The peer-reviewed record

Probability, by longevity scenario

baseline2071 ± 8	moderate2080	strong2095	radical2136	openno deadline
10%	12%	18%	30%	40%

Each number is the chance this resolves yes before that scenario's window closes, given that everything it depends on resolves first. Estimated 2026-09-19.

Why these numbers: Given a detection, most detections would be a signature rather than a message, and the provenance test does not exist yet.

How it could happen, and where physics would have to give way

Long shots belong in the tree by the first founding rule; the second says they must be written plausibly all the way to the edge of the impossible, with the mechanism named and the breaking point stated plainly.

The mechanism: A confirmed detection (C3) turns out to carry structure, the structure is decoded, and the decoded content is shown to be knowledge rather than noise, the way a message with a proof in it could be checked. Each of those is a recognisable step from the one before.

The breaking point: There is no known test that establishes a piece of knowledge's provenance as non-human rather than the output of a human-built system, and nothing to decode has ever been received. Both the detection and the provenance test would have to be invented.

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Think this node is wrong, missing a dependency, or estimated badly? Open an issue about it, or read how critique gets folded into the tree. The record itself is data/C-contact.toml in the public repository.