Life, Universe and everything within

[Hampus Andersson]

Just stating what you do. If you don´t like that then stop doing that in the future.
It´s a forum so what you write is etched in stone here.
Would be hard for me to make up things here.

And how can you expect me to treat you with any form of respect after all that you did?
Are you insane? You sure are starting to show traits of it.

And you obviously missed the point of this thread as well.

P.S. don´t talk about "class" because you don´t have any of it.

 

[Kennett Ylitalo]

1000C to -150C in 1/100s ..just wow

 

[Chronus]

We are fortunate to live in a time when we have great science communicators such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku and Brian Greene (all of them physicists).

For those interested in understanding some of the ideas at the base of Quantum Mechanics, here is a good Nova documentary with Brian Greene:

 

[Hampus Andersson]

On the theory of Digital Physics with a NASA Scientist.

Two years ago, Rich Terrile appeared on Through the Wormhole, the Science Channel’s show about the mysteries of life and the universe. He was invited onto the program to discuss the theory that the human experience can be boiled down to something like an incredibly advanced, metaphysical version of The Sims.
It’s an idea that every college student with a gravity bong and The Matrix on DVD has thought of before, but Rich is a well-regarded scientist, the director of the Center for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is currently writing an as-yet-untitled book about the subject, so we’re going to go ahead and take him seriously.
The essence of Rich’s theory is that a “programmer” from the future designed our reality to simulate the course of what the programmer considers to be ancient history—for whatever reason, maybe because he’s bored.
According to Moore’s Law, which states that computing power doubles roughly every two years, all of this will be theoretically possible in the future. Sooner or later, we’ll get to a place where simulating a few billion people—and making them believe they are sentient beings with the ability to control their own destinies—will be as easy as sending a stranger a picture of your genitals on your phone.
This hypothesis—versions of which have been kicked around for centuries—is becoming the trippy notion of the moment for philosophers, with people like Nick Bostrom, the director of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, seriously considering the premise.
Until recently, the simulation argument hadn’t really attracted traditional researchers. That’s not to say he is the first scientist to predict our ability to run realistic simulations (among others, Ray Kurzweil did that in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines), but he is one of the first to argue we might already be living inside one. Rich has even gone one step further by attempting to prove his theories through physics, citing things like the observable pixelation of the tiniest matter and the eerie similarities between quantum mechanics, the mathematical rules that govern our universe, and the creation of video game environments.
Just think: Whenever you **** up there could be the intergalactic version of an overweight 13-year-old Korean boy controlling you and screaming “****!” into an Xbox headset. It sort of takes the edge off things.

VICE: When did you first surmise that our reality could be a computer simulation?
Rich Terrile: Unless you believe there’s something magical about consciousness—and I don’t, I believe it’s the product of a very sophisticated architecture within the human brain—then you have to assume that at some point it can be simulated by a computer, or in other words, replicated. There are two ways one might accomplish an artificial human brain in the future. One of them is to reverse-engineer it, but I think it would be far easier to evolve a circuit or architecture that could become conscious. Perhaps in the next ten to 30 years we’ll be able to incorporate artificial consciousness into our machines.

We’ll get there that fast?
Right now the fastest NASA supercomputers are cranking away at about double the speed of the human brain. If you make a simple calculation using Moore’s Law, you’ll find that these supercomputers, inside of a decade, will have the ability to compute an entire human lifetime of 80 years—including every thought ever conceived during that lifetime—in the span of a month.

That’s depressing.
Now brace yourself: In 30 years we expect that a PlayStation—they come out with a new PlayStation every six to eight years, so this would be a PlayStation 7—will be able to compute about 10,000 human lifetimes simultaneously in real time, or about a human lifetime in an hour.
There’s how many PlayStations worldwide? More than 100 million, certainly. So think of 100 million consoles, each one containing 10,000 humans. That means, by that time, conceptually, you could have more humans living in PlayStations than you have humans living on Earth today.

So there’s a possibility we’re living in a super advanced game in some bloodshot-eyed goober’s PlayStation right now?
Exactly. The supposition here is how do you know it’s not 30 years in the future now and you’re not one of these simulations? Let me go back a step here. As scientists, we put physical processes into mathematical frameworks, or into an equation. The universe behaves in a very peculiar way because it follows mathematics. Einstein said, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it’s comprehensible.” The universe does not have to work that way. It does not have to be so easy to abbreviate that I can basically write down a few pages of equations that contain enough information to simulate it.
The other interesting thing is that the natural world behaves exactly the same way as the environment of Grand Theft Auto IV. In the game, you can explore Liberty City seamlessly in phenomenal detail. I made a calculation of how big that city is, and it turns out it’s a million times larger than my PlayStation 3. You see exactly what you need to see of Liberty City when you need to see it, abbreviating the entire game universe into the console. The universe behaves in the exact same way. In quantum mechanics, particles do not have a definite state unless they’re being observed. Many theorists have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how you explain this. One explanation is that we’re living within a simulation, seeing what we need to see when we need to see it.
Which would explain why there have been reports of scientists observing pixels in the tiniest of microscopic images.
Right. The universe is also pixelated—in time, space, volume, and energy. There exists a fundamental unit that you cannot break down into anything smaller, which means the universe is made of a finite number of these units. This also means there are a finite number of things the universe can be; it’s not infinite, so it’s computable. And if it only behaves in a finite way when it’s being observed, then the question is: Is it being computed? Then there’s a mathematical parallel. If two things are mathematically equivalent, they’re the same. So the universe is mathematically equivalent to the simulation of the universe.

Do you play video games?
I do, actually, and I’ve played The Sims before, but coming up with this theory was the result of a combination of several things. I’m a planetary scientist, so I think a lot about the future of technology and where it might lead us. I also do a lot of work in evolutionary computation and artificial intelligence, where I’m dealing with the nature of consciousness. Plus, I began thinking about religion, or what you believe about the universe if you’re an atheist, which means you have to believe there’s an alternative origin story independent of a creator. And we have a pretty good one: the Big Bang. But you also have to think about engineering and if a creator could exist in our current universe. And if so, what are the requirements of said creator? After thinking about it, I realized that a creator of a universe is capable of changing the laws of physics and sculpting whatever this universe is, which I can do in a computer simulation. In fact, I’ll maybe be able to do that soon with conscious beings.

Beings with whom you could interact?
Maybe, or maybe I’d just let them go. They’d be living out their lives in an incredibly short amount of time. Maybe I could change the physical laws. I could make them live in places both hospitable and inhospitable. I could make it so that they’re completely alone—perhaps that’s a boundary condition for us, and explains why there are no aliens.

You seem really at peace with this concept. When I first heard about your theory I was incredibly bummed but, obviously, intrigued.
I find great inspiration in it, and I’ll tell you why: It tells me that we’re at the threshold of being able to create a universe—a simulation—and that we in turn could be living inside a simulation, which could be in turn yet another simulation. And our simulated beings could also create simulations. What I find intriguing is, if there is a creator, and there will be a creator in the future and it will be us, this also means if there’s a creator for our world, here, it’s also us. This means we are both God and servants of God, and that we made it all. What I find inspiring is that, even if we are in a simulation or many orders of magnitude down in levels of simulation, somewhere along the line something escaped the primordial ooze to become us and to result in simulations that made us. And that’s cool.

http://www.vice.com/read/whoa-dude-are-we-inside-a-computer-right-now-0000329-v19n9

 

[Mark Gormley]

The atoms in your left arm might not come from the same star as the ones in your right arm.

Has someone been reading a bit of Krauss?

 

[Dennis Phelan]

Would having too many atoms from one star in your body constitute a blood marriage or incest?

 

[Chronus]

 

[Hampus Andersson]

Has someone been reading a bit of Krauss?

This guy you mean?

I have only watched one video on him, about the Universe being flat, round, how it will end, big crunch, etc.

But what i said could very well be true, same with earth.
All atoms on our earth might not come from the same star.
I´m not saying they are, just that the possibility definitely is there.

A piece of rock could have traveled through the universe and collided with our piece of rock that we now know as Earth and thus you have atoms from two completely different stars.

 

[Hampus Andersson]

Would having too many atoms from one star in your body constitute a blood marriage or incest?

If everything came from one dot (i.e Big Bang) does it mean everything is incest after that?

 

[Mark Gormley]

This guy you mean?

Yes, that's him. I finished his book, 'A universe from nothing', last week. If you liked his YouTube lecture I'd recommend it, it's very good.

 

[Hampus Andersson]

Yes, that's him. I finished his book, 'A universe from nothing', last week. If you liked his YouTube lecture I'd recommend it, it's very good.

Will definitely check it out, thanks!

 

[Hampus Andersson]

Been thinking about a thing... (oh really, what a surprise...)

Anyway, How much land would one person have if we took a quarter of the earth´s surface (land surface) and divided it by say 20 billion?
How much land would 20 billion people get out of a quarter of the earth?

I think everyone should have the right to atleast 10x10m of land on earth and wanted to know if it was even possible.

 

[Rhys Gardiner]

This chart >>> http://chartsbin.com/view/wwu <<< shows the Total Surface Area (TSA) of the Earth. Since 70.8% of Earth's surface is water (both fresh and salt), this means that there is 29.2% left over for land. If you were to give everyone 25% of the total surface area of the earth, it would be 85.62% of all of Earth's land. Even then, not all of that is habitable, but I'll address that in a bit.

From this article >>> http://www.universetoday.com/25756/surface-area-of-the-earth/ <<< we can assume that the TSA of Earth's land is 149 million square km as quoted in the article. 85.62% of 149,000,000 is 127,573,800 square km. Further divide that by 20 billion (20,000,000,000) and you get this:

6.37869x10^-3 square km for every person out of those 20 billion. That's 0.00637869 square km, which (using an online converter) equates to
6378.690m² per person.

That's much, much more than the minimum 100 square meters (10x10=100) that you specify in your post, Hampus... so by these calculations, everyone gets a pretty fair deal!

However (and this is what I briefly mentioned earlier):

The chart in my first link notes that only 8.76% of Earth's total TSA is farmable. Everywhere else is essentially inhospitable. If you want everyone to be able to live off the land they own, it must be this farmable land. So let's alter the calculations a bit to take this into account.
8.76 out of 29.2 is 30% of Earth's land TSA. 30% of 149,000,000 is 44,700,000 square km.

Divide 44,700,000 by 20,000,000,000 and you get 2.235x10^-3 square km per person. That is 0.002235 square km per person, which when fed through the converter is
2235.0m² per person.

Which is still a lot more than 10x10 metres. Give everyone their own little water supply and they'd still have more space than that to live in.

So, long story short - whichever way you look at it - Yes, Hampus, it's possible.

(Dammit, I should be in bed right now...)

 

[Hampus Andersson]

wow thanks for all of that, that was brilliant Wish i could like it twice!

Ok so despite using 20 billion (not sure we really will reach that number) and giving everyone a piece of "good" land we are still way above the "roof".

That´s amazing really. If i were a politician or the top dog in a country i would work towards something like this.
I know there´s massive complications with cities and other stuff and the fact that most if not all is already owned either by person or government.

To me it just makes sense that everyone on this planet should have an equal share of land they can do whatever they want with.
We all essentially come from the earth thus it belongs to everyone.
I don´t even know how you as a government can claim X piece of land then charge money for it, who told them they magically just owned that piece of land?

Even if i want a piece of the earth, 10x10m why should i pay the government, a thing that essentially doesn´t even exist concretely speaking.
Most are rethorical questions that nobody has to answer but it´s food for thought imo.

I think i have the right to a small piece of land to do what i want with.
But that´s just my opinion, someone might differ on that

Or the government can take out a median of what that piece of land would cost and simply give every single individual that amount of money so that they buy it from Humans.

 

[Rhys Gardiner]

It's certainly a reasonable thing to want. The best part of that idea for me is that since you own that piece of land, and everyone gets the same as you, the onus would be on you to take care of your share to the best of your ability.

After typing up my previous post, I remembered a very interesting video I watched that relates somewhat to this land-and-human-population question. The video is mostly about other things (that are still very interesting!), but the stuff I'm talking about starts at 1:28 into the video...

For spoilers, highlight the space between the brackets: [ If the entire human population alive right now - 7 billion people - were put into a packed crowd standing shoulder to shoulder, we would fit into an area THE SIZE OF LOS ANGELES. Shows you just how small we are, really. ]

Mind = Blown.

 

[Chronus]

Insignificant we may be, Rhys, but...

 

[Rhys Gardiner]

Insignificant we may be, Rhys, but...

Oh, indeed. We are small but our influence, and the damage we can cause to ourselves and the environment, is greater than we can imagine.

 

[Hampus Andersson]

Just read that around 56 million people die every year. That´s crazy.
My country has 9 million people. That´s 6 full countries becoming ghost towns every year.

the "good" side is 133 million people are born every year.
Human population is increasing with 200.000 lives every single day.

Basically if Sweden was empty it would take 45 days to fill it up
That´s insane lol.

Another interesting fact is that 90% of these 200.000 people a day are born in developing countries.

It´s an interesting thing that the better man has it, the less offspring it will produce.
(not specific to man but in general every life-form)

 

[Hampus Andersson]

Edited, for correct info,

All this means that in the 200,000 years since Homo Sapiens took her first steps across the African plains, just 57 billion people have ever lived. Astonishingly that means over 12% of all the people ever born are walking the planet at this very moment. Or to put it another way: one in eight people who have ever been born are alive today.

 

[Hampus Andersson]

Awesome news! Scientists have found a planet just 40 lightyears away from us, it's star you can see with bare eyes and the planet is twice the size of our planet.

The awesome bit? They believe at least one third of the planet is covered in Diamond.
The rest Graphite.

Thats insane! Must be quite a sight on that planet.