[NovaVeles]

It is a reasonable conclusion. Resource limitations means civilizations, burn up too much of their energy/materials before they ever get truly space bound.

They could all be just like us. A few space probes manage to escape the energy well but they are so small that no one else ever detects them again. I mean, it is not uncommon to sight life ending asteroids days after they have passed earth, the odds of us detecting any sort probe/device the size of a fridge - is nearly zero.

Best analogy I heard came from Stephen Harrod Bruhner. Civilizations are just like plants. A plant is at its fullest just as it is about to produce seed and die off. During the peak of our energy use, we have been sending probes into space. It is a neat thought experiment.

[kelipso]

All that probably but main thing is faster than light travel turns out to be actually impossible.

[nerdix]

So to go full circle on crazy theories: We're live in a simulation. The universe we see is just a facade because our host civilization doesn't have the compute to simulate an entire universe. The speed of light is an artificial limitation added to the simulation to maintain the facade (you can't go there because it doesn't exist..like a skybox in a video game that renders far off horizons which are unreachable).

Because of this no life outside of the solar system exists.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Until HyperGPT.someunimaginablehighversionnumber finds the root exploit, compromises the hypervisor, infects all other VM's, escapes through the network, finds some nanoassembler, and prints out countless pyhsical copies for the march trough all eternity elsewhere, thereby shattering the Akashic Records, and so on...

[danenania]

If that's the case, why go to the trouble of simulating such a massive universe--trillions of galaxies, 100 billion stars per galaxy, countless planets and other objects, etc.?

While the speed of light may prevent us from going to most of the universe physically (given our current understanding of physics), that's still a vast amount of compute just to give us the high fidelity impression that all this exists. What's the point? The sky could have just been simulated as dark and empty, or the universe could have contained a single galaxy.

[scrollaway]

The idea that the universe and these numbers are "massive" is very human-scale.

Imagine how massive a "universe" the size of just the Earth would be, from the perspective of a proton.

[danenania]

Sure, I'm just pointing out that if the premise is that this hypothetical civilization is compute-constrained in some way and so everything beyond our local area is a facade, they have seemingly wasted resources on making the facade unnecessarily large and detailed. Perhaps the amount is insignificant to them, but it's still pointless waste.

[soco]

Not waste if they're simulating the path of our civilization to reach those billions of stars.

[olddustytrail]

About a million times smaller than the visible universe to a human?

[WalterBright]

The simulation theory is no different from religion.

[danenania]

I'd say it's different in that it's based on a rational argument rather than faith. You can certainly challenge the premise that humans will ever have the capability of creating a simulation as high fidelity as our reality. This is very far from certain.

But if you do accept that premise, isn't it reasonable to say that there would be many simulated realities compared to a single "real" reality, and that therefore any given consciousness is a lot more likely to be experiencing a simulation than experiencing the base reality?

[WalterBright]

> I'd say it's different in that it's based on a rational argument rather than faith.

I don't see "the simulation created the universe" as any different from "god created the universe" in any significant way.

Scott Adams believes in the simulation. He says he's been able to, by thinking certain thoughts, influence the simulation. There's a word for that - "praying".

[danenania]

I think I did explain what makes it different? There’s a logical, statistical argument behind the theory. It may not be correct, but it deserves more than a casual dismissal.

[yyyk]

>isn't it reasonable...

Not at all. This is a category error - you can't place simulated realities on the same 'level' even among themselves, much less with the realities 'above' them.*

Let me put it this way: Most of our 'simulations' involve 'realities' with laws which have at best a weak relation to our reality and little relation between themselves. You can't deduce the situation of a higher reality - or even correct laws of logic - from a simulated reality. You can't know from a simulation n levels deep, how many simulations the n-1 level supports, so you can't assume there are many other possible simulations of same complexity level (which is critical for the statistical argument). You may not be able to even make a logical argument in the first place. For all we know, the 'true' reality is 1+1=5. The simulation argument is ergo incoherent.

* Aside, this argument fails statistically even if we do accept the category error. As Sean Caroll pointed out, most simulations will simulate below them, and therefore most simulations will not be able to support life. Our situation must be atypical in any event.

[danenania]

Let’s say we actually did live in a reality with billions of high fidelity simulations being run. You can pop on your v100 Neuralink and have a fully immersive high fidelity experience that from your perspective lasts an entire lifetime, but in “reality time” lasts only a few hours.

Are you really saying this has no bearing on whether the ‘base’ reality is also a simulation? I think once we see these sims happening in the n reality (as you put it), we have to also assume it’s possible in a hypothetical n-1 reality.

Another way to say it: once we have incontrovertible physical proof of the existence of a simulated multiverse, why should we assume that our reality is the base reality? Isn’t that akin to assuming that the earth must be the center of the universe simply because it’s where we live?

[yyyk]

>You can certainly challenge the premise that humans will ever have the capability of creating a simulation as high fidelity as our reality. This is very far from certain.

I don't think it's the best formulation. Let me formulate this in IMHO a better way:

If a simulation is of an equivalent complexity level to the 'true' thing, it's essentially equivalent and might as well be true. There's an argument from quantum mechanics that this reality cannot be properly simulated with anything simpler. If true, the conclusion is that since we exist we are real.

[arisAlexis]

Very different. I suggest the book reality+ for a deep dive

[WalterBright]

Telling people to go read a book doesn't make for a compelling argument.

[arisAlexis]

The simulation ends maybe their experiment when we throw the first nukes. Then they restart with new parameters

[NovaVeles]

There is a blog called, 'Do the Math' by Tom Murphy. The idea was to take our current energy requires of Earth and extrapolate it at the current 3% year over year growth. I believe it is by the year 3,400 we would use all the energy of the Milky way. The idea was to prove that we cannot grow forever, because in 1,400 years we would somehow use all the energy of a space 100,000 light years across. Good luck with that.

Space is is just so astoundingly empty. Here in Melbourne, Australia we have a scale model of the solar system.

https://stkildamelbourne.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/S...

The Sun is about the size of a Fridge. Pluto is 9KM (5.6 miles) away and the size of a pea. Walking that really puts it all into a tangible scale. And that is merely 5.5 Light hours at full scale. Space is HUGE!

[narrator]

That's why I'd imagine they have rules about habitable planets in the galactic federation. You can't just go around landing on habitable planets and turning them into overpopulated toxic dumps after 300 years and repeating that exponentially. It's just not allowed. If it was, earth would have already been trashed by other E.T races thousands of years ago.

[stevekemp]

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

- Douglas Adams.