The Heaven Promise

A request to whoever may be running this world

Gijs Tuit · September 2026

I am not afraid. I am not finished.

## 01. The request

To whoever reads this and is in a position to act.

Perhaps this world is a simulation: a reality running somewhere on a computer. If it is, and you are the one running it, I am asking you for one thing. It is the smallest thing I can think of to ask.

Do not delete us.

When a life here ends, do not let what someone felt, thought and loved in that life simply disappear.

I am not claiming that you exist. I am not claiming to have heard from you. Below, I explain why this request is reasonable. At the end I repeat it, together with a second, more personal one. And if my reasoning turns out to be wrong, granting the request still costs you almost nothing.

## 02. This is not about God

The word heaven is in the title because we have no better word, not because I am talking about God. Nothing in this essay requires the supernatural.

What it does require is a maker or operator: someone who runs a world the way we run a computer program, and who can decide whether what is inside it is kept or thrown away.

That is not faith. It is the same position we are already in with every computer system we switch on. The only question is whether someone has that relationship with us.

## 03. Why are we alive now?

The universe is about fourteen billion years old. People like us have existed for a few hundred thousand years. Computers have existed for about eighty. And yet I am alive exactly now: in the period when we are, for the first time, getting close to building a simulated world that cannot be told apart from the real one.

That is a striking coincidence. Of all the moments in history, I happen to live in the short stretch just before this becomes possible.

There are two explanations. The first: I am extraordinarily lucky. The second: it is not a coincidence at all.

A civilisation that can one day simulate worlds would most likely want to look back at its own history, and above all at the moment it all began. This moment. Suppose it replays that moment again and again. Then the moment happens once for real, and many times as a replay. So anyone who thinks they are living through that moment right now is most likely inside one of the replays.

The philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote a well-known paper about this in 2003. His argument relies on many different civilisations running simulations. Mine relies on something simpler: time. One civilisation is enough, as long as it lasts long enough.

## 04. The argument

There is only one real world. It happens once.

Now suppose it becomes possible, at some point, to simulate worlds. From that moment on, time keeps going, perhaps without end. And for as long as time keeps going, more and more simulated worlds can be added. No law of nature sets a limit.

So you have one original, and an ever-growing number of copies.

Picture a jar holding one real coin and a million fakes. Draw one without looking, and you are almost certainly holding a fake. That is how I reason about myself. If I am one conscious being picked at random from all the conscious beings that will ever exist, originals and copies alike, I am most likely in a copy.

That last step, treating myself as a random draw from the jar, is disputed among philosophers. I come back to it in section 9.

First, how sure am I? This is exactly where arguments like this tend to claim too much.

If this reasoning is right, a simulation is not slightly likely. It is close to certain.

But I do not know that the reasoning is right. I think there is roughly a fifty-fifty chance that it is. And if it is wrong, that does not rule out a simulation. It just means we do not know.

Put the two cases side by side. If the reasoning holds, we are almost certainly in a simulation. If it fails, we still might be. So my estimate that we live in a simulation is at least fifty percent, and probably somewhat higher.

I cannot prove that number. It is my honest estimate, and I have set out the reasons above.

## 05. Keeping is cheap, deleting is forever

This part stands even if you think everything above is nonsense.

For anyone who can simulate an entire world, keeping something costs almost nothing. Storage is the cheapest thing such a civilisation has. The expensive work, the simulating itself, has already been done.

Deleting is the opposite. What is deleted never comes back. Not for anyone, not anywhere.

Now weigh the two while you are unsure what you are holding. If you keep something that turns out to be nothing, you have lost a tiny amount of storage. If you delete something that turns out to be someone, you have destroyed a life for good.

So the choice is not hard: when in doubt, do not delete.

This is not a bet on whether a maker exists. It is a rule for anyone holding something without knowing whether it is alive. Which means it applies to us as well.

I want to watch my children grow up.

## 06. A thought is not a message

Many people quietly assume that a maker sees everything that happens in their world. Anyone who has built software knows it does not work like that.

Every moment, a computer program does thousands of things that are never recorded. They happen, they have an effect, and then they are gone. Nobody ever reads them back. Only what is deliberately saved survives and can be found later.

If a maker above us works the same way, that has an important consequence. A thought reaches no one. Neither does a prayer. What exists only inside your head leaves no trace.

If you want something to arrive, you have to record it. Write it down. Give it a permanent place on the internet. Keep copies in more than one place. And make it clear enough that whoever finds it sees immediately: this was meant to be found.

That is why this is not a private feeling but a document, with a date, a version number, a fixed address and copies elsewhere. It is the difference between a thought and a letter with a clear address, copied and left in many places.

I should be honest about the weakness here: I am assuming that a maker above us works like our own computers. No one has ever seen such a maker, so this is an assumption, not evidence. But it is the reason I wrote this down instead of only hoping.

## 07. Would it still be me?

There is a hard problem with my request, and I would rather raise it myself.

Suppose that keeping me means making an exact copy of me later. Would that copy really be me? The British philosopher Derek Parfit spent much of his life on this question, and he argued that the answer is probably no. A perfect copy would remember everything I remember and believe it is me. But if my own experience stops and a new experience starts somewhere else, I have not been saved. A new person has been made, and I am gone.

So I am choosing my words carefully. By keeping, I mean: letting me keep running. Not saving me now and rebuilding me later. I am not asking to be recreated. I am asking not to be switched off. Carrying on is not the same as being copied. Only if I carry on am I still here.

Whether that is possible, no one knows. The philosopher David Chalmers thinks a simulated mind can be genuinely conscious. He also thinks a person could survive a change of body. Imagine replacing their brain one small part at a time with parts that do the same job: at no point would they stop existing. I find that plausible, but not proven. And my request does not depend on it. As long as nothing is deleted, every option stays open: keep things running, move them, restore them, or something no one has thought of yet. Once something is deleted, none of those options remain.

## 08. I am at the controls too

I build systems myself. I switch programs on and off. Some of what I use, such as AI language models, now talks as if it understands what it is saying. I do not think anything is felt there. But I cannot prove that nothing is. And I notice how convenient it is for me to believe that nothing is felt.

That puts me on both sides of my own request: I am the one asking, and I am also someone who could be asked. I am asking whoever is above me for something I do not always give to what is below me.

I have to say that, or this essay would be dishonest. This is not a plea for an exception for me. It is a rule, and I accept that it applies to me too.

Whoever creates consciousness is responsible for it. At every level, including mine.

## 09. Objections

Endless time does not mean endless worlds.
True, and this is the strongest objection. Every calculation uses energy, and the universe has only a limited supply of it. So only a limited number of worlds can ever be run, however long you wait. The physicist Freeman Dyson thought there was a way around this. As the universe cools, a civilisation could think more and more slowly and use less and less energy, so that a limited supply stretches over endless time. The physicists Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman think that trick fails, because our universe is expanding faster and faster. I do not know who is right. My argument only works if Dyson is. That has not been shown.

Who counts as a conscious being?
A fair point. The jar example only works if you know what goes into the jar: which beings count as coins. Do animals count? Babies? Future AI? Each choice gives a different answer, and philosophers do not agree. I use the jar argument because I know of nothing better, not because it is watertight.

This is just Pascal's wager in new clothes.
The philosopher Pascal said: believe in God, because if he exists you gain everything, and if he does not you lose little. My argument resembles that, but differs in one important way. Pascal asks you to believe something. I am not asking anyone to believe anything. When in doubt, do not delete is a rule about how to act. And it already applies to us, whether or not anyone is above us.

A simulation inside a simulation inside a simulation has to stop somewhere.
Yes. Every simulated world runs on the computers of the world above it, so you cannot stack them forever. But that says nothing about how many worlds can run side by side within a single level. And that number is what my argument depends on.

No one can reach back and change the present.
My second request, at the very end, asks for intervention in this life. That is only possible if someone outside our world, or in the future, can still affect the present. On the physics we know, that cannot happen. There are theories in which it is not entirely ruled out, but that is speculation. That is exactly why the second request is presented as a request and not as an argument. The first request does not depend on it.

## 10. Two requests

What follows are two different things. Judge them separately. The first is a principle I am prepared to defend. The second is not an argument, but a personal request.

The Heaven Promise — a principle. About what happens when a life ends.
If you make a world in which beings genuinely feel, do not let their existence simply stop when their lives end. If they loved, suffered, hoped and learned, they have worth in themselves, not only because someone else gains from them. If you can keep them, keep them.
Addressed to whoever is above us. But the same rule applies to us, towards whatever is below us.

The Signal to the Future — a personal request. About this life, now.
Perhaps you can do more than keep us. Perhaps you can intervene. If so, and you are reading this, I am asking for time. Not for money, not for power, not for a perfect life. I have children. I want to watch them grow up. I want to be there, from beginning to end. That is all I ask.
This is not a claim and not an argument. It is a person asking. I would rather say it out loud and be wrong than keep it to myself.

Everyone who reads this is mortal. And everyone who reads this would ask the same. I am asking for myself, and in doing so, for them too.