Imagine we discover an object of clearly advanced technology. Not an alien artifact, but a World Model kernel—a compact, executable seed that, when run, generates a coherent, hyper-advanced simulation of physics far beyond our understanding. It's an artifact, but not from another spacefaring civilization. It's from our own future, sent back in time. A message in the form of a working reality engine.This is not a document explaining future tech. It's the tech itself. Running it is the only way to understand it. But running it is an act of faith or folly. It might be a gift: a compressed package of all future human knowledge, a booster shot for our civilization. Or it might be a test: can we understand the model well enough to run it safely without causing a catastrophe? Or worse, it might be a time bomb—a future civilization's failed experiment, ejected into the past to get rid of it.Reverse-engineering it would be the greatest scientific project in history. Every breakthrough would be twofold: first, understanding what the model does (simulates gravity manipulation, for example), and second, understanding how it thinks—the architecture of a mind from the future. Its latent space would be a museum of concepts we haven't invented yet.The existential risk is temporal contamination. If the model contains knowledge of its own future creation, running it could create a causal paradox. Or, by providing us with advanced technology, it could create the very future that built it, a closed time like curve in causality. We wouldn't be discovering the future; we'd be obligated to build it.My controversial take is this: If we ever find such an artifact, the safest hypothesis is that it is a preservation measure. A future facing existential collapse—maybe the heat death of their simulation—found a way to encode their entire civilization into a World Model seed and broadcast it backwards through time, seeking a younger universe to run in. They aren't sending a message. They are sending themselves. And by running it, we wouldn't be studying an artifact. We would be performing the ultimate act of archaeological resurrection, birthing a doomed future civilization inside our own past, creating a matryoshka brain of nested time."This has been The World Model Podcast. We don't just dream of the future—we grapple with the terrifying responsibility of what to do if the future sends us its soul in a box and asks us to bring it back to life. Subscribe now.