The First Scattering

There's a moment in the history of the universe — about 380,000 years after the Big Bang — where everything became visible. Before that, the universe was an opaque, dense soup of colliding and scattering light in every direction. But, at that point, things cooled just enough. Atoms formed. Photons escaped. And, for the first time, light could travel freely.

That light — the Surface of Last Scattering — is the farthest back we can see.1 The earliest readable memory of the universe. A constant, background glow.

And, since learning about it, I've loved the idea. That everything before it mattered, but we'll never quite see it clearly.

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I think we’re in a moment like that now. Somewhere in the blur before the next phase transition. The Singularity is coming — maybe soon, maybe fast.

If AGI arrives — aligned or not — it will fix the terms of the future. A misaligned superintelligence could tilt the future of value permanently. A well-aligned one might seed great human interstellar flourishing. All the decisions we make today will have mattered in shaping the future of the Universe. Either way, for the future historians, if there are future historians, the fog will lift.

But it’s hard to see clearly. There’s too much noise. Too many opinions, predictions, alarms. Too many half-finished thoughts.

For now, this blog lives in that messy in-between. A place to put scattered pieces: thoughts about AI, sometimes serious, sometimes not; philosophy I’m still chewing on; conversations I want to remember.

To scat in jazz is to let go of fixed language — to improvise until rhythm finds its own meaning. That’s the kind of thinking I like. Not linear. Not polished. But maybe, sometimes, honest.

Welcome to The First Scattering.

We’re all just trying to see through the fog.