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?
Render distance would be reduced requiring us to come up with plausible theories to account for the fact that there is a limit to the size of the so-called ‘observable universe’
Things will stop making sense, people will start to glitch and make horrible decisions that will affect millions, and…
Wait
We download more RAM.
They take some users offline to free up some memory for everyone else
Limitations of hardware resources show up as “Natural Limits”, like the speed of light, in the simulation. The amount of RAM consumed translates to the Hubble Bubble, or the greatest distance light could have traveled since the beginning of our universe, and moreso to the amount of matter and energy contained within it, which is a constant. Energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed, only changed forms allowed, so a set amount from the beginning.
You should check out the short story “Sleepover” by Alastair Reynolds.
We go to sleep and it clears
Great, thanks for the dose of existential dread.
We can see that already when something approaches the speed of light: time slows down for it.
This simplification horribly misunderstands what time-dilation is, and I love it.
My vm is running out of ram.
I have a running theory that that’s also what’s going on with quantum physics, because I understand it so poorly that it just seems like nonsense to me. So in my head, I see it as us getting into some sort of source code we’re not supposed to see, and on the other side some programmers are going “fuck I don’t know, just make it be both things at once!” and making it up on the fly.
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.
you know, they’re made out of meat?
Singing meat!
The OOM killer goes on the prowl.
The server admins run a
kill -9on a few processes. Inside the sim, this looks a lot like the Chicxulub impact.
