Simulated Reality - Matrioshka Brain (A Definite Possibility?)

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I wrote a piece yesterday regarding evolution, but let's wind the clock backwards on that one and use it to peer into the past, from the future.

Many works of science fiction as well as some predictions by serious thinkers hypothesize that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Think quantum computers, world spanning supercomputers, or even computational engines the size of entire solar systems.

Let us assume for a moment that these predictions are spot on. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their ancestors. Because what else do you do when you have virtually unlimited ability to compute but compute all the things, seems logical.

Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a vast amount of simulations, assuming that these simulated people are conscious - then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race that spawned us, but, instead to people simulated by the technologically advanced descendants.

If this were the case, it would be rational and quite logical to think that there is the possibility that we are among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones.

Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not allowed to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their ancestors. So one can safely assume (due to technological advancement) the matrix is real, and you are already in it.

So let's have a think about how we could potentially achieve this goal.

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Introducing the Matrioshka Brain.

A Matrioshka brain comes from the idea of using a Dyson Sphere or Dyson Swarm around a star as a gigantic computer. Essentially a computational engine that is driven by the power of the star itself.

The name Matrioshka comes from the Russian dolls, the ones that come apart and have a smaller copy inside and so on.

Similarly, the brain would be nested Dyson spheres (or semisolid shells made out of a swarm of nanites for example), drawing most or all of their power from the star and propagating it up out through each layer of the brain.

The inner shells could run at almost the same temperature as the star itself, while the outer ones would be almost at the temperature of interstellar space.

It's a system whereby each layer directly feeds the next one, each hop in the chain increasing efficiency as you scale further out. The only real limitation is the construction materials, output of the star itself, cosmic background temperature, the Carnot efficiency formula, and the Landauer Limit.

Due to the sheer size of the constructs required to build these hypothetical systems, the energy input and computational ability and material challenges it is likely in the far future however once created we can safely assume that they could simulate all that is, ever was, and could possibly be.

To give you an idea of the computational power of a brain around a typical star, the following maths has to take place.

Sun's power = 3.86 x 10^26 watts,

Energy / Calculation = 2.67 x 10^-23 J/Bit.

Computational speed (power vs energy per calculation) = 1.45 x 10^49 Hz,

Approximately 40 orders of magnitude times more processing power than the device you are reading this on, and 34 orders of magnitude more than the current best guess to run a full simulation of a human mind, so just a single Matrioshka Brain could simulate about a ten billion trillion trillion people at once and in real time.

Now this is just a typical star, if you were to go and find some of the super-massive stars with much more surface area, outputting tens of thousands of times more power, well things start to get out of hand very quickly.

Combine all of that processing power into a single entity instead of running multiple smaller simulations and it is not unfeasible for this 'computer' to figure out how to break Faster Than Light travel, stable wormhole tunnels into other dimensions, reversing the sphere/swarm to take advantage of black holes perhaps? or even to use quantum entanglement to link a universal swarm of brains.

Talk about infinite possibilities.

I hope you enjoyed my not so simple words today, this was challenging to write and hope I presented things in a way that was fairly easy to understand. At least without digging too far into the maths, (not going to lie the numbers make my head hurt).

However this is a lead on from the evolutionary topic that I really wanted to explore with you.

Have a glorious day, Much love, and I look forward to your feedback in the comments section below.

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