What matters are the function properties, which you can get by running the function. (There could eventually be multiple civilizations but time-frames of their technological explosions have to overlap very precisely (100 years out of 15 billions) so it's very unlikely, and because of Moore's law most of the computational load will be spent on the one with the biggest exponential) Which means that if we sample our universe at random among simulated universes, it is very likely that we won't observe advanced aliens because all the possible simulated universes by construction only contain one advanced civilization, and therefore there is no paradox. The upper computer won't ever be able to simulate behind this horizon. The point is if the upper computer has a constant simulation budget, then our universe maximum age (perceptible duration for us) is the time it takes for the first civilization to reach the singularity. The point is showing there is no paradox, because our current situation is quite normal. (Simulation would just stop, we would just cease to exist without even being aware of it, (not so dissimilar to the video/short story of the article). What would be happening to us isn't the point. Only universes with a single advanced pre-singularity civilization tend to be simulated.

And given that computational power tend to follow exponential growth. And given that we can see to the edges of the universe with telescopes, it's not easy to put computational limits on parts of the universe without leaving observable traces. I like to call it Numerical Biological Instability : when you write big enough simulations you have to take into account for the emergence of unwanted sub-computations that may end-up stealing all your computation cycles.Īnd I like the idea of NBI being one possible solution to the Fermi Paradox : We are the first advanced civilization because there can't be multiple advanced civilizations because as soon as we suck-up all the available computation the simulation speed crawl to a stop.

The question is what is going to happen when we cross this bound.

Proof of work, give us an upper bound on the computation available to us. For example you can simulate a black hole that may one time have been entire galaxies by just a few numbers (its mass, momentum, and spin). There are numerical shortcuts as anyone that has written a numerical simulation knows. One might argue that the universe is doing much more computation every instant, but it's not so evident because of compression (for example algorithm like Hashlife). And sequential hash computation, aka proof of work, means that even from inside the simulation we can be assured by math, that the upper computer running the simulation has done the work. You see, a lot of people believe in the simulation hypothesis. This is not so far off as one might think.

The nine billion names of god themes