{"id":439,"date":"2002-07-15T19:25:15","date_gmt":"2002-07-16T03:25:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ogre.nu\/wp\/?p=439"},"modified":"2006-07-15T08:18:16","modified_gmt":"2006-07-15T16:18:16","slug":"mad-cosmology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=439","title":{"rendered":"mad cosmology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some entertaining notions in Susan Stepney&#8217;s notes from a <a href=\"http:\/\/www-users.cs.york.ac.uk\/~susan\/sf\/cons\/e2001.htm#16\">panel at Eastercon 2001<\/a>: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> Maybe we&#8217;re surrounded by fake scenery, living in a &#8220;planetarium&#8221; &ndash; what are the required capabilities of civilisations that can fool us?\n<ul>\n<li>info is needed to generate a holodeck <\/li>\n<li>a hydrogen atom can encode about a megabyte <\/li>\n<li>it all takes energy, which limits the size of simulation <\/li>\n<li>K1 (planet) &#8212; 100 km radius simulation <\/li>\n<li>K2 (star) &#8212; 6000 km <\/li>\n<li>K3 (galaxy) &#8212; 100 AU <\/li>\n<li>(universe) &#8212; 100 ly <\/li>\n<li>so if we had a consistent culture crossing 100ly, we couldn&#8217;t be living in a &#8220;planetarium&#8221; <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(I don&#8217;t know what this bit means either; perhaps the minimum eye-span from which parallax discrepancies can be detected?)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> could we search for a leak in reality?\n<ul>\n<li> most stress at boundary of planetarium  <\/li>\n<li> in 1969, had to replace a painted fake moon with real rock &ndash; that&#8217;s why the dark side looks so different &ndash; it was a rush job!  <\/li>\n<li> look for programmers&#8217; signatures [&#8220;Easter eggs&#8221;] &ndash; solar eclipses are a bit fishy!  <\/li>\n<li> look for hidden control mechanisms &ndash; there&#8217;s a big heat engine somewhere (unless the laws of physics are different, too)  <\/li>\n<li> so, push the boundaries, &#8220;rush the fence&#8221;, &#8220;crash the computer&#8221; <\/li>\n<li> cold fusion &ndash; for the first few weeks, everybody could reproduce it, then nobody could &ndash; took that long to fix the bug  <\/li>\n<li> Mariner 9 at Mars &ndash; biggest dust storm in history as it arrives  <\/li>\n<li> inconsistencies between GR and QM <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li> have to be perfect &ndash; they could control us by taboo &ndash; control the space programme, etc &ndash; we should seek out places it&#8217;s hard to probe  <\/li>\n<li><i>Perfect simulation only when being looked at<\/i> &ndash; less processing power required &ndash; more opportunities to catch them out  <\/li>\n<li> If we crash the planetarium, would what we see be any more comforting than what we see now?  <\/li>\n<li><i>We&#8217;re already hitting light speed boundaries<\/i> &ndash; we&#8217;re backing away from geostationary satellites to cable, because it&#8217;s faster &ndash; maybe we all end up in a 10 cubic metre box <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some entertaining notions in Susan Stepney&#8217;s notes from a panel at Eastercon 2001: Maybe we&#8217;re surrounded by fake scenery, living in a &#8220;planetarium&#8221; &ndash; what are the required capabilities of civilisations that can fool us? info is needed to generate &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=439\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fandom","category-sciences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}