Simulation theory, sounds really science-fictiony, like something straight out of a Orwell scenario. The idea itself has no current proof, but it could very well be real. I’m getting ahead of myself, Sim theory basically states that we are built with a consciousness inside of a simulated environment, and our universe, as we know it, is probably just the bare minimum that it has to be for us to never have enough energy to get past the simulated boundaries that have been built for us. Wow, that was word vomit, the idea is that we live inside a computer simulation, everything we do and think is the creation of a combination of 1’s and 0’s. The environment we live in is not created to be an enormous universe, but in order to optimize this simulation, only the necessities are simulated. The simulated environment does not have to be limitless, it just has to be unsurpassable for us. The idea of simulation theory poses many questions, and if true, could prove many things that are currently quite odd about our brains and anatomy. Such as our inability to accurately remember something that happened a long while ago, every time we access that memory, it distorts itself. An explanation posed by the sim theory states that our simulated brains are corrupting the information from what our perspective happened years ago.
From the brain comes the question of how a computer could have the processing ability to take in and compute the short term and long term memories of one single person, let alone the same for 7 billion people. One second of human consciousness can take up about 1020 operations, considering that all of human history has to be simulated at once, you would need to calculate this for over 200 billion people, or 2*1011 people with the same amount of operations, for the calculated 200,000 years that we have existed, there are approximately 31,536,000 seconds in a year, after multiplying, you get a tentative value for how much computing power would be necessary to generate a simulation of this magnitude. The computing power would be approximately 3*1034. This value is likely an underestimation, due to us not taking interactions into account, every atom of every being interacts with each other, every single interaction, whether it be very complex or only the result of a binary decision, changes everything, increases the input necessary. Considering the mind of humans, we didn’t even start to correlate that to the consciousness of animals, of creatures, everything would have its own enormous computing power. This vast underestimation can also be slightly balanced out by the system of optimization touched on in the first paragraph. Either way, the necessary energy is massive and extremely outside our current capabilities.
In the future, once we start building mega structures like dyson spheres (gigantic solar panels covering our sun to get direct solar energy), we would be able to gain that amount of energy. One such way that we believe that we could gain that computing power would be to build a Matrioshka brain, this mega structure would basically be inside of a dyson sphere and would take up some of the dyson sphere energy to power a quantum computer, this computer would have more than enough power to generate a simulation of this magnitude. A quantum computer works in an interesting way, consider your basic laptop, every instance, every operation is ruled by two options. A 1 or a 0 <bits>. In a quantum computer, there are interesting options, the 1 and the 0 are still there, but unlike a regular computer, which can only have one of the options at a time (like a switch), the quantum computer can have an operation be both a 1 and a 0 <qbits>, the ambiguity, the ability to run all operations simultaneously instead of one at a time is what makes a quantum computer a quantum computer. The ability to run massive simulations is only achieved if a quantum computer is created and given enough energy to operate.
How would we know that we are in a simulation? Well one of the main points of the sim theory is that the people that are inside are made to believe that they are not in a simulation, but are living in real life. They will believe in this until they are soon to have the capacity to create simulations of their own. This is currently the point that we are at right now. So being in a simulation is virtually undetectable, except for this, the point of the simulation is to have the absolute bare minimum so as to not destroy the computer, so we never know whether whatever we have with us is just hollow and have nothing inside, for example, the chairs that you are sitting on right now, you do not know whether the chairs are hollow, until you actually break it apart, and by then it will have already been masked. This is computer optimization, it’s actually the same type of technology used in VR games, everything is hollow unless checked. If this is a simulated environment, whatever we think that we know is completely false, our universe could just be a bunch of randomly simulated events that just build up what we think we know as the laws of our universe. All of this information could very well be and is most likely completely false.
Don’t be afraid, when you actually think about the simulation theory, you realize that our entire existence could end with just the unplugging of a computer, our existence could be tied to a computer, our entire universe could just blink out, and it would just be because the computer ran out of charge. So live your life like it is your last day, nothing else matters except you and the people that you love. Live like there is nothing after death, everything should be lived to the fullest, and most importantly, enjoy yourself, there is no better time than today. Carpe diem, as reality is generated around you