Expanding Civilizational Optionality · Condition-First Causal Inquiry

The planetary cascade atlas: authored pathways, not aggregate scores.

One hundred and fifteen coupled planetary systems, every one read all the way through as an authored causal pathway — slow stocks, a perturbation, the foundation that fails, whom it fails, and how the response either repairs the field or exports the harm to a named receiving system. Five non-substitutable margins, never summed into a score — and, until each is separately evidenced, held as missing rather than shown as a label. Now with an evidence-graded propagation ladder, explicit feedback loops, an initiating-event overlay, and a situated-agreement response layer. No probability, no country ranking, no authority to act.

Planetary evidence cut 5 August 2026 · Model v6.0 · v8 publication · 115-system register · 457 typed relations · 13 feedback loops · 14 initiating-event records (4 current; 2 historical, 8 unmaterialised) · Provenance-incomplete (0 / 115 observations frozen; sources external) · Fully self-contained — no network required · How this was audited →

01slow stocks02perturbation03foundation failure04unequal incidence05actor response06carrier → receiver

Condition first, and one system at a time: slow stocks and dependencies decide whether a perturbation breaks a foundation, whom it breaks it for, and whether the response repairs the field or carries the harm into a named receiving system. Nothing here is summed, ranked, or turned into a probability.

The model · in plain terms

What this is for, and how to trust it

Why it exists

Most shocks stay where they land. A few don't — a failed harvest becomes a hunger crisis becomes displacement becomes conflict, crossing borders and jumping between systems that looked unrelated. This atlas is a way of watching for that second kind, one pathway at a time.

It won't tell you what is going to happen. It tells you where to look, and what to ask once you are looking — across one hundred and fifteen coupled systems, each traced all the way through. The register is purposive, not the whole planet: if a system is missing, that is not reassurance — it only means no one has drawn it here yet.

How it thinks

  1. It's not the spark — it's how dry the field already was

    What decides whether a shock spreads is the condition it lands in: how much strain a place already carries, how tightly its systems are bound, and how little slack it has left.

  2. It follows the chain to a named place

    Harm moves through a specific carrier — a river, a food market, a migration route — into a specific receiving system that can be named. An arrow that can't be named isn't drawn.

  3. It never adds things up

    Each system is read on five separate margins — biophysical recovery, provision, legitimacy, agency, network absorption — never summed into a readiness number. A place can be fine on four and breaking on the fifth, and that is exactly what a total would hide. None of the five is yet populated with measured values, so no margin is displayed per system: the inherited severity labels were suppressed rather than shown as though they had been calibrated.

  4. Evidence, not interpolation, and the response is part of the model

    Sparse evidence is never drawn as a smooth curve; missing data never becomes zero; two things in the same place is not one causing the other. And the response — how actors, agreements and firebreaks either repair or export the harm — is modelled, not assumed.

  5. Built to be argued with

    Every pathway carries a counter-signal and a date it was last looked at. Political conversion stays gate-closed until its evidence gates pass. Nothing hardens into truth without a person — ideally the people who would live with it — looking, disagreeing, and correcting.

Skip to atlas
v8 · xCO canonical Loading immutable model… No calibrated probability or country ranking All relation instances inactive until separately evidenced
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Planetary systems and bounded structural relations

Points are orientation anchors, not exposure geometries. Every displayed relation is structural or hypothesised; no relation instance is active.

115 systems

Atlas

Selected one-hop relations only; heuristic matches remain suggestions, never endpoints.

System Event / join nomination Selected Inactive relation
World map of 115 planetary systems. Selected relations are inactive mechanism hypotheses. Initiating events nominate Stage 2 tests without opening propagation gates.

Bounded local structural graph

The selected system, explicit receiver boundaries and reviewed target candidates. This is not an activated cascade.

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The response layer · situated agreement infrastructure

When a firebreak needs many hands, it needs an agreement.

The atlas ends each pathway at a response — a firebreak that either repairs the field or exports the harm. But most firebreaks are not one actor's to pull: they are commitment knots of roughly 3–12 principals — a water authority, a lender, an insurer, a health service, a community — each holding a necessary right, asset, permission, duty or assurance, viable only if they close together.

The Situated Agreement Infrastructure (concept paper v0.1) is the layer that makes those knots cheap enough to constitute and maintain: a regulated, machine-assisted protocol that constructs valid, case-specific commitments from a common constitutional grammar. It discovers rights-compatible, distribution-tested feasible packages — and returns an honest infeasibility explanation when none exist. No agreement is a valid outcome. Machine agents hold no independent authority; every action resolves through a live mandate to an identifiable principal.

Constitution is the substrateNon-negotiable rights, safeguarding floors and ecological minima never enter bargaining.
Standing permissions define the searchRevocable prior authority to propose within stated limits.
The agreement is the situated outputA small frontier of materially distinct packages, exposing cost, burden and distribution — no hidden single optimum.
Reserved decisions stay humanCapacity, diagnosis, safeguarding and exclusion remain with an authorised person or public body.
Partial reopeningA change reopens only the affected dependency subgraph, not the whole agreement.
A versioned audit bundleEvidence, assent, dissent, events and reopening decisions — correctable, never blockchain-immutable.

Synthesis: this layer is xCO's mass multi-agent agency made operational at the firebreak — the atlas names where a coupled system is loading; the agreement infrastructure is how a plural response gets constituted without collapsing rights or situational variance. Concept architecture, not a legal specification.

— Orientation, not authority · where to look, not what will happen — Audit logic & process logic — the three lenses, the decision rules, what the 7 August 2026 pass found, and what the audit cannot establish. An interpretation generated from a maintained working wiki; not an official Dark Matter Labs publication.