Atila Vahedian
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Choose a Side

March 22, 2026 · Essay 02

The great illusion of the post-Cold War era was that democracy would naturally spread across the world. That belief now looks weak and outdated. Countries like China and Russia do not believe in liberal democracy, and they are not trying to build a neutral world. They are trying to build a world shaped by their own power. In that kind of environment, the United States should stop assuming it can export democracy everywhere and instead focus first on protecting democracy for its own citizens.

Democracy only survives when it is backed by strength. A free society cannot remain free if its enemies dominate technology, intelligence, industry, and defense. The world is becoming more openly competitive and more zero-sum. When hostile powers win strategic ground, America loses real power, and when America loses power, the security of its democratic system weakens too. There is no comfortable middle position anymore. Serious people have to choose a side.

That is why being pro-Palantir makes sense. Palantir understood something many elites still avoid admitting: technology is political. Powerful software will serve some state, some system, and some worldview. Palantir chose the United States. In a world where authoritarian powers are building tools to expand control, I would rather see the most advanced defense and intelligence systems built by America than by its enemies.

History does not reward the side that hesitates. In a world defined by strategic rivalry, the nation that builds the stronger systems writes the rules. I would rather those systems be built by the United States than by its enemies. That is why I have chosen a side. I am on the American side, and I am pro-Palantir.

Why the Scientific Case Points to a Simulated Universe

March 22, 2026 · Essay 01

The strongest modern case for a simulated universe begins with an awkward fact: fundamental physics increasingly describes reality as information, not substance. Bekenstein showed that black-hole entropy scales with surface area rather than volume. From there, holographic duality, starting with Maldacena's AdS/CFT correspondence and sharpened by Ryu and Takayanagi, showed that a gravitational spacetime can be represented by a lower-dimensional quantum system, with geometry tied directly to entanglement. Takayanagi's 2025 review pushes the point further: gravitational spacetime can emerge from enormous numbers of entangled quantum bits. Once space itself can…

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The strongest modern case for a simulated universe begins with an awkward fact: fundamental physics increasingly describes reality as information, not substance. Bekenstein showed that black-hole entropy scales with surface area rather than volume. From there, holographic duality, starting with Maldacena's AdS/CFT correspondence and sharpened by Ryu and Takayanagi, showed that a gravitational spacetime can be represented by a lower-dimensional quantum system, with geometry tied directly to entanglement. Takayanagi's 2025 review pushes the point further: gravitational spacetime can emerge from enormous numbers of entangled quantum bits. Once space itself can be encoded and reconstructed from information, calling the universe "physical" and calling it "computed" stop being opposites. [1]

The second step is computational capacity. Lloyd calculated that the observable universe can have registered about 10^90 bits and performed no more than about 10^120 elementary operations over its history. A universe with a finite bit budget and a finite operation budget looks far more like a bounded computation than an infinitely detailed continuum. Wolpert's 2024 analysis goes further: under the physical Church-Turing thesis, the idea that physically realizable processes are computable, it is mathematically possible for us to be in a simulation, including a self-simulation. Modern science has not uncovered a computational impossibility here; it has uncovered a blueprint. [2]

Probability then stops this from being a mere curiosity. Bostrom showed that at least one of three things must be true: civilizations like ours almost always die before reaching technological maturity, mature civilizations almost never run large numbers of ancestor simulations, or observers like us are almost certainly simulated. If even a modest fraction of advanced civilizations survive and run such simulations, simulated observers will vastly outnumber biological originals. In that scenario, betting that we are in base reality is like betting that, in a library stuffed with copies, you are holding the unique first manuscript. Possible, yes. Rational, no. [3]

Most important, this idea has crossed into science because it touches observation. Beane, Davoudi, and Savage showed that a lattice-style simulated universe could leave detectable traces, including rotational-symmetry breaking in the highest-energy cosmic rays, and they derived a lower bound on the inverse lattice spacing from existing data. A sharper next test, extending their logic, would be to look for the same preferred symmetry across ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, neutrinos, and gravitational-wave backgrounds; if the same grid-like pattern appeared in all three, the case would become viciously strong. Put together, the evidence forms a coherent picture: spacetime behaves like encoded information, the universe has a finite computational budget, computer science allows self-simulation in principle, observer-counting strongly favors simulated minds, and physics offers possible detection channels. The strongest scientific inference is that reality is probably simulated and base reality is the exception, not the rule. [4]