Science

We’ve scanned the sky for decades and haven’t found evidence of even a single culture, not within hundreds of millions of light years from us. That’s pretty special.

Actually, it mostly just means our detection methods probably still suck. We are still just trying to identify biomarkers by light refraction, which not only requires that the orbital body transit a star in our line of sight, but that it be large and close enough to register refraction through the atmosphere. And that's pretty new. The old methods were trying to intercept radio and other em signals.

"Decades" ago we had identified 1 or 2 potential planets in the "Goldilocks Zone", and people declared that it was in fact exceedingly rare for a solar system to even have planets, much less planets in the habitable zone. Now we have identified a LOT more potentials, nevermind planets.

You're looking through heavily dirtied goggles at a room that could be full of people and saying, "I don't see anyone, so I must be alone. I must be special."

This is very much a situation in which the "lack of evidence is not evidence of a lack" rule applies.

Compared to a being that can build a universe? A spacecraft might as well be a bird's nest. I'm inclined to agree with the guy that you're replying to. If this universe is a simulation, I personally doubt that its creator is specifically aware of us as a species, let alone as individuals. The fact that life appears so rare in this universe only tells me that if the universe was designed, it wasn't designed for us or entities like us.

Also are you sure about that last sentence? Surely none have language as sophisticated as we do, but don't dolphins have a sort-of language? I genuinely don't know

We only just noticed that Europa is probably a good candidate for life and it's been in our back yard forever. Saying we have no evidence for life in the universe is like saying that someone with vision too blurry to read signs sees no evidence of life across the street. Like, okay, but that doesn't really tell us much of anything.

Our sky scanning is also looking for radio waves, which is probably not a great candidate for finding advanced life outside of our own neighborhood.

My biggest issue with simulation theory is that original basis seems to be the assumption that whatever universe is simulating our own must follow the same rules as our own. However, that's not true in the slightest.

We simulate worlds that operate under different rules than our own all the time. While they aren't anywhere near as complex as our reality, we're at least able to dream of worlds with magic or faster-than-light travel. In a few hundred (or maybe thousand) years, who knows, we might be able to simulate a reality that follows 90% of our physical laws while also allowing for magic.

For all we know, if our universe is a simulation, it could be a magical simulation of a mundane world, taking place in a scholarly wizard's guild because they wanted to see what a mundane reality would look like.

I mean, is there really potential for infinite simulated ones? It doesn't make sense to be able to simulate a more powerful computer than the one running the simulation, else any computer would be able to have effectively infinite processing power with recursive simulations, so each "layer" of the simulation is logically going to have less processing power available for it than the layer above, probably a lot less. After a certain point, shouldn't it reach a state where reality as we perceive it is too computationally intense to simulate?

That is how the line of thinking goes. However, most arguments are wrong, so statistically speaking, that argument about simulation theory is probably wrong

I'd be curious to see evidence that it's possible to simulate an entire universe. Considering a universe is infinite, it would take an infinite amount of memory to store the state of everything in the universe, let alone an infinite amount of compute to calculate steps in the simulation. I guess if you don't simulate things that aren't being observed (which I believe there is support for), there's still a theoretically infinite number of observers.

Possibly true, but as much as that's bandied around it's rarely balanced against the fact that if it's not possible then there's a 0% chance of it happening (somewhat obviously). And it's not like the possibility exists on a continuum where you could say it's 50/50. It's either one or the other.

Humanity immediately pulls a Gurren Lagann and breaks out of the simulation every time they figure out they're in one. It's been a real problem in all the iterations we've done so far.

That's kind of where I'm at with the whole idea too. Should we be in such a situation, it just moves all our existing questions about "What is reality and the universe?" up one meta-level to the theoretical actual reality. I doubt we would stop finding out as much as is possible about this layer, but we would be wholly unable apply our findings or assumptions to the true reality.

But even if that true reality remains forever unknowable, it at least sets what I would consider some "sensible" bounds on our universe. As things are now, I'm not sure if I'm more dumbfounded by the idea of an infinite universe or a finite one - both boggle the mind for different reasons.

Based on what we've seen in the last decade, I'm fairly confident that most people would respond with "huh, that's weird" and then go back to watching TikTok videos.

And I fully expect it to.

As legacy religion fades, this kind of pseudo science has a strong potential to be the basis of cults.

First half felt like something you cram into your college essay to fill up the word minimum. I think the lemmy article summarizer also got confused by it.

Interesting. And so what does the author mean by "event" then? Just literally anything happening? Does their "law" track with events happening?

Thanks