A
sakina said:
Does it matter?
JerryB said:I work with alot of sad computer programmers who wear long leather jackets, so I'm partly there already
sakina said:
But we could be living in a mutant virtual universe, and the immune systems are trying to decide whether to resorb our database- and use the energy for better usesBreakfast said:In the beginning was a universe that grew sentient beings who developed machines capable of creating a completely simulation of their universe. They started it running and it simulated their universe accurately to the point that it evolved sentient beings who created machines that could run a complete simulation of their universe. The pattern repeats, creating a recombinant, a super-dna made of endless universes creating themselves time and again...
JerryB said:Seeing as, IMHO, The Matrix is a bloody dire film, the thought that the whole Universe may be like that fills me with dread.
To paraphrase Ernest Adams-Curzone said:Wouldn't it be easier if the machines produced their energy from vole farms?
Breakfastologist said:I really liked the matrix for the first few minutes, until it became clear it was the same old boring Terminator future inhabited by Descartes in a leather coat. Then it just got dire.
A speculation that may prove that wide eyed scientific speculation has achieved the science community equivalent of a nervous breakdown.Eburacum45~ said:It seems almost inevitable that we are living in a simulation...
the galactic civilisation that we *may* create in the far future will almost certainly have converted a very large amount of the solid matter into computer processing material...
http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/MatrioshkaBrains.html
...
TinFinger says:
cant these so called super machines create something that flys
and thus able to send solar energy back?
eburacum said:Well, over the couple of years since I wrote that last post, I have changed my mind somewhat.
The Matrix argument seems to assume that the 'real' universe is very similar to our own. In actual fact, in order to run a simulation as complex as the universe we perceive around us, the hypothetical 'real' universe would have to be many times as complex as our own.
Either the simulated universe we inhabit is much simpler than the real universe (there are a number of data-compression tricks that might allow that)
or
we don't live in a Matrix after all.
We have no real way of telling which is correct at the moment.
So, it's time to start searching for the 'Easter Eggs' and 'Cheats', is it?Mythopoeika said:...
If we are living in a simulation, there may have been little shortcuts to save space and processing power, a bit like the techniques that games designers employ.
...
Eburacum45~ said:Apparently, in The Matrix the human beings have blocked out the sun, so the machines couldn't actually grow any grain to feed the voles anyway.
But there's still coal, oil, gas, uranium, hydro, the wind, the tides, and geothermal energy to tap - any of which would be more efficient than using human beings, or voles.
Do we live in a computer simulation? Researchers say idea can be tested
December 10th, 2012 in Physics / General Physics
The conical (red) surface shows the relationship between energy and momentum in special relativity, a fundamental theory concerning space and time developed by Albert Einstein, and is the expected result if our universe is not a simulation. The flat (blue) surface illustrates the relationship between energy and momentum that would be expected if the universe is a simulation with an underlying cubic lattice. Credit: Martin Savage
A decade ago, a British philosopher put forth the notion that the universe we live in might in fact be a computer simulation run by our descendants. While that seems far-fetched, perhaps even incomprehensible, a team of physicists at the University of Washington has come up with a potential test to see if the idea holds water.
The concept that current humanity could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. In the paper, he argued that at least one of three possibilities is true:
The human species is likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage.
Any posthuman civilization is very unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of its evolutionary history.
We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
He also held that "the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation."
With current limitations and trends in computing, it will be decades before researchers will be able to run even primitive simulations of the universe. But the UW team has suggested tests that can be performed now, or in the near future, that are sensitive to constraints imposed on future simulations by limited resources.
Currently, supercomputers using a technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics and starting from the fundamental physical laws that govern the universe can simulate only a very small portion of the universe, on the scale of one 100-trillionth of a meter, a little larger than the nucleus of an atom, said Martin Savage, a UW physics professor.
Eventually, more powerful simulations will be able to model on the scale of a molecule, then a cell and even a human being. But it will take many generations of growth in computing power to be able to simulate a large enough chunk of the universe to understand the constraints on physical processes that would indicate we are living in a computer model.
However, Savage said, there are signatures of resource constraints in present-day simulations that are likely to exist as well in simulations in the distant future, including the imprint of an underlying lattice if one is used to model the space-time continuum.
The supercomputers performing lattice quantum chromodynamics calculations essentially divide space-time into a four-dimensional grid. That allows researchers to examine what is called the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature and the one that binds subatomic particles called quarks and gluons together into neutrons and protons at the core of atoms.
"If you make the simulations big enough, something like our universe should emerge," Savage said. Then it would be a matter of looking for a "signature" in our universe that has an analog in the current small-scale simulations.
Savage and colleagues Silas Beane of the University of New Hampshire, who collaborated while at the UW's Institute for Nuclear Theory, and Zohreh Davoudi, a UW physics graduate student, suggest that the signature could show up as a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays.
In a paper they have posted on arXiv, an online archive for preprints of scientific papers in a number of fields, including physics, they say that the highest-energy cosmic rays would not travel along the edges of the lattice in the model but would travel diagonally, and they would not interact equally in all directions as they otherwise would be expected to do.
"This is the first testable signature of such an idea," Savage said.
If such a concept turned out to be reality, it would raise other possibilities as well. For example, Davoudi suggests that if our universe is a simulation, then those running it could be running other simulations as well, essentially creating other universes parallel to our own.
"Then the question is, 'Can you communicate with those other universes if they are running on the same platform?'" she said.
Provided by University of Washington
"Do we live in a computer simulation? Researchers say idea can be tested." December 10th, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-12-simulation-idea.html
A decade ago, a British philosopher put forth the notion that the universe we live in might in fact be a computer simulation run by our descendants.