I'd love to read alternate endings to it. I've been thinking about writing a story with a very similar plot for a couple of years, but it had a big plot hole: computation overhead between the universes, and I hadn't thought about quantum computers as a way to solve it. The other main difference with the story that I had in mind is that the characters would write a story about it, which would be "my" story, and they'd…
Only tangentially related, but the lovely (quite) short story "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility" is fantastic and kind of hits on simulating worlds, in a sense: https://qntm.org/responsibility
Only tangentially related, but the lovely (quite) short story "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility" is fantastic and kind of hits on simulating worlds, in a sense: https://qntm.org/responsibility
Thanks! For anyone who liked that here's another [0] short story in the same vein.
While I have some doubts some of your statements your comment still resonates. Unfortunately, we live in an “Excel world”. The predominant thinking is that our highly complex world can be modeled into an excel sheet. And based on the outputs we should make decisions. This approach mostly ignores the second order effects you describe.
Climate change predicts a warmer wetter world The author just didn’t know this
The issue is, the locations where most humans live today, grew historically from the best spots our ancestors could find in the whole planet, taking many factors in consideration: proximity to water bodies, good climate, good agricultural lands, adequate rainfall, et cetera. These are not random locations, they grew around the best spots available. If climate changes, they tend to regress toward the mean, diminishing carrying capacity. Other places may even improve, from the POV of human habitability, but statistically those will not be the same we have a lot of people living today, but places like siberia, that historically were population voids, prompting the need for mass migration and mass resettlement in a world that is already full of borders, and all the associated problems this entails.
>written entirely in GLSL fragment shaders What's the language for that? (The music is pretty cliche. Maybe it was written by AI)
The music is "Adagio in D Minor", and probably cliche more because it's been used so much rather than because it was cliche when written. It was originally composed by John Murphy for the 2007 film Sunshine . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine:_Music_from_the_Motio...
Sunshine is one really fine piece of film. Beautiful.
I think modern people have so much faith in this reality, they'd have little chance accepting that it is other than it seems. Any evidence would have to be stark .
Actually, physics supports the probability that we live in a simulation. Our universe has the highest limitation of speed and the smallest units of length and energy.
Neuroscience, psychology, public opinion polls, and internet forums demonstrate that we do.
The problem is, the nature of this style of simulation, as opposed to the Bostrom theory ("the" simulation theory (singular, there can be only one)), makes it (nearly) impossible to realize.
This is both tragic and hilarious, especially since we have extensive knowledge of this flaw.
When thinking about this one, I always wonder if it even matters.. playing both "Yes" and "No" scenarios doesn't really offer any insight for me. Maybe it's a degree of nihilism but it makes me not get overwhelmed.
A simulation has a nonzero chance of having exploits, and it's debatable whether it is in our best interest to discover them.