Four billion years in four minutes – Simulating worlds on the GPU
davidar.io
davidar.io
Basically it's a cool sim when it's trying to simulate stuff that actually happened, and before it gets opinionated.
Moreover, it apparently equates heat with dryness, and also doesn't take into account the effect of additional CO2 on plant life. It is called a greenhouse effect for a reason. It's quite possible the equatorial belt could heat up to where it's uninhabitable by humans but overrun by jungle rather than desert.
Unfortunately, we live in an “Excel world”. The predominant thinking is that our highly complex world can be modeled into an excel sheet. And based on the outputs we should make decisions.
This approach mostly ignores the second order effects you describe.
But here’s a question for you, total arable land increases or decreases with a warmer wetter world? (We must consider soil as the soil in eg norther Canada is garbage and would take a millennium to improve)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Global_s...
> Annual food caloric production is the product of caloric yield, cropping frequency (CF, number of production seasons per year) and cropland area. Existing studies have largely focused on crop yield, whereas how CF responds to climate change remains poorly understood. Here, we evaluate the global climate sensitivity of caloric yields and CF at national scale. We find a robust negative association between warming and both caloric yield and CF. By the 2050s, projected CF increases in cold regions are offset by larger decreases in warm regions, resulting in a net global CF reduction (−4.2 ± 2.5% in high emission scenario), suggesting that climate-driven decline in CF will exacerbate crop production loss and not provide climate adaptation alone. Although irrigation is effective in offsetting the projected production loss, irrigation areas have to be expanded by >5% in warm regions to fully offset climate-induced production losses by the 2050s.
> “The final section is intended to illustrate a possible future, though perhaps an improbable one,” Roberts said. “I wanted it to be dramatic, so it is an illustration of a particularly extreme outcome where literally all of the fossil fuels are burned, but I tried to keep the effects realistic otherwise, based on scientific articles I've read about such a hypothetical.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgx7nq/watch-four-billion-ye...
We wrote an in-house editor that let us create and animate the different cratons, starting with the Pangaea configuration (basically all cratons stuck together as a giant continent) all the way through to how they are arranged now, to simulate how they moved historically. That was also difficult!
I also worked on the initial placement of some visual elements that dotted the landscape, and the serialization of the different data structures for loading/saving games.
After it shipped they gave each of us devs a couple of shrink-wrapped copies of the boxed final product but weirdly they were not the US version. I still have an (unopened) Portuguese version that probably has the poster.
Anyway, I was musing that I'd love to see a 3D globe with a time slider that I could play around with and visualize the (projected of course) movement of the plates to get us to where we are now.
Do you know of anything like that?
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19898.Assembling_Califor...
[2] excerpt: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/09/07/assembling-cal...
I really love thought pieces like this if you refrain from poking holes in the logic or physics. I love the idea of a multiverse where they’re all actually just identical so it’s mostly moot.
You probably have, but haven't thought of it like that. Ever seen a Director's Cut version of a movie? :-)
I guess I’ve just not yet faced it with print.
Sure you have, if you've ever bought an Nth edition of a book (where N > 1). Editions aren't always just an artwork/formatting change, they sometimes contain changes to the text too.
I've been thinking about writing a story with a very similar plot for a couple of years, but it had a big plot hole: computation overhead between the universes, and I hadn't thought about quantum computers as a way to solve it.
The other main difference with the story that I had in mind is that the characters would write a story about it, which would be "my" story, and they'd find a way to make it so that the ending would tell the reader the universe depth they are in, by creating a variable whose value is incremented by 1 for each universe.
For anyone reading this on HN, you're 8474771628371839 levels deep.
Unless you're going hard sci-fi, you can do what this story did. Give them by fiat "infinite processing power and infinite storage capacity."
Can't black holes already encode an infinite amount of information past the event horizon?
No, current physics has a bunch of hard limits on information.
> A new fundamental particle doesn’t necessarily make it soft sci-fi
Calling something a particle doesn’t matter here. It’s a fully formed computational device that happens to magically solve all problems.
Consider, how do you encode and read information from such a particle. Qubit’s are physical properties of something, such as spin. Is this particle supposed to have infinite properties which you can access with infinite precision? No, it’s just a magic macguffin that does whatever the author wants.
As a general rule I consider this unfair. It's okay for science fiction to be set in universes that have different physical laws than our own. Hard or soft sci-fi has nothing to do with whether the rules match up to reality, only whether they're internally consistent and whether they are delved into in technical detail.
Sure, there is no known particle in our universe that could do this, nor is there any known way for such a particle to exist. Does that mean its existence in the story makes the sci-fi soft? Take a look at how it's described:
> They - by which we now refer to Tim, Diane, their eight colleagues, their two supervisors, four chemical engineers, six electrical engineers, the janitor, a countable infinity of TEEO 9.9.1 ultra-medium-density selectably-foaming non-elasticised quantum waveform frequency rate range collapse selectors and the single tormented tau neutrino caught in the middle of it all - represented the sum total of the human race's achievements in the field of quantum computing. Specifically, they had, earlier that week, successfully built a quantum computer. Putting into practice principles it had taken a trio of appallingly intelligent mathematical statisticians some 10 years to mastermind, and which only about fifty-five other people in the world had yet got a grip on, they had constructed an engine capable of passing information to and processing the responses from what could, without hyperbole, be described as a single fundamental particle with infinite processing power and infinite storage capacity.
Sure you could call it a MacGuffin, but it's not magic, it's clearly science (just within their universe). It's clearly explained to have been science. Maybe it's not explained in infinite detail, but it does not need to be. Nothing about this looks like soft sci-fi to me.
Nothing about qntm's other stories - Ra, Fine Structure, and a bunch of the short ones - seem like soft sci-fi to me either. I mean, seriously, Ra contains academic lectures[0] where the whole speech, parts of the equations, and the principles behind them are all actually explained to the reader in detail, not just glossed over. There is even an appendix where the actual in-universe mechanics behind the "magic" are explained.[1] And another one where a specific case of it is thoroughly considered and explained.[2] This is science. Fictional science, but that is what science fiction is. There's not really anything soft about it, imho.
[0]: https://qntm.org/know (warning: few chapters into Ra)
[1]: https://qntm.org/what, https://qntm.org/spells (many spoilers)
Hard: is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction
Soft: refer to science fiction which prioritizes human emotions over scientific accuracy or plausibility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_science_fiction
Hard refers to science fiction that matches our understanding of physics, mathematics, etc. If they discover an unknown particle or effect not theorized to exist in scientific literature it’s by definition not Hard science fiction.
Operating at the unknown edge where we don’t know what it takes to make AGI so under or overestimating the hardware requirements is fine. Tossing away our physics and replacing it with whatever is needed for the story to function is the definition of soft science fiction.
Granted degrees of soft science fiction exist. Jurassic Park is close enough to the boarder of Hard Science fiction it’s a little debatable, where Star Wars is fantasy with shapeships.
I was going off the Google definitions, oops.
> Star Trek is filled with academic lectures, fundamental particles, etc but its underlying physics is soft.
Yes, that's true, and I agree. Star Trek isn't really fully internally consistent or rigorous because advanced/alien technology is simply the setting. Most of it is about the people, not the science.
> Hard refers to science fiction that matches our understanding of physics, mathematics, etc. If they discover an unknown particle or effect not theorized to exist in scientific literature it’s by definition not Hard science fiction.
Since when? From Wikipedia:
> The heart of the "hard science fiction" designation is the relationship of the science content and attitude to the rest of the narrative, and (for some readers, at least) the "hardness" or rigor of the science itself.
> One requirement for hard SF is procedural or intentional: a story should try to be accurate, logical, credible and rigorous in its use of current scientific and technical knowledge about which technology, phenomena, scenarios and situations that are practically or theoretically possible.
Existing in a different universe from ours doesn't make it automatically soft, if their current scientific and technical knowledge is still rigorous in the same way that ours is. As an example, their book "Ra" seems absolutely like hard sci-fi to me, even though there exists within it an actual concept of "magic" (!), because (without spoilers) the phenomenon called magic is fully defined, and there is no element of arcanity to it.
But I guess you're right that this specific story might not count as hard sci-fi; though I don't agree that it's because of the particle's existence but rather the way it is regarded: the point of the story is to explore the philosophical implications of such a machine existing, not to explore the actual science of the machine.
Their other stories, like "Ra" and "Fine Structure", certainly explore the science of their respective universes/situations, not just the philosophical implications, and I would count both of those examples as hard sci-fi, having read both.
One of the references linked from Wikipedia wants not some consistent set of laws but also facts about our universe like the moon not having an atmosphere. https://books.google.com/books?id=PiphRocVYRwC&pg=PA187#v=on... Thus a platypus should be closely related to mammals even though it lays eggs. In a different universe different genealogies are possible even with identical physics, but that doesn’t fit our science.
So by “rigor of the science itself” it’s in reference to our science not the stories universe because:
> Existing in a different universe
Any story could work in some theoretical universe. Olympian gods could exist with the right physics and any child learning how the world works is exploring that physics.
> if their current scientific and technical knowledge is still rigorous in the same way that ours is
I think what you’re looking for is Rationalist fiction which cares about the consistency of the setting’s internal rules but not how close the physics matches ours. ‘Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality’ fits as soft science fiction and rationalist fiction. The main character is definitely trying to understand how the world works and carries out many experiments, things just don’t fit our physics.
Meanwhile you can have Hard Science fiction with primitive humans exploring the ruins of our civilization who don’t have the slightest idea of the scientific method. That line between possibility and not is a meaningful line and we came up with words to describe it.
I will admit the term “Hard” has gotten somewhat diluted over time, but it’s still grounded by our scientific knowledge.
I suppose even Ra still obeys the speed of light, though.
"Do you know how big the average positive integer is?"
888 412 1289018?
0118 999 881 999 119 7253?
... 262144 4782969 100000000 2357947691 61917364224 1792160394037 56693912375296 1946195068359375 :)
Maybe I've encoded the name in this comment (honestly though, I tried, and it's late - maybe search engines are good enough for it these days :) )
Lots of fun, but I unfortunately never managed to find anything similar to do in my job.
[0]: https://globalchange.mit.edu/research/research-tools/eppa
Taking a look, the CSS throws warnings about being ignored; adding "position: absolute" fixes that and makes the button fully visible.
If we are, we're in a sandbox that cant be escaped. live your best life and get on with it
If we aren't Live your best life and get on with it.
I've never seen the point of the question.
Nobody said the simulation had to be run on semiconductors.
But since we have a beginning, and a flow of time, we probably also have a birth, a mother, and maybe even a purpose... but that's a very human way to think, might all just be random soup.
But imagine there's a self-aware agent in a simulation we create, he starts thinking the same thoughts, everyone mock him "we're all just random, there is no God, no design, how could so much energy be spent on such a useless giant block of empty space for any reason", he would have to sort of agree, but he would be sort of wrong. And discovering us, would bring him no solace: we can't tell him of our own designers ourselves. Discovering them, would bring us no solace either, for the same reason. That's why the concept of God is stupid: God has a God too, so what do we do now, solved no problem to accept His existence.
The problem is, the nature of this style of simulation, as opposed to the Bostrom theory ("the" simulation theory (singular, there can be only one)), makes it (nearly) impossible to realize.
This is both tragic and hilarious, especially since we have extensive knowledge of this flaw.
What's the language for that?
(The music is pretty cliche. Maybe it was written by AI)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine:_Music_from_the_Motio...
https://open.spotify.com/intl-fr/track/50ExtKr8j9cHTY3OEw282...
I asked Siri to identify the song.
Tomorrow: "When you gaze long into the simulation, the simulation gazes back"