David Kipping

And we don't know that's true.

So, again, putting my good scientist hat on, once we've demonstrated that it's possible, then I will agree with Elon Musk on that fact.

But until that has been demonstrated, then I'm just going to give it 50-50 odds.

But I love this, and I know you've had Sean Carroll on here, I think, before.

Sure.

He has a really clever comment about the simulation hypothesis that I've sort of been thinking about a little bit.

Maybe you call it like Carroll's contradiction, if you like.

And it's the idea that if we are simulated, and we ourselves start making our own simulations in the future, and those simulations make their own simulations, you get this kind of hierarchy.

And eventually there'll be some bottom level because every time we run a computer, it's got a finite amount of computational power.

So therefore, the inhabitants of that computer must necessarily have less computational resources than we do, right?

Because we could run a whole bunch of them.

They live in just one machine.

So they only have access to what's in there.

So every level has less and less fidelity, less computational power.

And eventually you'd get to a level where it was kind of like Donkey Kong from the 1980s or something, right?

Where simulations are just really crappy.

for them it would be impossible to do simulations so that i kind of call this the sewer of reality there must be a sewer a bottom level where you just lack the resources to do simulations and if you think about it most civilizations would in fact live in the sewer because because of the fanning out of this tree they would be the most populous type of simulation out there

So then you have this contradiction.

And the contradiction is that we most likely live in a simulation that can't do simulations, but we're assuming that simulations are possible.

Or inevitable.