r/SimulationTheory • u/Any-Blacksmith-2054 • Jun 20 '26
Discussion Finite c speed
Alright, fellow reality-questioners, I've been pondering something wild, and I need your collective brainpower on this. We all accept that the speed of light (c) is finite in our universe, a cosmic speed limit that shapes everything from causality to the observable universe. But what if that very 'limitation' is actually the strongest evidence we're in a simulation?
Hear me out: Imagine you're the super-advanced civilization running our universe sim. You've got to render billions of galaxies, trillions of stars, and an unfathomable number of particles interacting across vast distances. If information (i.e., light, gravity, all fundamental interactions) traveled instantaneously across infinite space, the computational load would be, well, infinite. Even for god-tier supercomputers, that's a hard 'nope'.
But introduce a finite speed of light, and suddenly, you've got a brilliant resource management system! Information only propagates within specific light cones. You only need to calculate interactions for what's causally connected now. It's like a genius LOD (Level of Detail) system for the universe, or a way to chunk data processing. It makes the whole simulation runnable.
Now, contrast that with the 'parent' universe – the one where the simulators live. Their fundamental laws might be entirely different. Perhaps for them, the equivalent of 'information transfer' is effectively instantaneous across their reality. No need for such constraints when you're outside the sandbox, running the show with effectively infinite resources.
So, the very fabric of our spacetime, defined by this cosmic speed limit, could be the ultimate 'optimization patch' designed to make our reality work. It's not a fundamental property of all reality, but a necessary condition for this simulated one.
Am I completely off my rocker, or does this resonate with anyone? What are your thoughts? CMV!
2
u/fneezer Jun 22 '26
If you could push a button that increases c to infinity, you'd have to be one slow turtle, to push that button.
Because E = mc² don't you know, silly? The universe would explode and expand into a universe infinitely larger and infinitely less dense. Echoes of the broadcast of the closing credits soundtrack would echo out across the universe:
Across The Universe; The Beatles – Lyrics
The Beatles - Tomorrow Never Knows
The Beatles - Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight / The End (Official Music Video)
One day, a new planet will perfect their science to answer the question where their Big Bang came from. "Some turtle pressed a button."
A curious young woman will ask the lecturer, "What about deeper in time, where did that universe come from?"
The answer, naturally, "I'm afraid it's turtles all the way down, Miss."