Assuming our simulation is not designed to auto-scale (and our Admins don’t know how to download more RAM), what kind of side effects could we see in the world if the underlying system hosting our simulation began running out of resources?
Ever walk into a room and forget why you went in there? That’s garbage collection
I’m more concerned with what happens when the hardware invariably fails…
The universe ends when little Timmy gets sent to bed for the night.
We are the RAM
Stutterers
How would you know what physics runs the host universe? For all we know, things like ram limitations doesn’t even apply there
If our entire universe is a simulation so are our laws of physics, in the parent universe running our simulation the universe might be powered by pure imagination and the concept of memory or CPU cycles or even electricity might not even exist
That would only be a problem if you need dynamically allocated memory. It could be a statically allocated simulation where every atom is accounted for.
Given the whole “information can neither be created nor destroyed” aspect of atomic physics, taken literally, this theory checks out.
Why do you think our admins wouldn’t use autoscale, when they’ve obviously built it into the simulation?
adjacent answer, but resource requirements are lower than might be expected since the simulation only needs to capture elements observed by a conscious entity. the vast majority of the known universe has not been observed in any detail that requires significant memory or processing resources. this same technique is employed by computer game designers so that only scenery and elements within view of a player are fully rendered.
An automatic purge process will start to prevent this. It happened several times in the past. Last time between 2019-2022. It removed circa 7 million processes. With regular purges like this it is made sure that the resources are not maxed out before the admins can add more capacity.
You get stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner and the same movie/media coming out over and over again
Mandela effect too
You should check out the short story “Sleepover” by Alastair Reynolds.
Couldn’t they just suspend the simulation until they got more resources? We wouldn’t notice a thing.
I believe you are thinking in terms of a Turing-machine-like computer. I don’t think it’s possible today to “suspend” the bits in a quantum computer. I also don’t think it’s possible to know if the simulation could be paused (or even “added to” without losing its initial state).
They take some users offline to free up some memory for everyone else
@aCosmicWave we all just start moving more slowly.
Fortunately I can report that if anything, we"re having RAM added, because everything keeps speeding up as I get older.
