What if we just look at it simply?

Mass contracts, aka. gravity.

Radiation expands, aka, light.

Our measures of contracting space, GR, are based on measures of mass. Our measures of expanding space are based on radiation, aka, spectral.

So space contracts into galaxies and expands between them. They balance out, aka, Omega = 1.

As these mobile organisms, this sentient interface our bodies have with their situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate. So our experience of time is as the present moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration and correlates them with measures of distance, in order to come up with spacetime.

The evident reality though, is that activity and the resulting change is turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual. Duration is the present, as the events coalesce and dissolve, future to past.

There is no physical dimension of time, no time traveling through the fabric of spacetime, because the past is consumed by the present to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

The energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

So energy and whatever information derived from it go opposites direction of time.

Consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving if form and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, the nervous system sorting the information and the circulation system as feedback in the middle.

So there is an inherent intellectual bias to framing everything in terms of the information.

Why does the information generated tend to condense? What is the basis for this centripetal effect?

Possibly that waves tend to synchronize. One big wave is more efficient than lots of small waves.

So what if this dynamic goes from the barest bending of the light, to the black holes at the center of galaxies? Quasars shoot whatever actually falls into galaxies out the poles, as giant lasers, which are synchronized light waves.

Then the properties we associate with mass are an intermediate, stabilized effect, that our tactile senses treat as primary. So the reason there is so much more of this centripetal gravity, than mass it explain it, is that it creates mass, not a property of mass.