this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
98 points (85.0% liked)

Asklemmy

43908 readers
1020 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] dohpaz42@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] primalmotion@lemmy.antisocial.ly 2 points 9 months ago

The number of people is 1. It's me. You guys are all NPCs

load more comments (2 replies)