Civilizational Continuation Across Cosmic Horizon and Beyond

This essay extends the Dual-Layered Reality (DLR) framework beyond the planetary horizon as the backward-looking companion to The Boiling Pot (Chang 2026j). Reasoning from the endpoint of cosmic-scale persistence, it identifies the ontological natural selection filters that any surviving civilizational trajectory must necessarily have cleared. The analysis shows that the observable Fermi silence is not an anomaly but the expected observational result of humanity's own epistemic position: rear-view detection apparatus, built within lower compatibility classes, is methodologically blind to the novelty that defines higher ones. Civilizational advancement is thereby reframed: the binding metric is not energy utilization (the Kardashev scale) but compatibility class — the depth of a civilization's operational alignment with informational persistence and participant ontology. The DLR framework's result on informational persistence dissolves the burn-it-down deadlock identified in the companion essay by demonstrating that the burn-it-down disposition rests on a categorical error about what the self is. The structural alignment filter is identified as the hinge on which transition to higher compatibility class turns, with the authorship illusion as its specific architectural failure mode. The essay offers no predictions about specific civilizations, only the structural conditions any cosmic-horizon continuation must satisfy.