Assuming our simulation is not designed to auto-scale (and our Admins don’t know how to download more RAM), what kind of side effects could we see in the world if the underlying system hosting our simulation began running out of resources?
Assuming our simulation is not designed to auto-scale (and our Admins don’t know how to download more RAM), what kind of side effects could we see in the world if the underlying system hosting our simulation began running out of resources?
Given the vastness of space and time, the. Umber of people who die and have yet to learn anything (babies), I’d imagine we’re a system with 32gb of RAM, only consuming a few hundred megabytes.
Besides, I’d imagine that any intelligence capable of constructing and running such a complex simulation would have the ability to scale their system as needed. Using our existing technology, they probably use hot swappable components so that if there is a hardware failure or the need to “download more ram” 🤣 then they can just remove and insert new components on the fly and we’d be none the wiser.
Of course, we being part of the simulation, I’d also wager that unless the creators of said simulation are truly evil and sadistic, we’ll never know because it’s just not part of the programming. And if not we’re, we’d probably already have figured it out by now (beyond guessing and thought experiments). But rest assured, it is fun to think about, in a creepy and existential way.
If we are a simulation, what is the end goal of our creators? Could we be the roadmap for creating anew world in their real life? Maybe they are studying their own history and trying to figure out how their race came into being and evolved over time. Or maybe we are part of a crude video game keeping little Suzie occupied until dinner time. Better yet, maybe Susan is learning about simulations at university and we are part of her post-doctoral thesis.
Why even bother with hot swapping? Just shut down the simulation and turn it back on when you’re done upgrading. No one in the simulation would be able to tell that anything happened.
Continuing with the thought experiment, if you shut it down completely, you’d lose valuable information that was stored in the other ram modules. It’s also reasonable to suggest that resetting the state of such a complex simulation would be more complex (maybe even impossible) and detrimental to the simulation.
Of course another thought just occurred to me: maybe we’re not a computer simulation, but an organic simulation (as in a Petri dish in a lab). Then there would be no reason for ram or hot swappable modules, or any machine parts whatsoever.
It would mean that space is as finite as the Petri dish, but since we’re so small we’d never know it because to us it would be so vast and impossible to reach the edges.
The number of people is 1. It’s me. You guys are all NPCs