I hope they're not running Windows

A few days ago, whilst contemplating the nature of the universe, as I am wont to do, I came to a startling revelation. As I explain this revelation to you, many may shout out INSANITY! or recoil in fear or strike out in anger. These reactions are normal to one’s universe being changed before their eyes. I forgive you in advance.

We exist in a simulation.

I’m sure many of you have heard something very similar to this before. But by ‘simulation’, I do not mean The Matrix where we are in a trap nor a Sims type environment where events are actually being controlled by some unseen god-like hand. I’m writing about an all-encompassing simulation of our universe – from the atoms that make up the air you breathe to galaxies slamming into each other in the deep reaches of the cosmos.

This idea originally gained some traction after the 2001 publication of Are You Living in a Computer Simulation in the journal Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom from Oxford University. The premise of this was basically that we are NOT in a simulation because it is unlikely any post-human species would bother simulating its history in a computer. While that conclusion is certainly debatable, its main weakness is its limited scope. We may not want to simulate our evolutionary history on this planet. But simulate the fourteen-plus billion years of the universe? Absolutely.

Bostrom’s paper also falls short because it assumes that any simulation will be specifically about US, humanity here on Earth. This is typical center-of-the-universe thinking that caused religion to hold back science for hundreds of years. What if we are just an infinitesimal by-product of the simulation and not its purpose in any way?

Ok, here it is laid out. We exist in a simulation (I don’t use computer simulation, because there is no reason to believe the simulation is being run by humans or post-humans or that they are even using what we would recognize as computers) that, to our observation, has been running for roughly fourteen to fifteen billion years. Of course, it hasn’t actually been running that long. Anyone who does any kind of computer-based simulations can tell you that time can be dilated at an extreme rate. The universe we know may only be days or even hours old, depending on the sophistication of whatever is running the simulation in the first place.

This, of course, explains the Big Bang.

All of a sudden, every bit of matter and energy in the universe just blinked into existence and, completely ignoring the laws of physics, expanded untold trillions of miles in mere seconds? Sounds like the start of a simulation to me; the program (or its equivalent) placing all the necessary pieces in place. And because of our time dilation due to being inside of the simulation, this instantaneous action actually took time, albeit nanoseconds.

So, POOF, we have a universe. Ok, now what? Well, you add a variable like, say, gravity, and let the simulation do the rest. Gravity will cause the matter to move and shift, creating friction and heat. And if you know any cosmology at all, that’s really all you need. The rest is just putting the pieces together. The immense heat and pressure creates stars which in turn create the elements we know and the explosions of those same stars spread those elements around. Before you know it, there are planets, then life and eventually blogs.

But don’t think that we are the focus of this simulation. Most likely we are a mere off-shoot. One planet among billions, each one just a by-product of a larger universal model being run by some unseen entity. There is no one watching our evolution, our wars or our reality TV. Most likely, when this representation runs its course and we all cease to exist (it would be awesome if we were all listening to Don’t Stop Believing by Journey when it happens) humanity will just be a blip among billions of others in a larger program with barely any attention paid to us, if we are even noticed at all.

This is just the beginning of this idea, and there is much more to come. But you people have the attention span of gnats, so I’ll break this up into multiple posts for your convenience.

Next time – how all this fits in with multiple dimensions.