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[noodle0117]

So in my current fort, I just received a massive new migrant wave that got me up to 87 dwarves. Prior to the migration, I had about ~95 fps, but now I only have ~80 fps.

So while thinking about how I should go about increasing the speed of the game, I suddenly thought about our world, the real world, and how amazing it is to be able to run smoothly and lag free despite having to calculate the pathing of billions of humans, trillions of animals, quadrillions of vermin and insects, calculate perceptibly perfect physics, thermodynamics, aerodynamics, lighting effects and radiation, all while being able to simultaneously calculate the mass, position, velocity, and electronegative qualities of every single moving atom and molecule in the air, ocean, and ground.

And now I feel like a complete nerd after that thought passed through my head.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Bear in mind that if the universe lagged, we wouldn't notice it, because we'd experience the same lag.

[noodle0117]

Oh yeah... for some reason I never thought of that.

[yaklin]

and now i have this terrifying image in my head of the whole universe frozen in time for all eternity due to a massive lag spike that nobody will ever notice

[Deon]

Why is it terrifying if it would affect nobody?

[Draxis]

What terrifying thing can you think of that causes massive lag?

[iceball3]

What terrifying thing can you think of that causes massive lag?

The big bang, and the big crunch. That's it I think...

[Draignean]

What terrifying thing can you think of that causes massive lag?

Cats, the universe will come to an end in a massive catsplosion and we shall all forever be frozen in time.

So in my current fort, I just received a massive new migrant wave that got me up to 87 dwarves. Prior to the migration, I had about ~95 fps, but now I only have ~80 fps.

So while thinking about how I should go about increasing the speed of the game, I suddenly thought about our world, the real world, and how amazing it is to be able to run smoothly and lag free despite having to calculate the pathing of billions of humans, trillions of animals, quadrillions of vermin and insects, calculate perceptibly perfect physics, thermodynamics, aerodynamics, lighting effects and radiation, all while being able to simultaneously calculate the mass, position, velocity, and electronegative qualities of every single moving atom and molecule in the air, ocean, and ground.

And now I feel like a complete nerd after that thought passed through my head.

The world isn't nearly as impressive when you compare it to the entire frickin' universe, Hundreds of Trillions of life forms, an almost infinite number of planetoids, warped space, shockwave remnants from the big bang... it boggles the mind to think about it at once.

Compared to that modern computers have the sophistication of an ant burping.

[Jeoshua]

Actually, the universe definitely does exhibit some lag-type effects, when traveling at relativistic speeds.  The best way it was ever explained to me is that one can have only a certain speed through space-time.  Traveling very fast through space leaves less energy to travel through time, slowing your perception down or "lagging".

Nifty thing about that, since your perception of time is slowed down... well let me walk you through it, yes? Speed is normally (distance traveled)/(time).  So if you are passing by an object, you can take two measurements x seconds apart, and then take the distance between them, and find out how fast you're going.

So what happens when your sense of time is highly warped, like it is near light speed?  If your time metric was slowed to 1/10th of your normal time, it would take you 10 times longer to make the measurement of objects passing by you.  Meaning they are traveling 10x the distance they normally would through your field of vision in seemingly the same amount of time, to you.

And since you're traveling objectively near the speed of light, you get to see things pass by you at Warp 10.

FTL travel is possible from this perspective, that of passengers.  But the rest of the universe doesn't play by the same rules as the traveler does.  It could theoretically take you 6 years to get to Sirius on a .99c ship.  60 light years away.  That's 10x light speed.

But when you get there, 60 years will have passed anyways.

[LShadow]

It's closer to the game than you might think. Matter/energy cause a gravitational field. The more gravity in an area, the more slowly time runs. So, if you interpret matter/energy as "information", then the universe does in fact run more slowly when there's more stuff to process.

[Setharnas]

Someone has to link it.

[nil]

"A technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true:

• The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero;
  
• The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero;
• The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.
  

If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3).
Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation."

[Jeoshua]

Why should proposition 2 be remotely true? What we are doing with DF, and The Sims, and Sim City, etc etc, is playing god with a simulation of humanity.  This shows conclusively that human kind likes playing god, or some significant fraction of those able to do.  Posthumanity comes from humankind, therefore will have some similarities.  There is no reason to assume that playing god will be less attractive a past time for a posthuman.

God-playing starts early for human beings.  We start as children playing with action figures and dolls, no matter our culture or technological advancement level.  As we get older and more mature, our god-play does not lessen, but rather takes on more advanced and explainable terms.  Instead of dolls, we play video games, or pen and paper rpgs.  In hours of our lives which are not play, we still imagine what it would be like for our children, plan things out, and similarly play god there.

So it can be seen that as human beings mature, both physically and culturally, the desire to play god does not lessen, but strengthens.  Posthumanity being a natural extension of the maturing of the human species, we cannot assume that this curve, so established, will deviate from that course.

I cry shenanigans on all three of those postulates, since none of them is provable, and at least one of them seems directly counter to an honest assessment of the human condition and our current direction of advancement.

[Armok]

You forgot the parts where 2 is ridiculously unlikely (for reasons Jeoshua said) and 1 means we'll go extinct within your lifetime, not in hundreds of years.

So the options are: 1) Evry simulation is doomed to become an Orwellian place where computer games are forbidden, 2) humanity will go extinct in your lifetime, 3) you are an NPC.

That is, IF you accept the implicit Anthropic axioms the argument is based on, which are highly dubious but mostly for reasons way to complicated and technical to bother discussion here. So basically you can come up with a nearly watertight argument for the above, and you only have my word there is a hole in them that makes it all invalid.

[Darvi]

The probability of humanity reaching post-humanity is exactly nil. For obvious reasons.