O-40 - No vacuum-decay transition has occurred anywhere in our past light cone
Evidence-like general fact: its probability differs sharply between the rival hypotheses (vacuum easily triggered by high-energy collisions vs not), which is what gives the Hut-Rees collision-count comparison its bite. The paper’s phrasing: our existence is evidence that no such transition occurred in our past light cone.
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Why this is evidence
H-42 predicts this with certainty — no channel, no decay, ever. H-31 predicts it only with probability short of certainty, and the shortfall grows the faster the nucleation rate: survival of our whole past light cone rules out the rapid-decay corner of the false-vacuum possibility while leaving the long-lifetime metastable regime essentially untouched. (Observer-selection caveats on this survival evidence are handled at the argument layer.)
Likelihood
# E-12 (HC-10) — lone edge, one observation O-40 "no vacuum-decay transition in our past light cone".
# Members in HC-10.hypotheses order: [H-31 metastable false vacuum, H-42 exactly stable]. No residual
# (exhaustive_by_construction). A-63/A-64 are no-observation arguments already priced into the prior — not
# re-counted here (rule 5). Anchored on H-42 = 1 (rule 7). What this edge prices is almost entirely the
# observation-selection caveat A-55 (corrected) attaches to O-40, with A-25 supplying the light-cone step.
lik_o40_H42 = 1.0 # anchor: exact stability => no decay channel ever => past-light-cone survival is
# guaranteed, P(O-40 | H-42) = 1
lik_o40_H31 = 0.9 # ratio to H-42: metastability still predicts survival with near-certainty across its
# long-lifetime bulk — survival of ~1e47 comparable Fe-Fe collisions (A-25's light-cone /
# frame-independence step: a bubble expands at light speed whatever the production frame)
# only suppresses the rapid-nucleation corner, so the observation mildly favours H-42.
# Kept near 1, not lower, because A-55 (corrected) notes the anthropic shadow pushes
# P(O-40 | H-31, we observe) back toward 1 — a decay-destroys-all-observers catastrophe
# is seen as "survived" by every surviving observer regardless of the nucleation rate
t_lc = 0.3 # cap = trust_score(S-3) = 0.85. Docked hard for observation selection: A-55 (corrected)
# states past-light-cone survival is a biased witness of the stability split — every
# possible observer sees O-40 whatever p-bar — so the unbiased 2e-36 bound is set aside
# and only a far weaker selection-aware bound survives; this edge should barely move the
# prior. The markdown IS the price of the selection effect A-55 directs step 8 to charge
evidence("HC-10", ["O-40"], [lik_o40_H31, lik_o40_H42], t=t_lc)