What if life is a simulation

This theory overlaps slightly with the aliens-as-simulation-quitters theory above: if we found an innovative solution to climate crisis, extraterrestrial beings might return to crib the results. Further proof that we live in the Matrix, according to Musk, is how cool video games are these days. Two rectangles and a dot. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic 3D with millions playing simultaneously.

If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by 1, from what it is now.

Seemingly not-crazy theoretical physicist James Gates claims he has identified what appears to be actual computer code embedded in the equations of string theory that describe the fundamental particles of our universe.

So why were they in the equation I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry? Earth exists within what astrobiologists call a Goldilocks Zone , close enough to a star that greenhouse gases can trap heat to keep liquid water, but far enough away that the planet does not become a Venusian hothouse.

Paranormal events are not hauntings or alien encounters, but glitches in the simulation. Elevators are a frequent setting for glitch stories; the jump between floors seems to encourage a slip within dimensions. These beings might imagine themselves real but would have no physical form, existing only within the simulation. Now scientists are searching for ways to put the simulation hypothesis to the test. Bostrom is eager to see more concrete developments of his idea. Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, is more expressive about what such experiments could mean.

Any such bugs in our Matrix world would have to be extremely subtle, or else we would have noticed them by now. Silas Beane, a nuclear physicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, proposes that we may be able to ferret out previously overlooked flaws by uncovering the mathematical structure used to build our simulated reality.

He points out that scientists in his field use a lattice-like set of coordinates to simulate the behavior of subatomic particles. Maybe the aliens or whoever built our simulation, if it exists used that approach, too. Even if the resolution limit is too small for us to observe directly, Beane says, we may be able to detect it experimentally. In the simulated reality, seven million is a very large number, and one is a comparatively very small number.

In the physical world of the processor, the difference in scale between these two numbers is irrelevant. Both subtractions in our example constitute one operation and would take the same time. Within the abstract world of programmed mathematics, the processing speed of operations per second will be observed, felt, experienced, noted as an artifact of underlying physical computing machinery.

This artifact will appear as an additional component of any operation that is unaffected by the operation in the simulated reality. The value of this additional component of the operation would simply be defined as the time taken to perform one operation on variables up to a maximum limit that is the memory container size for the variable. So, in an eight-bit computer, for instance to oversimplify, this would be The value of this additional component will be the same for all numbers up to the maximum limit.

The additional hardware component will thus be irrelevant for any operations within the simulated reality except when it is discovered as the maximum container size. The observer within the simulation has no frame for quantifying the processor speed except when it presents itself as an upper limit.

If we live in a simulation, then our universe should also have such an artifact. We can now begin to articulate some properties of this artifact that would help us in our search for such an artifact in our universe.

Now that we have some defining features of the artifact, of course it becomes clear what the artifact manifests itself as within our universe. The artifact is manifested as the speed of light. Space is to our universe what numbers are to the simulated reality in any computer. Matter moving through space can simply be seen as operations happening on the variable space. If matter is moving at say 1, miles per second, then 1, miles worth of space is being transformed by a function, or operated upon every second.

Such a limit would appear in our universe as a maximum speed. This maximum speed is the speed of light. This helps us arrive at an interesting observation about the nature of space in our universe.

If we are in a simulation, as it appears, then space is an abstract property written in code. It is not real. It is analogous to the numbers seven million and one in our example, just different abstract representations on the same size memory block. Up, down, forward, backward, 10 miles, a million miles, these are just symbols.

We can see now that the speed of light meets all the criteria of a hardware artifact identified in our observation of our own computer builds. It remains the same irrespective of observer simulated speed, it is observed as a maximum limit, it is unexplainable by the physics of the universe, and it is absolute.

The speed of light is a hardware artifact showing we live in a simulated universe. But this is not the only indication that we live in a simulation.

Perhaps the most pertinent indication has been hiding right in front of our eyes. Or rather behind them. But ever since Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford wrote a seminal paper about the simulation argument in , philosophers, physicists, technologists and, yes, comedians have been grappling with the idea of our reality being a simulacrum. Some have tried to identify ways in which we can discern if we are simulated beings.

Others have attempted to calculate the chance of us being virtual entities. Now a new analysis shows that the odds that we are living in base reality—meaning an existence that is not simulated—are pretty much even. In Bostrom imagined a technologically adept civilization that possesses immense computing power and needs a fraction of that power to simulate new realities with conscious beings in them.

Given this scenario, his simulation argument showed that at least one proposition in the following trilemma must be true: First, humans almost always go extinct before reaching the simulation-savvy stage.

Second, even if humans make it to that stage, they are unlikely to be interested in simulating their own ancestral past. And third, the probability that we are living in a simulation is close to one. Before Bostrom, the movie The Matrix had already done its part to popularize the notion of simulated realities.

Kipping began by turning the trilemma into a dilemma. He collapsed propositions one and two into a single statement, because in both cases, the final outcome is that there are no simulations. Thus, the dilemma pits a physical hypothesis there are no simulations against the simulation hypothesis there is a base reality—and there are simulations, too. So each hypothesis gets a prior probability of one half, much as if one were to flip a coin to decide a wager.

If the physical hypothesis was true, then the probability that we were living in a nulliparous universe would be easy to calculate: it would be percent. Kipping then showed that even in the simulation hypothesis, most of the simulated realities would be nulliparous. That is because as simulations spawn more simulations, the computing resources available to each subsequent generation dwindles to the point where the vast majority of realities will be those that do not have the computing power necessary to simulate offspring realities that are capable of hosting conscious beings.