mad cosmology

Some entertaining notions in Susan Stepney’s notes from a panel at Eastercon 2001:

• Maybe we’re surrounded by fake scenery, living in a “planetarium” – what are the required capabilities of civilisations that can fool us?
  • info is needed to generate a holodeck
  • a hydrogen atom can encode about a megabyte
  • it all takes energy, which limits the size of simulation
  • K1 (planet) — 100 km radius simulation
  • K2 (star) — 6000 km
  • K3 (galaxy) — 100 AU
  • (universe) — 100 ly
  • so if we had a consistent culture crossing 100ly, we couldn’t be living in a “planetarium”

(I don’t know what this bit means either; perhaps the minimum eye-span from which parallax discrepancies can be detected?)

• could we search for a leak in reality?
  • most stress at boundary of planetarium
  • in 1969, had to replace a painted fake moon with real rock – that’s why the dark side looks so different – it was a rush job!
  • look for programmers’ signatures [“Easter eggs”] – solar eclipses are a bit fishy!
  • look for hidden control mechanisms – there’s a big heat engine somewhere (unless the laws of physics are different, too)
  • so, push the boundaries, “rush the fence”, “crash the computer”
  • cold fusion – for the first few weeks, everybody could reproduce it, then nobody could – took that long to fix the bug
  • Mariner 9 at Mars – biggest dust storm in history as it arrives
  • inconsistencies between GR and QM
• have to be perfect – they could control us by taboo – control the space programme, etc – we should seek out places it’s hard to probe
• Perfect simulation only when being looked at – less processing power required – more opportunities to catch them out
• If we crash the planetarium, would what we see be any more comforting than what we see now?
• We’re already hitting light speed boundaries – we’re backing away from geostationary satellites to cable, because it’s faster – maybe we all end up in a 10 cubic metre box