theantimedia | Already, the Department of Defense has created the Sentient World Simulation, a real-time “synthetic
mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with
respect to current real-world information, such as major events, opinion
polls, demographic statistics, economic reports, and shifts in trends,” according to a working paper on the system.
In recent years, other scientists have conducted research and even
experimentation in attempts to show actual evidence of the Simulation.
Heads turned last year when theoretical physicist S. James Gate
announced he had found strange computer code in
his String Theory research. Bound inside the equations we use to
describe our universe, he says, is peculiar self-dual linear binary
error-correcting block code.
A team of German physicists has
also set out to show that the numerical constraints we see in our
universe are consistent with the kinds of limitations we would see in a
simulated universe. These physicists have invoked a non-perturbative
approach known as lattice quantum chromodynamics to try to discover whether there is an underlying grid to the space/time continuum.
So far their efforts have recreated a minuscule region of the known
universe, a sliver of a corner that is but a few femtometers across. But
this corner simulates the hypothetical lattice of the universal grid,
and their search for a corresponding physical restraint turned up a
theoretical upper limit on high-energy particles known as the
Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin, or GZK cut off. In other words, there are aspects of our universe that look and behave as a simulation might.
With news that there are two anonymous tech billionaires working on a secret project to
break us out of the Matrix, it’s hard to know whether we should laugh
or scream in horror. Simulation talk is great epistemological fun and
metaphysical amusement of the highest order, but it may speak to an
underlying anxiety regarding the merging of our reality with machines,
or an underlying existential loneliness. It’s even been posited as a
solution to the Fermi Paradox. Why haven’t we met aliens? Well, because we live inside a world they built.
