Why the Universe Simulation Budget Has Exploded (WtUSBHE) outline ------- }}} {WRITE THIS 2ND TO LAST] Note on language - [word in Standard not in English] {word in English not in Standard} - Paris vs London Hofstadter "On Self-Referential Sentences" January, 1981 - (PowerPoint deck) :slide: :+-----------------------------+ :| | :| Why the Universe | :| Simulation Budget | :| Has Exploded | :| | :| summary of the report: | :| | :| "Future Budget Requirements | :| for the Finite Universe | :| Simulation Project -- | :| Goals, Projections | :| and Resources" | :| | :+-----------------------------+ narration: Hello. This briefing is a summry of the report: "Future Budget Requirments for the Finite Universe Simulation Projects -- Goals, Projections and Resources." :slide: :+------------------+ :| | :| contents | :| | :+------------------+ narration: }}} [WRITE THIS LAST] :slide: :+------------------------------------------------------------+ :| | :| "Have you heard about the new Cray super computer? | :| It’s so fast, it executes an infinite loop in 6 seconds." | :| | :| -- human joke in 1983 :| | :+------------------------------------------------------------+ narration: I was advised to begin with a joke, so here is a joke from the humans in the simulated universe from their year 1983: "Have you heard about the new Cray super computer? It’s so fast, it executes an infinite loop in 6 seconds." I notice no one is laughing. I'll have to explain the joke later on. :slide: :+--------------------------------+ :| | :| original goals of project: | :| can life and consciousness | :| evolve in a finite universe? | :| | :+--------------------------------+ narration: We embarked on this project seven years ago to answer a philosphical question that has been discussed for ages: could life and consciousness evolve in a finite universe? THat is, if we simulated a universe with a finite number of possible states, could life and then consciousness evolve under natural selction, just as they did in our infinite universe? :slide: :+--------------------+ :| | :| background: | :| our infinite minds | :| | :+--------------------+ narration: Those of you that have studied cosmology/neurology/physics/computers will know that we believe our universe is an infinite self-modifying network (mathematical graph) which had a beginning but will last forever. There are an infinite number of nodes connected by an infinite number of edges, and some nodes have an ionfinite number of connections. The first state we call the State With No Precedent (Garden of Eden State). The Old Religion called this state the Creator. Philosphers have long supposed that our life forms and our sentince, or consciousness, could only have evolved in an infinite universe like ours. Recently we realized we had the resources to put this idea to the test. The Finite Life Project (name later changed to the Finite Mind Project) sought to settle this question. :slide: :+------------------+ :| | :| success! | :| | :+------------------+ narration: Of course, we succeeded with our primary and secondary goals. Life evolved in thousands of places, including places we didn't expect with very high energy looping conditions (accretion disks), but mostly in places where we did expect it: medium energy accumulations of connection density (planets and moons). Then sentience evolved in one of these places. On one of the most unusual planets, having am adaptive, self-modifying layer of tightly connected nodes (liquid water) and other unique features, several of the lifeforms evolved consciousness (crows, dogs, dolphins, and humans). Though we must note that not every creature of these types was self-aware. (See the Appendices in the full report for details.) Many people were astonished that such beings could exist in a finite universe. :slide: :+------------------------+ :| | :| new goal of project: | :| discover what they can | :| do without infinity | :| | :+------------------------+ narration: Something quite amazing happened when we studied their mathematics, philosphy and religion. Somehow, despite the finite universe they live in, and finite minds thay have involved in it, they are able to conceive of and work with the concept of infinity. They're able to conceive of infinity theologicslly, and use it in their physics calculations. They can manipulate and compare levels of infinites. This was a total surprise to us. This is when we decided to update our mission, and our name. Finite Mind Project was started to gain a deeper understanding of how they did this. :slide: :+------------------------------------+ :| finite thoughts about the infinite | :+------------------------------------+ narration: Here are a few examples of their thoughts on infinity during their history. They created the mythic symbol for the snake or worm called Ouroboros, which had its tail in its mouth symbolizing infinity or eternity. It first appeared in Egypt in the tomb of King Tut. Around 935 BC in their religious text callled the Bible, (Ecclesiastes 3:11 American Standard Version) ... He hath set eternity in their heart, yet so that man cannot find out the work that God hath done from the beginning even to the end. Very early they have embraced the idea that a finite mind can partially understnd the infinite, enough to know they don't know everything. In the fourth century B.C. the philosopher Zeno posed a paradox about motion being impossible, because it either requires a finite number of nonzero jumps or an infinite number of jumps. They were starting to think they needed infinity for their math to work. In 1575 Francesco Maurolico proposed the Inductive Hypothesis, argiung that you can reach all of the counting numbers, all infinity of them, by counting. The humans have never proven it, but they mostly believe it. In 1655 John Wallis created the infinity symbol, a sideways digit eight. They were using it in calculations. Then "The Calculus" was develoled independently by Isaac Newton (1687) and Gottfried Leibniz (1684), introducing the ideas of limits (approaching infinity) and infinitesimals (acting something like one divided by infinity). It is worth noting that The Calculus solved Zeno's Paradox, and provided methods for dealing with infinities, but allways employing a finite number symbols and steps accomplished in finite time, Poet William Blake, in "Europe: A Prophecy" (1794), descibed human comprehension of the infinite: Thought chang’d the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth; To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hid In forests of night; then all the eternal forests were divided Into earths rolling in circles of space, that line an ocean rush’d And overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh. Then was the serpent temple form’d, image of infinite Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel; Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown’d. Here he is describing some of the mental tricks the humans use to think about the infinite with their finite minds: the Serpent Ouroboros, exponential growth, spinning planets, and circular orbits of heavenly bodies, and he alludes to philosophical and religious consequences. Mathematican Georg Cantor (1874) categorized levels of infinities. He proved that the nmber of points in an infinite continuum was greater than the infinite number of counting numbers. But contemplating infinites ultimately drove him mad. Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) made great strides in their understanding of infinite sums. He was able to derive that: 1 + 2 + 3 ... = -12 which was very alarming to us, because this was an internal error code in the simulation of their universe which the humans were never meant to see. This was one of many dangers we faced of the humans discovering the truth. More on that later. :slide: :+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ :| | :| press releases: | :| life evolves in finite universe simulation | :| sentient beings evolve in finite universe simulation | :| sentient beings in finite universe simulation conceive of infinity | :| sentient beings in finite universe simulation explore beyond expectations | :| | :+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ narration: This list is of the press releases we have issued throughout the project. There have also been some media events. Text and transcripts are in the appendix. :slide: :+------------------------+ :| | :| ethical considerations | :| | :+------------------------+ narration: Some of the public responses to our press releases asked about the ethics of our experiments. First, some have said we never should have done this. We don't see how it's different from other artificial life and artificial intelligence projects that have come before. Also, it's done, and can't be undone. We have taken some criticism to heart though. As I mentioned we found sentience evolving in accretion disks around black holes and other massive quai-stellar objects. We realized that if these cratures became aware of their situation tey would be facing certain doom with no hope for escape and no opportunity to leave any sort of legacy for the future. So we tweaked the rules of their universe to stop the sentience from evolving. We thought this was the obvious ethical choice. Bear in mind these are just data patterns in a computer file that we can evolve forward in time. Legally they have no rights. But they behave as if they have feelings of pain and pleasure, to their bodies and their minds. We have empathy for them. Once we have created them we have three options: we can pause the simulation for a period of time, we can stop the simuation and delete the files, or we can keep the simulation running. We believe these beings have a right to live. We also believe that it will a moral catastrophe if they find out that they are living in a simulation. Our research predicts that this disclosure would cause great emotional pain to the humans indivisually and great disruption to their society, and possibly the collapse of their civilization. The help us with ethical and other issues, over the course of the project we created mental "clones" of some of the humans and placed them in stand-alone simulations, so we could converse with them direcly without disturbing the main simulation. Our fist subject was celebrity Colin Quinn, at the age of 44 in 2003. He was adamant that if the humans find out the truth it will demotivate them to behave ethically. He suggested the human movie "The Purge" demonstrates the lawlessness that might happen. For our next "sim" we selected Georgio Tsoukalos, an expert on humans who believe in alien visitors to their planet. He was very disappointed to find out there are no aliens -- in fact there are no other civilizations in the universe. We had to tweak paramers a bit to get the humans to be viable, and we stopped tweaking when we had them. But his expertise on how humans react to game-changing revelations was very valuable. He explained US government experiments on how to break the news about extraterrestrials (which they believed in) to the public, which had poor results. Even with the help of Disney animators they couldn't prevent contagious panic and mental health effects. He affirmed that we must not let them discover the truth. These "sims" helped us clarify the ethical issues we faced. But they also resulted in new ethical quandries as well. It turned out we had a happiness problem wih our sims. We've tried to give them a good life. Each sim was housed in a replica of a manison on Ocean Blvd. in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which was among the most desired homes on the planet according to our research. For company they had communications with us, via email, and also simple AIs (artifical intelligences) that the humans might call Non-Player Characters (NPCs). The could serve as servants and guides, but really didn't have personalities. They definitely missed human relationships. One benefit of their lives was that we gave them access to everything we knew about human history, up to the present time. They were disappinted that we didn't know the future, but we have to wait for the simulation to evolve. We also gave them limited simulated physical bodies which they were not full please with. Thed no disease or pain from any maladies. Touching a stove still, hurt for example, but they couldn't break a bone). But they said the bodies didn't feel real. Also they missed their former lives, which they had implanted memories of even if they hadn't actually been there. We simulated Quin in 1998 just after his Broadway run. He was sad he didn't get to later experience his own TV show, "Tough Crowd" (2002-2004) and also a USO tour which he said was a liftime dream. We simulated Tsoukalos in 2012 after he became popular in an internet meme, "I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens." He was sad he didn't get to later experience his guest apearance on the TV show Resident Alien" (2021), which starred one of his favorite actors. They both complained about lack of real human company, so we let them interact with each other. They spent a lot of time together griping about their simulated lives, and watching video of their alterate selves in the main simulation. But they also did some interesting research on the JFK presiodential assisnation and the investigations into UFOs, using the total knowledge of the universe provided by the simulation archives. A sad development was when we copied out our third sim. Our internal review pointed out the first two had the same gender, ethnicity and national origin, so we wanted another view. We selected a woman athlete, Brazilian skateboarder Rayssa Leal, who wonm a silver Olymoic medal and had 6.5 million followers on Instagram. From time we switched her on, the Leal sim hated her simulated body. She said it did not feel right or perform correctly. She asked that we switch her off. Our options were: pause her program and keep her stored state, pause her program and delete her stored state, or keep her running. We chose the first option. I can't discuss details of pending legislation, but we are opposing attempts of an outside to group to depose her for a trial, which would require unpausing her. We think this is the least ethical choice. We'll issue a statement when the case is resolved. :slide: :+----------------------------+ :| | :| terminology | :| * unfamiliar terms | :| * approximately equivalent | :| terms in mathematics | :| * approximately equivalent | :| terms in common usage | :| | :+----------------------------+ narration: }}} [WRITE THIS 3RD TO LAST] - unfamiliar terms o matter o particle o image - appproximately equivalent terms in mathematics o space o postion o distance o base 36 (lfls = 1000000) - appproximately equivalent terms in common usage o energy o time o number o continuum o wave o infinity o algorithm :slide: :+-----------------------+ :| | :| previous risk | :| points | :| | :| * religion/philosophy | :| * arts | :| * math | :| * physics | :| | :+-----------------------+ narration: So, we've established that it is vital to the project that we keep the humans from relaizing they are living inside a simulation. I want to fill you in on some of the previous risk points we've reached and how we've handled them. :slide: :+---------------------+ :| | :| existential threats | :| | :+---------------------+ narration: We have actually been "tweaking" the parameters in the simulation since the beginning. The values of physical contants, the early distribution of masses, and the gravity model have been hand-crafted and adjusted to create a semi-stable, complex universe. We manually creted a lot of black holes, huge and tiny, to get galaxies to form correctly. Early on we simply removed most of the anti-matter to avoid a premature calamity. :slide: :+---------------------+ :| | :| vacuum collapse | :| | :+---------------------+ narration: It turns out with the physical rules we've set up there is a continuing risk of vacuum collapse. We've had to intervene thousands of times when our default vacuum, slightly unstable, has tunneled into a more stable state and destroyed the ability for atoms to exist. This begins in a single location and spreads at the speed of light. We've managed to snuff them out before they have done musch damage, but we can't predict or prevent them. Most occured when we were running the simulation at high speed, and by the time we stoppedthem they left large voids, which the humans are just now beginning to discover, as I'll talk about later. Since the evolution of life we've slowed the simulation down to watch more closely, and also improved our outomatic monitoring. Consequently more recent vacuum collapse events have had smaller impacts. The last was about 130 million BC., near the galaxy M-109. It is a mere 60 million light years from Earth, which made us a little jumpy. :slide: :+---------------------+ :| | :| unstable star | :| | :+---------------------+ narration: The precursor molecules for life evolved about 9 billion BC on a planet orbiting Barnard's Star. A simplified form of RNA, these molucules self-catalyzed their own assembly. The star, a small, dim red dwarf, originally formed when two planets collided and the combined mass crossed the minimum mass threshold for lighting a sun. But the resulting star was highly unstable and kept ejecting radiation flares at erratic intervals, which eventually destroyed the molecules. :slide: :+---------------------+ :| | :| ozone loss | :| | :+---------------------+ narration: We intervened and transplanted some molucules to Mars, a planet orbiting Sol, in the same system as Earth. At the time Mars had a liquid core acting as a dynamo, and so it had a magnetic field to create an ozone layer which blocked harmful ultraviolet radation. Natural proceses led to the dynamo shutting down about 4 billion BC, and Mars the lost its ozone and its oceans, and the life became extinct. Oce again we transplanted, this time to Earth. :slide: :+---------------------+ :| | :| oxygen poisoning | :| | :+---------------------+ narration: Our next crisis was the Great Oxidation Event in Paleoproterozoic Era about 2.3 billion years BC, which nearly killed all life on Earth, when the poisonous chemical oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere. By this time the life forms were primitive cells with no nucleus, called Archaea. In the Lomagundi Event, new kinds of cells called Eukaryotes formed from symbiogenesis between the Archaea and aerobic (oxygen-consuming) Protobacteria which entered the cells and became bodies called Mitochondria. They also developed sexual reproduction, which acted as a kind of error-correction for the genes which contained the growth instructions, and was a big help in dealing with the oxygen damage they faced. We had high hopes for these new Eukaryotes but they became extinct. So we re-introduced them in benign environments, mostly in volcanic vents in what is today called Loki's Castle, and guarded them as they took over the planet. :slide: :+---------------------+ :| | :| meteor strikes | :| | :+---------------------+ narration: Another existential threat has been meteor strikes. Early on we actually moved the Milky Way Galaxy into one of the vacuum collapse voids to reduce the rusk of rogue star collisions with Sol, but we still had to deal with all the asteroids and other debris in the Solar System. These had a nasty habit of wiping out all life or at least most of it. The largest ones wed were the ones the humans named Vredefort Dome Crater in South Africa about 2 billion BC, at 193 kilometers wide, and the Sudbury crater in Ontario, about 1.88 BC, at 266 kilometers wide, Also there was an impact which they haven't identified yet, in the Pacific Ocean about midway between French Polynesia and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, about 2.1 billion BC, at 333 kilometers wide. All of these wiped out life on Earth, mostly our precious Eukaryotes cells, but we just kept transplanting from backups. Meanwhile we did research on deflecting meteors, and finally just settled on removing them entirely and replacing them with vacuum. This turned out to be quite benign, except for recently when one huge threat, a planet-killer from the Oort Could, which the humans were tracking as a possible new ninth planet. You see, it left behind its gravitational history in the orbits of other planets. But anyway, after Chicxulub crater in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, about 66 million BC, at 244 kilometers wide (which made quite a mess of ur plans) we decided to vaporize all impact objects that were 100 kilometers wide or greater. :slide: :+---------------------+ :| | :| technical problems | :| | :+---------------------+ narration: Our own Information Technology infrastructure is a complex system and we had some growing pains in keeping it operating smoothly. The largest of these occured after we were restoring from a backup around 525 million BC using incrmental updates, when a glitch caused about 1.2 billion years of Earth's previous geological record to be lost. The humans have discovered this and called it the Great Unconformity. It was impossible to miss because it's all through the Grand Canyon, and one of the first geologists to visit saw it. But we had no other way to prerve a bunch of important biological evolution activity, so we tolerated it. Luckily the humans have decided the layers were scraped away by glaciers. Note that we do test our backups, and that all protocols were followed. We have fully analyzed the causes of these problems and believe they are fully resolved. :slide: :+---------------------+ :| | :| DNA malware | :| | :+---------------------+ narration: When human ancestors the primates evolved into later Old World anthropoids, about 29 million BC, they began to be infected by DNA malware called retrotransposons. You see DNA programs the building of structures called proteins that do an amazing number of different things. One thing that can be built out of proteins is a nanomachine called a reverse transcriptase, which can edit DNA. The retrotransposons use this to force copies of themsleves into DNA. There are several kinds but they all popped up around 29 million BC, and we think the malware came from a meteor that struck the Libyan desert at that time. This could explain why they appeard so suddenly. Unfortunately we don't have the resources to resolve this at the time. Biotech is hard for us. We recognize the irony that this finite model which we created has evolved structures so complex that we don't understand them. In any case, the retrotransposons decimated many of the anthropoids. Some ended up with about half of their DNA replaced by retrotransposons. We thought about going back to a saved state but we didn't have a clear plan of what to do next. We weren't sure it was caused by the meteor, so there was a risk if we tried removing it after we restored the universe from a saved state. Our budget was already stretched. So we just let the simulation run for a while and observed it, and we found that a few of the primates developed natural immunity. The simplest solution was to duplicate the survivors and scatter them in the habitats where their species used to live. It worked. It left some glitches in the DNA record but we don't ever expect the humans to detect this. :slide: :+---------------------+ :| | :| extreme glaciation | :| | :+---------------------+ narration: After the early anthropoids evolved into humans, begining about 930 thousand BC as they were migrating out of Africa to Europe, a Sumatra volcano triggered an ice age caused glaciation which resulted in a drmatic drop in their population, to only 1338 at one point, and the low levels lasted 100 thousand years before we finally took action. One tribe had discovered fire while another hundreds of miles away had invented clothing made of animal skins, but the tribe with the clothing all died when they ate a decaying giant sloth carcass and got trichinosis. We tried an experiment and moved their bodies to where the fire tribe would find them. It worked. The fire tribe studied the clothing and figured out how to make their own. :slide: :+-------------------------+ :| | :| environmental posioning | :| | :+-------------------------+ narration: Another threat to the simulation occured around 3030 BC when warring factions in Sumer discovered mineral deposits of transuranic elements, those well beyond Uranium in atmomic number that are stable, held together by the super-weak nuclear force (which the humans have yet to discover). They decided the metals made great spear tips, becaue of their large mass. But they were also chemically toxic to life, and leached into watersheds, moving slowly through the hydrology system until they permanently destroyed We had to resore from a backup and then simply removed all of the transuranic elements from Earth, keeping the factions from finding them in the first place. :slide: :+---------------------+ :| | :| plagues | :| | :+---------------------+ narration: We've dealt with a number of plagues that menaced humanity. As mentioned, biotech isn't easy for us, but usually we can amplify the humans' own defences and speed up the reaching of herd immunity. The Black Death or Bubonic Plague had been around since before 2000 BC, caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, but for a long time it resulted in mild plague cycles which had limited impacts. This changed around 555 AD when the bacteria became virtually 100% fatal in humans. Because it was also transmitted by fleas, wand it wasn't very deadly to the fleas, this did not stop its spread. In fact, there was a synergy effect because the humans were starting to travel widely while the fleas tended to stay on local small mammals like rats. This enabled the Black Death to become a pandemic many times. The first major outbreak was the Plague of Justinian which killed 40% of the population of Constantinople. Fortunately, a virus evolved which preyed on the plague bacteria. It also ended up 100% fatal, and resulted in the near extinction of both bacteria and virus. We thought it was total extinction. The plague vanished for over 600 years, But somehow it came back, in 1345 near the Tian Shan mountains, now northern Kyrgyzstan. Luckily we'd saved the virus, and were able to use it to battle the plague. Before we stopped it the world population dropped from 442 million to 377 million by the year 1400. Europe alone lost over 50% of its population. The plague cameback 14 more times in the next 267 years. The last major outbreak, the Great Plague of London from 1664–1666 AD, seemed impossible to stop. We found a "vampire virus" had evolved that preyed on the virus that preyed on the plague bacteria. By this time European powers were sending ships aound the world. With no other ideas at the time, we burned the infested area in the Grat Fire of London. Amazingly this worked. Later we found an antibiotic we could inject into water supplies and we finally could prevnt major outbreaks. The most cursed disease to us was the Smallpox. It had been in Asia and Europe for thousands of years but wasn't in the Americas until the European explorers began to arrive in 1492 AD. The humans there had almost no immune defenses against it. We did an ananlysis after the problem became severe and realized that in the Old World humans had domesticated many animals and in the process been exposed to many diseases over a long time, and developed more robust immune systems. In the New World the large animals had been hunted to extinction before domestication was discovered. The only domesticated four mammals, including dogs. Without other livestock they didn't gain the immune defenses of the Europeans. Although over a dozen diseases caused native epidemics, the Smallpox was almost uncontrollable. We spent a lot of our discretionary budget running and re-running scenarios to mitigate the effect os of it on the natives in the Americas. The most common outcome was for disease to totally wipe them out. One of our previously useful tools was to duplicate cretures with immunity and inject them into other locations, but now that the humans had oral and recorded histories this created great cultural disruption. We found allowing Europeans to arrive or too late had the worst outcomes. The worst was when we delayed European colonization of the Americas until the 1800s, when the Dutch conquered North America with an indutrial civilization while the nearly industrialized Turks quickly controlled most of South America. The best outcome came with a gradual invasion of waves of Viking, Spanish, French, Portugese, Dutch and English colonists. But there was a particular series of events that we decided to intervene to prevent in 1589, during the failure of the so-called Lost Colony of Roanoke, Virginia. Straving colonists split into two groups: one decided to join native tribes and live among them. The other group demparked on an expedition in open boats lead by the Dare family. The Dare Expedition portaged to the New River and sailed down to the Kanawha River, into the Ohio River, and on to the Missiissippi, to approximately Memphis. All along the way they met natives, some of whom joined them as translators. Unfortunately one of the colonists was a symptomless carrier for the Smallpox, and the effects of this expedition were devastating. We restored to a saved state and simply removed them and their boats after they rounded the first bend. Ironically the humans eradicated the Smallpox in 1977 using mostly public health measures such as vaccines and quarantines. In some ways their biotech is beter than ours, probably because they care more than we do. :slide: :+---------------------+ :| | :| nuclear exchanges | :| | :+---------------------+ narration: Once the humans developed nuclear weapons they kept blowing themselves up, and we kept stopping them. In Thule, Greenland on 5 October 1960 a recently commisioned radar installation in the US Defense Early Warning System (DEW) interpreted a moonrise over Norway as a swarm of Soviet missiles coming over the horizon. The operators attempted to report the attack and luckily we caught it in time and sabatoged their communications equipment long enough for the mistake to be identified. A maodified version of the story was eventually relesed to the public. Our next conundrum was the Cuban Missile Crisis in late October 1962. This situation got ahead of us and two different nuclear exchanges happened as scenarios developed, each requiring a restore from a saved state. The first was triggered on 27 October 1962 by United States preident John F. Kennedy's escalation after USAir Force pilot Major Rudolph Anderson was shot down by a Cuban aircraft. In the replay we sent Kennedy a dream that he was wandering the nuclear ruins with ashes in his mouth. He ended up using this imagery in a speech calling for calm. We also sent a dream to Soviet Premier Nakita Kruschev that he was visited by Saint Peter from the Christian Bible, and told history would remember him was the most evil man who lived if he started a doomsday war. This seemed to have little effect. But once we stopped that exchange another occured the same day. A Soviet submarine known as B-59 was being hunted by US ships with depth charges, and the three responsible officers decided to retaliate with a 5 kiloton nuclear torpedo, which destroyed their vessel and the American attack group, which led to a full nuclear exchange. This time we reran again and sent a dream to the on-board group commander Vice Admiral Vasily Arkhipov -- a visitation from the Angel Gabriel -- which motivted him to change his mind and prevent the launch. An additional minor problem occured as a result of repeatedly restoring from an incremental backup. This was a different problem than the one that created the Great Unconformity a billion years previously. The result was two timelines were intermingled in which a trivial detail different in each. The children's stories of a bear family ended up with two spellings of their names, the Berenstain Bears versus Berenstein Bears. There were people with memories and even physical evidence of both. Apparently the populus just shrugged this off and went on with life, so we did as well. Another false alarmed happened in Soviet command center Serpukhov-15 (near Kurilovo, Kaluga oblast, about 85 miles from KMoscow) on 26 September 1983. Due to a satellite warning system malfunction the early warning system Oko reported the launch of five intercontinental ballistic missiles from the United States. In the first scenario the Soviet's retaliated, leading to a nuclear exchange. We managed a sucessful intervention in our first replay, by sending a dream to Stanislav Petrov, an engineer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces on duty at the command center. Based on our research the dream was of the mythical Queen of Sheba, known in the west as Mother Goose, who traveled the world telling stories to children. She and a mass of children accosted him in the dream, begging not to die. It worked. He decided to wait for additional evidencerather than immediately passing the warning along. Cooler heads prevailed. We once again had to run multiple scenarios to avoid a nuclear exchange during the 1991 Russian coup. Once again we had some minor glitches due to restoring muliple times using incremental backups. This resulted in a time line in which some people had memories of South African politician Nelson Mandela dying in prison, and others remembered him being released from prison. This became so prevasive that the humans named it the Mandela Effect. Again we left things alone and moved on. Note that we do test our our increental backups, and that all protocols were followed. We have fully analyzed the causes of these problems and believe they are completely resolved. The most recent nuclear exchange we prevented was on New Years Eve 1999 as the transition occured to January 1, 2000. The so-called Y2K bug brought down the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) air defense system in the U.S. and the Russians used the blindness to launch a sneak attack. Our quick fix was to sabatoge the Russian communications equipment, which they attributed to their own Y2K bug. :slide: :+---------------------+ :| | :| scientific errors | :| | :+---------------------+ narration: There were five incidents that were existential threats to the simulation due to scientific miscalculations. The humans havebeen telling and retelling the story of the first one in a garbled for. In 1945 at the first atomic bomb test at the Trinity site in New Mexico, physicists Oppenheimer, Fermi and others mad joking bets on whether the extreme temperatures created would ignite the nitrogen in the atmosphere, by causing it to fission in a chain reaction. To our surprise this is what did happen. Even we don't fully understand the physics in our artificial universe. We had to tweak the value of the weak nuclear force to fix it in a replay. We're hoping the humans never notice the value changed then. Because of time I'm only going to name the four other crises: polywater in the 1960s in the USSR, and physics experiments triggering vacuum collapse at the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois in 1983, at Brookhaven Laboratoriesin New York in 2000, and at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva in Switzerland in 2012. :slide: :+---------------------+ :| | :| religion/philosophy | :| | :+---------------------+ narration: Surprisingly the humans have been trying to figure out the true nature of their world for a very long time. The first of these inquiries come under the heading of religion and philosophy. The Hindu religion included the concept of "Maya" or illusion about 1500 BC. It refers to the ways in which a person's existence and self-centredness stop them from seeing the truth. The Buddha (awakened one) around the 6th century BC taught the concept of "emptiness of form," the idea that reality is a form of projection that results from karmic seeds. Laozi as far back as the 8th century BC wrote the "Tao Te Ching or "Book of the Way" in which he taught that the world described by symbols was not indicive of the eternal properties of the world. He said: "The way that can be spoken is not the eternal way. The name that can be named is not the eternal name." The Greek philosopher Plato, around 375 BC, described reality as like people in a cave, looking at 2-dimensional shadows on the wall of 3-dimensional shapes they can never see. We initially attempted to thwart these developments with interventions. In each case we saved the state of the simulation (which is rather expensive) and then attempted to change the mind of a prophet or philosopher. We appeared to them as whirlwinds, burning bush, angels, babbling brooks and even vivions in dreams. In every case we ended up returning to the save point after developments became chaotic and destructive. Our worst outcome was the result of a dream sent to Lao Tzu, which somehow resulted in a world Chinese empire that adopted the Manichean religion, conquored Europe, had no Dark Ages and ended up developing nuclearing weapons and destroying civiliation with nuclear winter in what would've been called the Sixth Century A.D. As previously mentioned, we did have good results with dreams in the 20th century nuclear war era in the current timeline. Our only interventions that were not catastrophic were visions we sent to Siddhartha Guatama, the Buddha, which seemd to alter nothing at all. We didn't bother undoing them as a cost savings. Since not only is it expensive to save state, it is also expensive and risky to restore state. After our failures we adopted a policy mainly of observing only as the humans developed these ideas. Philosophers continued to toy with the idea that reality was unreal, and we just left them alone. The idea of Monads was developed by Descartes (1626) and Leibnitz (1633) which implied a simulated universe, but none of the humans seemed to fully grasp the concept. (Neither did we, actually.) Nietze in 1882 decalred that "God is dead," implying a universe that used to have interventions, i.e. miracles, but no longer did. Eighty-four years later Time Magazine asked on its cover: "Is God dead?" :slide: :+------------------+ :| | :| arts | :| | :+------------------+ narration: In the human's creative works, designed for their enjoyment, we can chronicle their development of the idea that their reality is a simulation. The development of epic poems and theater eventually lead to novels. Novels like Edgar Allan Poe's "Eureka" 1848 and Jorge Luis Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths"" (1941) and "The Library of Babel" (1941) began to explore the idea of a universe with do-overs. Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein's short story "They" (1941) described a being who has figured out that his reality is simulated. When humans migrated from one-dimenional artforms like novels and radio, to two-dimensional forms like movies and televison, the stories became less intellectual. In the era before home computers, movie rarely dabbled in the idea of a simulated reality. But there were a few: "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari" (1920) suggested a person's perceptions could be controlled, "The Thirteenth Floor" (1947) dabbled in the idea of a created reality, "Thirty-Six Hours" (1964) used the concept of a faked alternate historical timeline as part of an interrogation in wartime, and "The Magic Christian" (1969) included a voyage on a simulated cruise ship. Televisioon,a form of movies communicated into the home, was even less intellectual than movies, but there were a few exceptions. In the show "The Outer Limits" in 1964, the episode "Wolf 359" portrayed a scientist who created a simulation of a planet where intelligent life evolved. The special project "The Cube" (1969) by Jim Henson dealt with a man in an artificial environment with changing rules. These were one-off events so we weren't too concerned about them. But then writer Rod Serling began creating his hit TV show The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) which dealt with occult universes in which karmic forces triggered moral parables. Some of these realms were constructed by other beings. The stories kept churning up issues relevant to residents of a simulated universe. We finally put a stop to it by amplifying misunderstandings between Serling and his bosses, resulting in the show being canceled. He never again produced a TV program in which he had creative control. Humans have been playing games for millenia, which in some ways resemble little articial universes. But recently thay began developing simulation games, such as "The Lord of the Rings" (1961) based on a series of fantasy novels set in a mythical "Middle Eart" universe, "Empire" (1960s) whcih began as a do-it-yourself game, mostly on college campuses, and some very fluid rules, set in a mythical ancient empire, and later "Dungeons and Dragons" (1974) which spawned a huge and still-growing franchise. Meanwhile the humans' computer systems wer growing smaller, cheaper and more powerful, and since the 1950s were commercially available. Inevitably games were programmed for them. The first was a simple "Tic-Tac-Toe" game in 1950. The first commercial use of computer simulation came with flight simulators for pilot training. Early systems taught the kinaesthetics of flight and how to use controls, then how to do "instrument flight" in cloudy or dark conditions in a static cockpit, then added visual displays, and lastly added kinaesthetics back in. Initially these complete systems were incredibly expensive, special-purpose systems by companies such as General Electric, McDonnel-Douglas, Evans & Sutherland, Redifon, Redifusion and Link. Eventually in the 1990s general-purpose computers became powerful enough to perform these tasks. There were also "unauthorized" games developed in computer labs, all of which ran on larger computers costing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Most were text-based games, for exmple to simulate ruling an ancient empire (Hamurabi, 1968), a historical migration to a pioneering lifestyle (Oregon Trail, 1971), and an exporation of a cave with magical objects and creatures (Colossal Cave Adventure, 1976). Interestingly, the oldest minicomputer game dates from 1962, and used an oscilliscope to provide 2D vector graphics of a space battlefield (Spacewar!). All of these games were ported to home computers when they emerged in the late 1970s. As an aside, the Bally company had been making mechanical arcade amusements since 1932 when they entered the home video gme market at the early date of 1977 with their Astrocade product. It didn't succeed largely because they were stingy with advertising, refusing TV ads, and also had few games and they refused to partner with third party developers to add more. But we were intrigued by the categories they listed for their games: * Action * Cards * Edutainment * Maze * Other * Pinball * Puzzle * Racing * Shooter * Snake * Sports Although there a few vague categories, like Action and Other, and the oddball Snake, for the most part these categories of games have persisted. Only a few more categories have been added over the years. * Board Games have expaned from Cards * Action has evolved into Quests and Combat (sometimes in the same game) * Sandbox games give the player a world to build and play with * Fidget games mic the play from physical fidget toys like spinners and simiulated bubble poppers * Horror games have emerged based on the thrill of beriong frightened or anxious Meanwhile, coin-operated amusements had existed for decades, electromechanical devices that mostly involved the bouncing of metals spheres off of pins. There were busineses called pinball arcades, or just arcades, that offered these games. It was easy to add the games based on computer technology, called video games, into thee arcades. We have closely monitored the develpment of these games, especiually noting the evolution of the hardware platforms, the advances in graphics technology, and the expansion of the artificial worlds in which they take place. Here are some milestone games: The first video arcade games had 2-dimensional flat graphics. "Pong" (1972) from Atari took place in an abstract geometry space, while "Space Invaders" (1978) from Taito/Midway and "Asteroids" (1979) from Atari took place in outer space. The innovatice game "Battlezone" (1980) from Atari used drawn vectors (lines) in a true 3-dimensional space that represented a simple battlefield for tank battles. Many called it the first "immersive" game. Arcade machines were enhanced with special purpose hardware for doing Bit Block Transfer (BITBLT) operations to aniate sprites, caching backgroud bits to restore after sprites unocculted them. Examples of these games are "Pac-Man" (1980) from Midway and "Donky Kong" (1981) from Niontendo, which took place in stylized mazes. Three-D vectors and sprites were combined in "Tron" (1982) by Bally. It took place inside a computer, in a fantastic sort of way. This game based on a movie made more money than the movie. An innovative game was "Dragon's Lair" (1983) by Cinematronics,which used videodisk technology to deliver hand-drawn animation in a forking, interacive storytelling experience. Later this became common as the computer hardware was sped up and could stream video without special devices. Arade games continued to advance but other platforms were developed for home use. These had less computing power than the arcade machines but, like the arcade machines, they had special-purpose graphics hardware. Initially the home games were mostly ports of the arcade versions of games that were already popular. Atari's "Space Invaders" (1978) for the Atari 2600 was a huge hit. After they sold nearly 400,000 units into arcades, they sold a hundred times that amount into homes. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) running "Super Mario Brothers" (1985) beat that record two years later, eventually doubling it. This game was played in a stylized maze similar to Donkey Kong. In 1986 "The Legend of Zelda" on NES, another maze game, was the first game to allow users to save games in play and continue them later. This feature of home games made little sense in arcades, where many customers shared games and paid per pley, but home users could play all day, pausing to do other things. In the 1980s home computers became available and immediately games were created for them. At first they were text only or had extremely limited, slow, low- resoltion graphics, so the popular text-based games were ported to them. One of these, "Zork" (1980) from Infocom, had improved tecxt processing and showed that compelling branching storylines could still entertain players even without graphics. It was induicted into the Library of Congress, a presigious data archive. With the arrival of bitmapped graphics displays the games gained Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). Both 2D and 3D games became popular, including ports of arcade games and original computer games. An innovative early game on the Atari 400/800 was "Star Raiders" (1980) from Atari. It used 1-dimenional point stars displayed in a three dimensional space to better simulate immersive space travel. Meanwhile, one of the most popular categories of games was the aircraft flight simulator. Versions appeared from various companies for a number of plaforms, but the most significan was "Flight Simulator" (1982) from Microsoft, based on acquired game. The simulation was of an aircraft in an atmosphere, based on real historical andn modern aircraft designs. It ran on many platforms, but was favored on the ones Microsoft controlled. By 1982, revenue from video games on the three platforms, arcade machines, home games and home computers, exceeded $8 billion, more than music ($4 billion) and movies ($3 billion) combined, and the maket share has continued to increase since then. By July 2018 worldwide revenue was $134.9 billion, vs. $19.1 billionfor music and $41 billion for movies. Beyond the early 1980s it is harder and less siginificant to track the platforms the games ran on. Most hit games were released in arcade, home game and personal computer versions. They continued to evolve rapidly. User interfaces were improved by games such as "Sundog" (1984) by FTL Games, which took pace on and between planets in space, with a different universe in every game. Objects were directly manuipiulated with a joystick or mouse. Their "Dungeon Master" (1987) inproved this interface and added visual display of character attributes, as used in table-top games like Dungeons and Dragons. The range of setings for games increased, including an urban terrain for marshall arts in Capcom's "Street Fighter II" (1991), the ruins of a fallen civilization in Cyan's "Myst" (1993), a universe shared by humans and mythical pocket monsters in Nintendo's "Pokemon" (1996), and a school environment with complex social dynamics in Purple Moon's "Rocket" series (1997). In an ironic development, games such as "Quake" (1996) from GT Interactive and "Portal" (2007) from Valve introduced players to a topological universe connected by transporter technology, which comes closest to the way our own reality is structured. "Sim City" (1989) from Maxis was an early "sandbox" game. It was the first game to be set in a redeveloping urban environment, and it wa more of a pastime than a game. Players often just fiddled with it. It was sometimes compared to gardening. Roblox (2006) from Roblox offered a "meta-game" that allowed users to build games for each other, and made a billion dollars in twenty years. >>> PC game 1996 GT Interactive Quake DOS & Windows, Mac, Linux, Sun & Sega Saturn, others ### teleportation network 250K units @@@ 3D OpenGL, multiplayer LAN parties, NIN music PC game 2006 Roblox Roblox Rocket Arena Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, home games ### meta-game $1.04 billon in 2025 online game 2006 Blizzard Entertainment World of Warcraft internet/Windows and Mac quests and battles in terrain and dungeons peak 12 million subscribers in 2010, 7.25 million subscribers & 1.2 million players now @@@ MMORPG PC game 2011 Microsoft Minecraft Windows, everything ### post-apocolypse alternate reality 350 million (most popular ever) @@@ sandbox game online game 2013 Grinding Gear Games Path of Exile internet/Windows then Xbox One, Playstation 4 dark fantasy world battlefield Path of Exile 2 437K players now ### MMORPG PC game 2017 Epic Fortnite Windows, Mac, etc., also home games ### user-modified battlefield $9 billion gross as of 2019 - post-computer lit o "True Names" (1981) Vernor Vinge o "Neuromancer" (1984) William Gibson In 1987 an entrepeneur named Jaron Lanier coined the phrase "Virtual Reality" to describe a cluster of simulation technologies that were being combined to create multisensory artificial environments. The term "virtual" was originally borrowed from the physics of optics, describing places where images appeared to originate, and then in computers to describe hardware components which were replaced by software work-alikes; for example: virtual memory, virtual disk, virtual device. Lanier adapted it again to essentially describe an entire universe replaced by software. o Star Tours 1987 5th generation 3D shaded polygons 1994 Sony Playstation 1, 1994 Sega Saturn, 1996 Nintendo 64, currently 100K games for PC, many thousands of which are categorized as simulation games ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- >>> - post-computer movies o Lawnmower Man (1992) o The Truman Show (1998) o The Matrix (1999) o Ready Player One (2018) o Don't Worry Darling (2022) - post-computer TV o holodeck on Star Trek: TNG (1987) o Wild Palms (1993) o VR-5 (1995) o Black Mirror (2011) o Wayward Pines (2015-2016) o Love, Death and Robots (2019) o The Midnight Gospel (2020) o Wandavision (2021) tree : battle : chess game : clock : steam engine : organism : mind : game/sim :slide: :+------------------+ :| | :| math | :| | :+------------------+ narration: >>> = math - Turing and Church (1936) Turing Machone, Lambda Calculus - Godels's Theorem (1950) o math is flawed o limits are flawed o induction is flawed - Conway monstrous moonshine (1979) monstrous number prime factors 196,884 = 2^2 * 3^3 * 1823 (1979) it has 808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000 elements 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000 2^46 * 3^20 * 5^9 * 7^6 * 11^2 * 13^3 * 17 * 19 * 23 * 29 * 31 * 41 * 47 * 59 * 71 2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 - 41 - 47 - 59 - - 71 all 2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,29,31,(37),41,(43),47,(53),59,(61),(67),71 divide by 10^9 * 36^10 and get 2^17×7^6×11^2×13^3×17×19×23×29×31×41×47×59×71 (37 prime factors, 13 distinct) = 221001753080644686034025709568 - their computers explain joke "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process." ― E.B. White :slide: :+------------------+ :| | :| physics | :| | :+------------------+ narration: >>> = physics - nothing inside singularities or outside light cones (horizon = 380,000 light years) Horizon Problem - Planck limits (space and time) - supermassive black holes -- we made them - Hubble Tension - cosmological principle wrong (assumed to make job easier) - Shroedenger's Cat (1935) - spooky action at a distance - Einstein (1947) entangled quantum states - Feynman diagrams (1948) - In 1957 astronomer Robert Dicke proposed the "anthropic principle, also known as the "observation selection effect," - Transactional Interpetation (1986) intervention - Nick Bostrom (philosopher), Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?, 2003 - Wigner's Friend (1961) - Bell Inequality (1964) - Wolfram "Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics… and It’s Beautiful" (2020) self-modifying networks "We started understanding how quantum mechanics works. Then we realized what energy is. We found an outline derivation of my late friend and mentor Richard Feynman’s path integral. We started seeing some deep structural connections between relativity and quantum mechanics. Everything just started falling into place. All those things I’d known about in physics for nearly 50 years—and finally we had a way to see not just what was true, but why." - Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger, Nobel Prize in Physics (2022) "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science" - Shroedenger's Cat, Wigner's Friend, 2023: measurment, records, perception and memory are reversible -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some Fascinating Developments in the Wigner's Friend Paradox I've been fascinated for years by the Wigner's Friend Paradox in quantum mechanics. ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend ) There has been a lot of attention lately on some experiments that seem to confirm the weirdness. This year I began looking for articles in Google Scholar to get more direct access to what physicists are saying. I found this paper: "No-go theorem based on incomplete information of Wigner about his friend" (17 Feb. 2023) by Zhen-Peng Xu, Jonathan Steinberg, H. Chau Nguyen, and Otfried Gühne School of Physics and Optoelectronics Engineering, Anhui University, 230601 Hefei, People's Republic of China ( arxiv.org/pdf/2111.15010.pdf ) Which begins with: At the center of many orthodox interpretations of quantum mechanics is the assumption that the action of measuring a quantity on a physical system creates its ac- tual value. This prompts to suggest that the action of creating a value of a measured quantity is an 'absolute event' of this world, meaning that it is same for any ob- server and a process that cannot be reversed. This perception of measurements in quantum mechanics has been highly debated. While it is supported by collapse models of the measurement process, it is not in line with other viewpoints which assume the universal validity of quantum mechanics. Indeed, assum- ing universality of quantum mechanics suggests to model the measurement process by a unitary dynamics, which in principle can always be reversed. As a result, the measurement may be undone and the value of the mea- sured quantity can be erased, as if it never existed. Did you get that? Measurements, records, perceptions, memories can all be undone if we make some reasonable assumptions about quantum physics. (Head explodes.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Melvin Vopson (2024) "proof" living in a simulation, 2nd law of infodynamics - Are we living in a computer simulation? Many people think so (2024) Eric Ralls, Earth.com https://www.earth.com/news/simulation-hypothesis-are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation/ - dark matter & MOND - luckily wrong turn with string theory, dark energy - standard model counterexamples o inflation / accelerating expansion o clumpiness o litle red dots o lithium problem o KDC void 2B light years wide, contains Milky Way o Quipu 1.3B light years wide :slide: :+------------------+ :| | :| biggest new | :|risks and expenses| :| | :| physics | :| astronomy | :| | :+------------------+ narration: >>> = physics = astronomy - HST (1990) - JWST (2022) - eROSITA x-ray observatory, found more high-energy sources in 6 months than in 60 years (launched 2019) - LSST Legacy Survey of Space and Time (first light expected July 2025) -- built at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, installing at Vera C. Rubin Observatory atop Chile's Simonyi Survey Telescope -- 3200 megapixel - The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will measure the effect of dark energy on the expansion of the universe. It will obtain optical spectra for tens of millions of alaxies and quasars, constructing a 3D map spanning the nearby universe to 11 billion light years. The DESI Survey is being conducted on the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. news from Berkely Lab: First Results from DESI Make the Most Precise Measurement of Our Expanding Universe By Lauren Biron April 4, 2024 https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2024/04/04/desi-first-results-make-most-precise-measurement-of-expanding-universe/ - LISA (2035) - cosmic expansion - coffee rings :slide: :+--------------------+ :| | :| summary | :| | :| action needed now! | :| | :+--------------------+ narration: >>> == Pilbara Craton in Western Australia 3.47 billion years ago == - Internet survey 50% o at least peole think they are crazy just like the crazy people in our real universe who think it is simulated == Yellowstone 80K years == transactional = optimization == little red dots == galactic wave Wed Mar 11 22:54:55 PDT 2026