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| The late, great DNA |
More than 30 years ago, Douglas Adams wrote his famous Hitchhiker's Guide novels
around the idea that the Earth was a giant, purpose built computer
simulation intended to answer a question (actually, to question an
answer) of staggering difficulty. Of course, this was all in good fun,
but the idea is actually very interesting.
Maybe Adams just didn’t think big enough. There has been much discussion in the last few years about whether our entire universe is in fact a computer simulation (by hyper intelligent, pan-dimensional mice, if you like). This was first seriously proposed in a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom,
We don’t know how to build or program such a computer ourselves, but
we can imagine that it could be built, and if our universe is a
simulation, there is no way to know what actual constraints might exist.
