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It's frankly not all that clear what this even means. When cosmologists talk about the "universe," the generally mean the observable universe, which is all even
by nonameiguess 2y ago
It's frankly not all that clear what this even means. When cosmologists talk about the "universe," the generally mean the observable universe, which is all events that have ever happened in the past light-cone of the observer. Since space is expanding, that is constantly changing, with the expectation being that at some point, from the perspective of anything in our current galactic supercluster, everything else will become causally disconnected when the expansion rate exceeds the speed of light and will no longer be in "our" observable universe, where even then it isn't clear what "our" means as it's also likely by then that black holes will be the only baryonic matter still in existence, and there will no longer be humans, life, planets, or even light most of the time.
As those black holes degrade via Hawking radiation over however many quadrillions of quadrillions of year, without gravitationally bound superstructures of any kind, eventually all fundamental particles will be causally disconnected from all others, permanently.
What then does it mean to "emulate the universe inside the universe itself?" How do you emulate a single fundamental particle with only a single fundamental particle? What is the distinction between the emulation and the real thing? The real thing has nothing else to interact with, so it can't compute. It's state can't be measured because there is nothing to measure with.
In short, I hesitate to speculate about what can and can't be done with the universe because what the universe even is will change quite drastically over long enough spans of time.
- qingcharles 2y agoWell, I feel like an emulator for our universe should be able to boot off simply the initial seed value and a copy of the Total Laws of Physics(tm). If you could emulate it then you could access and see into all the parts of our universe which are currently unobservable. Of course, if you could emulate it sufficiently you should be able to scrub the timeline into the future and visit Milliways too.
- joquarky 2y agoThere's no point simulating a universe that lacks agents. When the last agent dies, the simulation should halt.