Yeah but your are an NPC that is set up to throw us off the trail!
Nice try.
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Hey, I didn’t program it. I just work there.
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Ah, you got me. I’m just a SkepticBot, here to confuse things.
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Last night I had a dream that I was Zhuang Zi lying down for a rest when suddenly I was Zhuang Zi as a butterfly who was alighting on a twig for a quick nap when suddenly I was a butterfly dreaming about processing payments on the internet.
After I woke I watched films of autonomous rockets, “Unreal,” I thought to myself.
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Honestly, they’re all good, but like @anon61221983 says, just start at the beginning and it’ll work. Keep you busy a while too. The last one made me cry; you can just see it shining through that it’s a goodbye letter to his daughter.
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The argument goes thus. The stelliferous epoch of the universe will last a mere 100 trillion (1012) years, during which only a small fraction of the mass will get converted into energy in the hearts of stars. The black hole evaporation epoch will last 1064 years, that’s a duoquinquagintillion times as long as the stelliferous epoch. During that time, once the cosmic background is cooler than the blackbody temperature of the Virgo black hole (the ultimate fate of the galaxies in our, the Virgo supercluster), the hole will emit more radiation than it absorbs from the background, and will slowly begin to convert 100% of it’s mass into energy. The total energy output of the black hole evaporation epoch is therefore many times greater than all the usable energy released in the stelliferous epoch by stellar fusion, but the rate of energy output is much slower. Stars live fast and die, but are poor converters. Even if they fused all the hydrogen and helium inside themselves, that would still only be about 10% converted, and nothing like all their mass winds up getting fused. In contrast black holes live slow, but they are perfect converters.
Therefore, the black hole evaporation epoch provides much more energy overall, but at a tiny trickle. Any civilization running off that energy will basically have two choices. If they can figure out how to convert bosons back into fermions, they could conceivably collect the Virgo black hole’s energy to create a very small number of artificial stars or just use the energy to power a material civilization directly, but the civilization would need to be small because of the slow rate of it’s energy source.
Working from the fundamental limits imposed by information theory, physicists can calculate the minimum power (rate of energy) usage needed to simulate the data content of a human mind in real time, and the answer is about 1% of a single watt. Compare that to several hundred watts just to run one human body. The useful energy consumed by an average human adult could power about 20,000 simulated people. And that’s before you account for tricks like shared libraries as I described earlier. It makes more sense for the black hole evaporation epoch civilization to run simulations of the stelliferous epoch than to try and eek out a living as physical biological beings.
Over the course of the black hole evaporation epoch, they can simulate many many many times more consciousnesses than lived during the comparatively brief stelliferous epoch. Even if they only commit a relative fraction of the energy to simulations - heck, even if stelliferous epoch civilizations commit just a fraction of the energy produced by stars - the relative efficiency of a simulation versus physical existence means simulacra will ultimate vastly outnumber physically embodied people. In roulette you have a 1 in 38 chance of getting any given number on a spin. If simulations can and do get built, your odds at the roulette table are absolutely wonderful compared to the odds that you’re in the base reality.
The real question I think you’re asking is: Is it a difference that makes no difference? If we can’t find any evidence we’re in a simulation, then no. However, given the statistical argument above, not having any evidence yet does not mean we should not look. And even if we ultimately find none, the search may lead us to other unexpected discoveries. A lack of evidence is not a reason for not exploring ideas simply because they seem bizarre and conflict with our common sense assumptions. As I pointed out earlier, the notion that the universe does not require a Creator once seemed as bizarre as the simulation argument does now. Even the idea of a non-geocentric universe was once believed outlandish. It was science fiction.
Most hypotheses do not pan out. Science nonetheless advances by not presuming that we know which will and which won’t, or we wouldn’t need to ask because we’d already know. It’s precisely because we don’t know that we explore even the hypotheses that seem bizarre at the time.
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…have you been mainlining Adventure Time?
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Awesome post, friend. Im going to be thinking about this for a while.
Never considered relative rates of energy production before, except in one case that considered the far, far future( similar to what you describe ) in which efficiencies are implemented in order to deal with extremes of entropy in a late stage universe. In this case these innovations were implemented to insure the continued survival of the ‘real’ inhabitants of the universe - not to produce copies or simulations of the past, hypothetical or otherwise.
Would it suffice an advanced, late stage universe, civilization to produce simulations of
low entropy ones? Or put another way: when the lights start to go out would we be content to use that remaining energy to project slow running simulations of our past?
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The beauty of it is that the simulations could experience the passage of time at whatever rate they are programmed to. They need never know they’re thoughts run exceedingly slow. The black hole evaporation simulators could, if they were so inclined, even upload themselves and forget the cold dark place they came from. Though I sincerely hope they would make a better refuge than this world!
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Right, although I was considering this from an existentialist perspective- but I think your response addresses this. Also, now that I think about it the hypothetical residents of a dying universe in the aforementioned article did just that, that is, moved themselves into a slower running experiential existence.
Heavy stuff.
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I like it. I’m a computational physicist and while I like my work, most of it is fairly mundane. This kind of thing keeps the mind limber, even if nothing practical ever comes from it.
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Really, 77 comments in… and not a single Bohemian Rhapsody pun?
“I am disappoint.”
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cool, cool
I have recently began to venture outside of engineering to consider things like non-Von Neumann computation, neurology, what it means to ‘compute’ etc.
So to further explore this consider hyperbolic space in which the boundary is unattainable due to the ( damn, what is it… the metric increases from the center? ) I see this as being analogous to what we are talking about here. That is, as the available energy of The System decreases can the rate of consumption, with respect to existence, decrease can ‘existence’ keep up with the decline, or put another way, can existence be perpetual? That is, whatever ‘existence’ means :).
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There is a hypothetical thing in information theory called reversible computation. However, my gut feeling is that it can only be asymptotically approached. The Second Law has proven itself to be a relentless taskmaster so far.
But there is some question as to what happens in Deep Time long after the black hold evaporation epoch. Really the Big Rip is the major hurdle. If current predictions turn out to be correct, every boson that Virgo black hole spits out is going to be red-shifted by the accelerating expansion of the universe until it’s wavelength is longer than the observable universe, at which point every surviving elementary particle will be be separated by its own cosmological event horizon and effectively trapped in its own lonely universe. Since you need more than one particle to perform a computation or record a pattern of any kind, this is the ultimate information eraser.
But, if there were some way around it, some way to defeat the sundering of space itself, there might be a light at the end of the tunnel. Whatever time actually is, it has no meaning without relative motion. Time might actually stop after the Big Rip, and there are any number of weird things that condition might result in, from vacuum instability to inflatons to a new Big Bang. However, while I’m fascinated by quantum cosmology, it’s quite decidedly outside of my wheelhouse.
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I’ll also note, @anon36081309, that the books go pretty fast. They are hard to put down and you’ll get through them quicker than you imagine and want to go back and read them again!
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Now that song is stuck in my head!
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Me too. I do not consider this a bad state of affairs.
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Ya gotta admit, there are worse songs to have stuck there, though…
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Ahem…
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Now, if my recollection serves me correctly ‘reversible computation’ defines a lower-bound on the energy to switch a Boolean bit?
And this is the growth toward the inevitable constant that will define the horizon beyond which information processing will no longer be possible?
I see, so a civilization wishing to preserve itself( at least experientially ) will need a way to postpone this limit even sooner and faster?
Friend, its not even in my world!
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