Let's kill the universe | Hacker News Reader

Let's kill the universe

quimzy.github.io

18 pointsQuimzy51 comments

My problem with the "let's cause a glitch in the simulation to escape it" idea is this.

What are the odds that you'll glitch it and not just simply "crash" the universe, i.e. instantly end its existence? And actually escape, intact, to some higher plane? Let's say one in a billion.

Now let's say you're the higher entity to which universes like ours are bacteria... billions and billions of them. Boom, some of them evolve, everything changed in an instant.

But let's say you're one of the bacteria-like universes. Glitch, and you have a 99.9999999% chance that you'll wipe out the universe? Do that? Don't be ridiculous.

This game only makes sense from the perspective of the higher entity. Not from inside the simulation.

> This game only makes sense from the perspective of the higher entity. Not from inside the simulation.

Always wondered, if our universe was a simulation, maybe the inherent randomness of quantum mechanics is a deliberate optimization, so it doesn't have to store the state beyond certain resolution. This is of course couch mental wandering, but imagine if quantum computers are powerful because they're a sandbox escape, directly using resources from the host.

If advanced quantum computers start draining too much resources, said higher entity might notice and decide to stop the simulation.

That’s exactly how many 3D games are rendered. You don’t render scenes not within the field of view and draw distance of the frame.

The quantum uncertainty principal and the speed of light are quite convenient if you are trying to efficiency simulate a universe without infinite computational power.

Except the speed of light is actually pretty small on absolute terms. Modern computers can imagine much larger numbers and have no problem utilizing them.

Edit: or maybe the speed of light is actually represented in Planck lengths/planck times in the 4D simulation computers O.o

Agreed, speed of light is small, which is what makes it such a good optimization.

So basically each planet, solar system, and galaxy has to only consider older and older events outside and focus on local events for the simulation.

good point

>> And actually escape, intact, to some higher plane?

I think the chances are as high as that of snake getting out of a nokia 3310

We should have an award: "the HN pun of the day".

Where’s the pun?

Could an _intelligent_ snake on a Nokia 3310 have caused a buffer overflow in an intelligent way such that some intelligent piece of it was capable of escaping the game to get to the OS, and perhaps beyond? And let’s say the snake knew almost nothing of how the OS worked or even what computer code or microprocessors really functioned like outside of what it could observe from its game.

Kind of an interesting philosophical CS thought experiment. The game itself might not have been very isolated from the OS, although applying this to some 4D super beings and our own universe I imagine maybe they’ve got a better handle on things.

Can an _intelligent_ man from my dreams get out and materialize into our world? Good look to him doing that, as I've already awoken, and won't be dreaming him again any time soon.

I remember when I was 15, I had the distinct thought that I would rather be historically famous for being evil, than unknown and/or forgotten. 30 years later I feel a bit differently about the whole thing.

Ego is a helluva drug. "How can we win at the universe", indeed.

The only winning move is not to play. ;)

It is possible to commit no mistakes (or plays) and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life ;)

This was a WarGames reference.

Mine was a Star Trek: NTG reference

Uh, for this author I'd advise seeking some form of help.

They just turned 15 (or 16?), I’d say they’re geek-level normal for that age.

Why ?

They’re trapped in the Monad error frame and haven’t learned how to catch the Great Stack-trace yet.

Zen transfusion, stat!

Heh good one. I meant professional help as in seeing a medically and professionally trained psychiatrist not a religion. Just based on his other posts I'm not sure where the others think he's 15 years old? He reads like someone who english isn't his first language and write in a way that makes him think that he's smarter than he actually is. And looking at his profile he's from Turkey so not that unsurprising. He doesn't sound like a 15 year old either people this age sound nothing like this. Anyways this is all I found about him.

"So, I come from an Islamic family, a very faithful one i might add. And, eversince i was a kid i’ve always wondered about existence. I remember looking around me, asking myself questions like “Why are we here?”, “Where IS God?”, “Who IS God?”, “What if everything that i’ve learnt about EVERYTHING is wrong?”, etc…"

Yeah he sounds closer to what someone who is unfamiliar and doesn't really know English sounds like. I know this because I grew up in an immigrant community and well it's very easy to tell when someone doesn't actually know English but knows words. Or knows an incorrect version of it.

Edit: Ah I see it's in the intro paragraph, yeah no. This definitely was not written by a 15 year old. I've spent a lot of time around children who are "Geeks" or very talented children at a young age, they don't act like this, nor do they reach this stage naturally from being around many of them of even really understanding what a CTF even is or anything to do with security, everything here seems like a man in his 30s pretending to be a child. Heck the kid probably exists but it's most likely not him. Looking through his profile and knowing similar ones around the world, it's astroturfed and I wonder why.

Well I guess the footer is what stand out here.

"A blog to help you know WHAT TO THINK when you are bored"

I'm guessing the What to think portion is in the sense of creating a false sense of what children in the region are capable of even though it's far from the truth and even in America this isn't really a thing either. Weird and manipulative I guess.

Third sentence in TFA he says he’s 15.

I've studied quite a few religions, and the Zen I'm talking about isn't one. No God, no gods, no worship, no orthodoxy or dogma or gurus or priests or masters ... just mental liberation. A book of koans is the bible.

It's as easy to get trapped in the conundrums of material reductionism as any of the myriad traps that may involve our minds, monkey-and-cocoanut-style.

Zen is about religion, specifically Buddhism it is clear to me you know nothing about religion.

This is so silly. You hear about how entropy always increases.. and you response is to make it increase faster? All to spite a theoretical simulation creator? Sorry, but I don't want to kill the universe, that I live in mind you, out of spite.

The universe makes me live in it, out of spite.

These concerns on the universal timescale are so outside the scope of our existence as to be purely theoretical.

It's akin to an oxygen atom fretting the solar system.

Do what you want, but I say: chill the CHILL out.

To whoever out there that hasn’t read the two greatest short stories by Asimov, here they are:

The Last Question - https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

The Last Answer - https://www.highexistence.com/the-last-answer-short-story/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay#Existential...

I check the revised calculations for the top quark and Higgs mass measurements every few years, as the accuracy increases it seems more and more that the universe metastable, though last I checked stable conditions were not eliminated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay#Bubble_prop...

The vacuum can only expand at the speed of light.

Only a portion of the universe would be destroyed. The universe would still be unaffected because galaxies located further than 4,200 megaparsecs (13 billion light-years) away from each other are moving away from each other faster than the speed of light while the vacuum decay cannot expand faster than the speed of light.

Can you elaborate on why the increasing accuracy of these measurements indicates that the universe is metastable?

As the measurements of the mass of the Higgs boson and top quark become more accurate, either through better data or better models and methods to interpret the data the ovals in the images [0] [1] shown in the margin of the article become narrower. So far that narrowness tends to reduce the ovals overlap with the green area indicating a stable universe. But it has not ruled out a stable universe afaik.

For the most part continued measurements have increased the accuracy of the Higgs boson which is the horizontal aspect of the oval, but there have been improvements in the models and methods that have assisted in narrowing the top quark as wel.

While there might be better sources now, when I was following it more often, the authors of this paper [2] were the best source of tracking at least the top quark as that seemed to be a special topic of research for them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Higgs-Mass-MetaStability....

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Higgs_FalseVacuum2018.jpg

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1207.0980

This kind of “reality shock” will probably occur more and more often in the future, as knowledge about how the universe works becomes more established and widespread. Until the other galaxies recede behind the cosmological horizon, I guess, and important parts of that knowledge become more of a myth.

We are entropy incarnate. Not the most effective vector the universe has managed to come up with by far, but perhaps, given enough time, we might be able help move things along just a tiny bit faster.

This mechanism of increasing entropy faster than normal already exists. It's called life.

The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.

Left to its own devices, carbon dioxide won't get hydrogenated, although that's it's lowest energy level. By creating a chemical pathways towards the lowest energy levels of this (and other) molecules, life is indeed helping us to reach the heat death of the universe sooner.

Sorry, but this is utterly false. CO2 is a very low energy state for carbon, and "hydrogenating" carbon (CO2 -> HCOOH/formic acid -> CH2O/formaldehyde -> CH2OH/methanol -> CH4/methane) climbs a ladder towards higher energy states. The life that does this (green plants) use the incoming energy from the sun (outside the system) to do it in a stable fashion and capture the energy into biologically useful (e.g. low-entropy) molecules.

Setting fire to these things is a fast way to increase entropy (locally on this planet, anyway; not sure it would make any material difference on a galactic scale). Fire is a short circuit of electrons flowing from the source (e.g. methane) to the sink (oxygen in the atmosphere). Life is effectively a resistor in the middle of that circuit that can use the energy slowly and to do "useful work" first, before it is released as heat.

So, the exact opposite of what you wrote.

I think they meant it as a trade off between local and isolated low entropy regions with high entropy regions long term. We, the low entropy regions, reduce the universe’s capacity to do useful work by , well, using it, and thus increasing entropy.

Thanks. Yeah I had to ruin the Michael Russel quote and thr (otherwise correct, I think) general point about entropy increase by adding some detail about the energy of that particular reaction that I have no idea about.

But on HN "the best way to get the right answer [..] is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer" so let's call it a win

Life is quite the opposite it decreases entropy inside of itself.

But it increases the total entropy of the system (the universe). Doing everything increases the entropy.

I think I read/heard somewhere (cannot recall where) that complex systems in general (and Life in particular) are processes that are more efficient at increasing entropy. Perhaps the very same effort to to maintain their internal entropy low, drives the overall entropy to increase faster than if there wasn't any complex system in the first place.

If anything life is an organizing principle of chaos. Life is akin to negentropy.

That's true but it is exceedingly temporary organizing principle. It's almost a humorous joke that there is negentropy. Kind of like our lives. They are exceedingly temporarily organized before we're dirt.

It seems that the universe creates geometries that organize other geometries into self-similar procreations. I don't know, maybe it is a cosmic joke, but it seems everything is making itself out there one way or another; and that begets a certain level of organizing.

Considering we have zero knowledge about dark matter and energy, but know it exists, we cannot really know what will happen in the future.

Maybe if the universe expands to certain point, dark energy will put a candy can in everyone's hand and every one of us will turn into Santa Claus. Who knows? We don't know the nature of dark energy and matter. No predictions are possible.

Surprised they didn't seek the answer in another work of classic science fiction:

The Nine Billion Names of God - https://lecturia.org/en/short-stories/arthur-c-clarke-the-ni...

I just read "l'anomalie" from Hervé le Tellier, Reading that post made me think of that book, I recommend it.

Maybe we should rather use rowhammers and spectres to gain information about parallel universes. ;)

This entire piece is one assumption after another.

> Maybe the puzzle is to escape the program, some sort of an advanced hacking test, a CTF? A competition between billions of species trying to get noticed by God?

The assumption here of course is that the goal is to escape. If there was a goal, it could be entirely different. The goal could be to answer a question, a lot like the earth of Douglas Adams.

> To escape any program you have to break one of its rules.

Not true. If the goal is to escape a program, another viable path is to find the exit condition. Maybe the entire program runs in a try-except, so crashing it isn't even viable. Perhaps the program itself doesn't even have a way of crashing at all. For example, I'm sure a quantum computer could do something unexpected, but I'm not sure it could crash.

> So, should we buffer overflow nature? The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that entropy, the amount of randomness and chaos in a closed system, always increases. This law -like any other law in the universe- is unbreakable, entropy could never be decreased. It could be increased tho.

There is no reason to believe that increasing entropy would cause anything. We can make exceptionally cold things, we can make exceptionally hot things, and in neither case did the Universe show any signs of anything.

I think if I was running a Universe simulation, I would want to set an interesting challenge:

1. We define intelligence loosely as the ability to have some concept of self and others. We can internally model these actors and loosely predict future events. If you were trying to find a super intelligent being, perhaps you would look for a being able to manipulate a hidden physical property that agents cannot otherwise naturally interact with. Searching the simulation for such a case could be relatively easy, you just look for abnormal behaviour in this physical property, maybe high entropy or patterns.

2. Maybe the purpose of our simulation is for the same reason we run simulations of our own universe. It could be a simplified version of their universe, and they are trying to model some future event. Perhaps if we all start nuking each other it might affect some policy decision in an external existence.

3. A lot of the ideas want to add meaning to our existence, but consider the possibility we are running on some computer that got a bit flipped in RAM and accidentally started overwriting it's own code. Some small set of rules were established, which then created everything we currently know. Somebody at some point will realise that the computer is no longer performing the task it is supposed to perform, and reboot it.

Almost expected a byline of "Thanos".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com