Theoretical Thursday

What If We Live in a Computer Simulation?

You've probably heard of the Sims -- a video-game in which the player controls digital people's lives and decides what activities they perform. Now picture this: we are the Sims in our own universe, simulated by much more powerful beings.

The idea might seem crazy, but hear me out. Suppose that a billion years from now, our race and technology still exist and have become unfathomably advanced. Our humble beginnings as humans would be long obscured by time, so we'd want to simulate our history. By Moore's law, computing power doubles every year. We can currently simulate about 1/4 of an atom and all of its properties. In a billion years or less, it's easy to see that we'd eventually have the computational power to replicate the whole universe.

However, a problem arises: Seth Lloyd, a quantum-mechanical engineer at MIT, estimated the total number of events that have ever happened. He found that to simulate this number of events would require more energy than we have in our entire universe! This set our theory aside for a while, but not for long. Just as iTunes allows you to make songs smaller by changing them to a lower-quality  format, future programmers of the simulation we're living in could have "dumbed it down" to make it possible. When we decide to observe distant stars, the simulation would add them in, taking them away again when we stop. We shouldn't be able to tell that what we're living in is fake. Now you may ask, how would we ever find out anyways?

Just like Windows, or Mac, or your Internet browser, this simulation would need updates -- and updates mean glitches. Constants like the speed of light -- things we can detect -- may suddenly change. Another possible observation would be the distribution of super high-energy cosmic waves throughout the universe. A simulated world would be built on a grid-like system much like pixels on a TV. Because of this grid, high energy waves would be uniformly distributed, unlike in a perfectly-smooth real universe that would have an uneven distribution.

"I Hope They Didn't Notice..."

The simulation theory would explain a lot of things going on, such as the Fermi paradox. In our infinite universe, we should have made contact with aliens, or at least discovered some, but we still have not. Perhaps it's because we're programmed in as the only life forms. Also, those that programmed our simulation would probably be living in a simulation of their own. We'll eventually go on to create a simulation of our past in our distant future, and this pattern would continue to the simulation that we create.

"Hello.....? Aliens? You There?"

Many scientists actually think that it's more likely we're living in a simulated universe than a real one because of these explanations. Even if we are, there's really nothing to worry about because it's programmed to seem completely real. Our programmers wouldn't interfere with us: they'd let it play out because they're interested in their own history, not playing games with fake people. Whether we're in a simulation or not wouldn't have any affect on us or our lives. It's still an interesting idea to ponder. What do you think?