Category Archive: Speculation

Wild speculation about the nature of the universe. I don't necessarily believe the theories proposed here; but I think they are worth thinking about.

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November 22, 2005

Worldbuilding

My intent when I started this blog was that it would reflect the kinds of things I actually spend my time thinking about (within the limits of propriety when it comes to my job and other people). I have however come to realize that there is a whole class of stuff I think about which hasn't really been captured here. I'm not sure I am going to make it a regular feature of this blog; but I should at least acknowledge its existence.

I have long aspired to be a fiction writer (specifically a writer of science fiction and fantasy); but truth be told, what gets me excited about developing fiction is creating the background of the stories – elaborating in my mind and in my notes the world in which the story takes place, not the story itself. I have begun to suspect that this is why I never get around to finishing my stories – once I have developed all of the details of the background; I become disinterested in the story itself.

The result is I spend (waste?) a lot of time thinking about questions like: How big of a crew would a spaceship like that have? What kind of ecology would keep all of those monsters alive in the evil forest? (Saying "its magic" is just a cop-out to me.) What does the reproductive cycle of this alien species look like and how has it shaped their culture? How does "magic" work? What are its limits?

I have designed several alien species from the ground up, including what other kinds of life forms would appear on their planet to fill in the various ecological niches. Perhaps the most interesting is a species that has three and a half genders which are involved in reproduction (one gender undergoes a transformation in their lifecycle which results in their serving a slightly different role in the process late in life). The complexities of their reproductive cycle would of course result in complexities in their society, which I also developed.

Likewise I have designed many spaceships, and considered the effect of different technologies on the politics and culture of the society that uses them. While faster-than-light travel appears to be impossible in the real world, just what rules you choose to break in order to get it to work can have interesting consequences. Consider two solutions: A "warp drive" that allows you to travel faster than light, along with the technologies that allow you to detect and attack such craft in transit (essentially the "Star Trek" model). Alternatively you could have a "Jump Drive" that (after allowing the drive to "charge up") allows you to instantaneously jump to a distant location in the universe, where your ability to detect spacecraft is still limited to slower-than-light means.

A key observation is that "Warp Drive" encourages empire building while "Jump Drive" discourages it? Why? Because a primary motivation for building geographically large political organizations is that (because of fundamentals of geometry) their borders grow more slowly than their volume. Thus the larger the political entity, the more resources they can put into defending each unit of border. That's all well and good when the technology provides the means to defend borders (as "Warp Drive" would); but consider "Jump Drives" – as described, you could jump and attack any planet inside your enemy's territory, without actually passing through the border, so the advantage of size is completely lost. I once started outlining a story set in a galactic republic (which had been built using a "warp drive") soon after the discovery of "jump drive" technology. The story was about the fall of the empire (with hints towards the problems of fighting a war on terrorists using a military designed to fight more conventional wars.)

Actually, it is quite often that I come up with one story idea, and in the process of fleshing out the world surrounding it, I discover that the "real story" is elsewhere. A long time ago I started a fantasy story where griffons started attacking the livestock maintained by some villages (the story was about two heroes with different approaches to solving the problem). The story however got me thinking: Why did the griffon start attacking? Why Now? My answer was that a dragon had moved in and made a nest in the mountains, and was eating so much that the griffons has to travel farther to get their meals. But then why did the dragon move? At that point I saw an interesting pattern – the dragon moved because of some change where it had been living, which was caused by something else, which had been caused by something else, which finally led back to the villages building a dam on the river. The real story then become one of ecological consequences, and was much more interesting than the one I started with. But, as usual, once I had worked out the details, I lost interest in the project.

Anyway, I don't know how much of this kind of random speculation I want to spend time writing up (if for no other reason than a good deal of it is intrinsic to stories I'd still like to write someday, even if I have doubts that I ever will); but I at least wanted to acknowledge that I spend a fair amount of energy doing this.

Posted by Steven at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

April 27, 2005

My Quantum Pseudoscience.

After the movie "The Matrix" came out (the original one) a common theme of hallway conversation was "How do we know if we are or aren't living inside of a giant computer simulation?" Well, if you assume that the computer running the simulation is a digital computer – perhaps many generations more advanced than the ones we used today; but using a similar architecture, then I think there are several key indicators we could use to tell.

First, one characteristic of simulations of digital computers is that they have limited precision. Every value gets stored in some number of bits, and there is therefore some smallest value of everything which can be represented. When you write the simulation you try and make that value very small (usually by allocating a lot of bits for the value, or using some kind of floating point technique); but it always exists. If the minimum value is small enough, then when you deal with large values, it rarely makes a difference (the difference between 30,000 and 30,001 is generally imperceptible); but when you get down to low values of what ever it is, the jump from 1 to 2 to 3 represents fairly large percentage changes. So, if we were all living in a computer simulation, we'd expect when we looked at very small values of things that their behavior isn't very smooth.

A special case of this is dealing with the locations of things....

A special case of this is dealing with the locations of things. A computer monitor displays information in pixels which form in nice neat rows and columns. You can put a dot "on" a pixel; but you can't actually put a dot in between pixels. Now there's a technique (technical term: anti-aliasing); where you spread the dot out in a statistical manner. So if you want it to be on the line in between two pixels, you put 50% of its color in one pixel and 50% in the other. The idea is that when the human eye looks at that from a distance, it will average things out and make you think that the dot is in between when it isn't. Now pixels are 2 dimensional concepts, but there is a 3 dimensional equivalent: voxels, and they have the same issue – there is a smallest unit of position and the only way to fake that out is to spread the location of things over several voxels.

Second, digital computers work using a finite clock speed. That's what all the Megahertz and Gigahertz talk is all about – it takes time for computers to do something. In simulations this means that you take the information about where everything is "now" and then calculate where everything will be in some small amount of time later. The result is that in computer simulations, time jumps in steps – there is a smallest unit of time (just as there is a smallest unit of everything else). Game players know this as the "frame rate" problem – that because it takes time to do all of this calculation, the computer can only update the screen a limited number of times a second. If that "frame rate" is high enough, you never notice (televisions in the use a frame rate of 60 times a second, and few people notice); but if the frame rate gets down to 5-10, it becomes impossible to play some games. Now if we all live in a computer simulation, its would seem that the frame rate is fairly high; but still if you look at things happening fast enough, you would expect to find sudden jumps in time.

Third, digital computers themselves are finite, and therefore can not be used to actually simulate an infinite universe. Game developers face the same problem – how to keep players from "walking off the edge of the map" and ruining the illusion of the simulation. Many resort to brute force solution – building impassable walls in the games that keep the players in the area that is simulated. Others are more creative – they leave the illusion that you could just walk in one direction forever; but make the journey impractical. Now if we are all in a computer simulation, it's clear the author(s) of that simulation want us to believe the universe is infinite (or at least very large), so we would expect to find some means to dissuade us from heading off in one direction and finding the edge of the simulation.

So how does the world we live in stack up?

Well, Quantum Mechanics says that all of the key pieces of information in the universe – energy, change, spin, etc. are all "quantized" – they all have some smallest unit, and it is impossible to have smaller that that unit. When you get down into small energies and small charges, you see these big jumps from 1 to 2 to 3. Exactly what you'd expect if we were living in a computer simulation.

Furthermore, the latest attempts at a "Grand Unified Theory" in physics (a "Theory of Everything") – theories like Quantum Loop Gravity, specify that space and time are also quantized. That there is a smallest unit of distance and of time – just as you would expect in a computer simulation. But even without resorting to the latest theories (which are far from proven), basic quantum mechanics says that things typically don't have precise positions – they tend to be spread out probabilistically over several locations – just like anti-aliasing pixels or voxels.

Finally – what about some way to keep us from realizing the simulation is limited? Well, The theory of Relativity puts an upper bound of how fast we can move, and in fact makes it infinitely costly to go even that fast. Because of relativity, travel outsize of our solar system is going to be a very slow process, and communication with anyone doing it will be limited and slow. An excellent solution if you ask me. It discourages anyone from trying, and if someone tries, you have the time to set up a separate simulation for the traveler and have opportunity to control the communication between the simulations.

Interesting eh?

To be completely clear, I do NOT believe that this is the case. However, I have to admit that there is nothing about this scenario which actually contradicts anything which I do believe, and as a software engineer I find the idea that God may also be a software engineer (and a pretty impressive one at that) strangely comforting.

Posted by Steven at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)