Alex Wissner-Gross

Maybe.

I don't know.

But either way, I don't think we're living inside anything resembling a simulation as we currently know it.

I do think that as we build out the Dyson Swarm, I think one of the many killer apps of a Dyson Swarm is going to be to build our own ancestor simulations.

I think it would be...

Completely transformative.

If we could take every human who's ever lived, and there's a whole strain of Russian cosmist philosophers, long dead, who argue that humanity's common task is to simulate, or in some sense digitally, they didn't use the term digitally at the time, but to use technology to resurrect every human who's ever lived.

And I do think that's going to be one of many killer apps of the Dyson Swarm and the singularity we're going to simulate at minimum every human who's ever lived.

I think there will be a revival of this cosmist philosophy, maybe neocosmism, where we argue it's almost humanity's common task to go and bring back everyone.

Things move quickly, don't they?

I'm pounding the drum.

And before me, science fiction authors like friend Charlie Strauss, who wrote Accelerando, by the way, best novel, I would argue, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, best work of Western literature ever, Accelerando, the notion of a Dyson Swarm.

So, perhaps some viewers may be familiar with the notion of a Dyson sphere.

This is the idea that we could disassemble a planet and build a sphere, a solid, rigid sphere, encasing our sun and then live on the interior of the sphere.

It would increase the habitable surface area of our solar system by many orders of magnitude if we could live on the interior of a sphere.

That's right.

The sun.

So at a uniform radius, we'd still see the sun in the sky, hypothetically.

Of course, this all falls to pieces because we don't know of a material that we could build a rigid sphere in, but it would sure be a compelling sci-fi vision if we could live on the inside of an enormous sphere encasing our sun.

there's a more practical alternative to a Dyson sphere, and that's a Dyson swarm.