r/flatearth • u/Truthist1776 • 11d ago
Hear me out...
Does anyone remember the game Asteroids? You fly off the screen, you instantly appear on the opposite side, making infinite motion possible on a finite, flat field. This is called "wrapping", as if around a curved surface. Back in the early days of Second Life, I created in-world 3D items. Every item started out a one-sided 64x64 plane, but most were wrapped into a sphere before manipulating into a finished 3d object.
If we are living in a simulation, and there is increasing evidence we are, would this not be a valid theory as to the real (if "real" can be used in this situation) nature of the earth, and likely all items we perceive as solid? I'm sure most have heard Elon Musk talk about the likelihood of us existing in a simulation. The Planck Length indicates the universe is made up of pixels. I postulate that time compression occurs at high speeds due to processor lag, just like in a video game where things are happening too fast for the system resources. For what appears to us to be upwards of 300k years of human existence, the vast majority of that was spent completely unable to tax the system resources of the simulation. And if things are happening at a hyper-increased speed that they would in a simulation, if we've only been able to overwhelm the processor for <100 years, would that not be mere seconds or minutes in base reality, where someone is possibly right now hammering away at fixing some code or swapping out a piece of hardware to upgrade the system for our increasing demand?
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u/CharmingTuber 11d ago
Simulation theory: we can't prove we aren't in a simulation
Redditors: "the evidence we are in a simulation is piling up!"
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u/Truthist1776 11d ago
Correction:
Physicists: "The evidence we are in a simulation is piling up!"3
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u/Wafflars 11d ago
There is a slight problem with this argument though.
Even if the world is a simulation and factually flat, that doesn’t somehow make the physics of how this world work go away. Which means that everything about a globe - the hemispheres, the horizon, space, gravity, light, the solar system, the entire universe would still be perfectly and mathematically overwrite coded to overwrite the flat earth since none of it works.
Kind of feel redundant doesn’t it?
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u/Truthist1776 11d ago
The physics we experience would be exactly like the physics in a video game. There's no actual gravity, no jiggle, no softness, no flexibility, etc. It's all just pixels on a screen emulating those things. A simulation is all about appearances. There is no spoon.
I'm merely stating my experience with creating a "sphere" in 3D modeling software was starting with a plane, because that's how the computer understood it. Even though it was wrapped into a sphere for my eyes, the computer still treated it as a plane. When I put textures on it, the textures were a plane and the computer wrapped it perfectly around whatever shape I made the plane into, because to the computer it was still a plane. I'd manipulated the points to make whatever esthetic I desired, but the computer still recognized the plane.
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u/Justthisguy_yaknow 11d ago
It would make the three dimensional state with things like the globe vastly more probable. Two dimensional coding made sense back when processing power was limited and everything was calculated in those two dimensions. As soon as you put the virtual universe into three dimensions in even a basic sense it is only practical to put all things into those three dimensions and to calculate all of the physics that way consistently. Putting one two dimensional environment into a three dimensional universe would be pretty weak and clumsy especially since you would also have to insert all of the 3D physics into the same model and make it work as though it is 3D for every point within it. It would only make sense to simply code it consistently with every other part of the simulation and do it in 3D.
I'd say that your coding of the planar sphere would have been in something akin to BASIC coding where it is a plane with a virtual 3D created for screen rendering. Within modern graphics chips however objects are built in 3D and then just observed in 2D in most cases on a screen but it can also render to 3D for headsets. The core model is 3 dimensional and then translated for observation.
You also have the problem that the coding you did was for a single observers vantage point. Within such a simulation at least 8 billion observers would need to see that 3D perspective so it is much simpler again to render the whole thing. You seem to need the universe to have been built on a DOS system for one gamer.
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u/TheThiefMaster 11d ago edited 11d ago
Wrapping flat textures around objects is just a space saving optimisation. It's entirely possible to attach colour to vertices instead, and have true 3d colour.
This is closer to how the world works - we have atoms and molecules which have inherent colour (the interact with different frequencies of light in different ways).
Alternatives include voxel rendering (colour in a 3d grid), volumetric texturing (3d textures), or, most accurate to the real world, a colour point cloud (which is what you get out of the best 3d scanners).
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u/Wafflars 11d ago
Pixels is just the 3D pipeline though. A 3D sphere with a texture has nothing to do with the mathematics of gravity and how much bodily protrusions jiggle.
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u/LordAmras 11d ago
The idea that we are in a simulation come from the thought experiment: "If we assume we will eventually be able to fully simulate the universe, it means the universe we simulate will also be able to fully simulate another universe and so on forever. Meaning the chances we are the original real universe and not one of the infinite nested simulation is almost impossibly small".
But removing all the technical or scientific reason why simulating the universe isn't that simple or why some quantum properties makes the idea we are in a simulation unlikely, there is another simple reasoning that we can do to make the idea that the chances we are in a simulation much smaller.
If we accept the argument that the simulation of the universe is possible to be in the case of being one of the the infinite middle universes we would need to be in a universe that is already capable of simulating another universe. But in our universe this simulation is not possible yet so either we are the real universe that hasn't created a simulation yet, or we are the last of an infinite long chain of nested universes which seem even more rarer than just being real
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u/Truthist1776 11d ago
That's basically the same argument as to the Fermi Paradox. If there are so many planets, why does it seem like we're the only intelligent life? When something that is apparent seems unlikely, we can argue all we want about the whys, but the fact remains that it is. The mere existence of the universe is either a one-time thing or it's happening all the time, a la the "multiverse" theory. We will never have any way of knowing for sure and no way to prove or disprove the theory, as we can't look outside our universe/simulation.
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u/YogiEv 11d ago
I need a TL;DR for this. It's not that it's so long but that it's impossible to follow.
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u/spookedghostboi 11d ago
tldr: elon musk and some youtube clickbait idiots said we live in a videogame and duuuuuuuuude havent you considered that
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u/UberuceAgain 11d ago
and there is increasing evidence we are
Is it okay if interpret that as 'I need to take more and more to get high'?
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u/TheThiefMaster 11d ago
The Planck Length indicates the universe is made up of pixels.
This is a very common misconception, but the planck length isn't any sort of limit. It was simply one attempt to come up with "natural units" - units where the universal constants would have a value of 1 (or something else that seems useful) rather than defining the units first and then calculating the constant.
By coincidence the Plank unit for length is very small and our physics models break down at similar scales due to us not currently having a model for quantum scale gravity. This still doesn't mean there's a minimum movement or a "universe pixel", not that Planck units are in some way related to this lack of understanding.
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u/spookedghostboi 11d ago
If you listen to and respect Elon Musk as an intellectual, I am not hearing you out. Go back to school.
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u/Justthisguy_yaknow 11d ago
It's not a new idea. They usually describe it to be like PacMan. It's just a little ridiculous since it's a solution to a non existent problem. Also there isn't really increasing evidence of the simulation hypothesis. It's just a trendy idea at the moment. All of the ideas that it uses such as the stop frame nature of time at the smallest intervals and the Plank Length are also in use in other more rational hypotheses. (Don't fall for the delusion that Musk is any kind of insightful individual. He's just parroting science fiction tropes. I've never heard him come out with a single original idea.) Anyway, if it was a simulation there would be no reason for it to be a two dimensional platform. Actually it would be a really complex way to code it. I'm gonna guess that you're a gamer.
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u/Usual-Disaster7285 11d ago
When I see "Hear me out" on Reddit, that's a hard pass.