hack the universe

If you could change the laws of nature, what would you change?

Perhaps the annoying limit on the speed of light in cosmic travel, not to mention the wars, plagues and asteroids that can hit the Earth.

Perhaps you wish you could go back in time to tell your teenage self how to treat your parents or buy Google stock.

Couldn’t the universe use some improvements?

This was the question that David Anderson, computer scientist, passionate about Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)musician and mathematician at the University of California at Berkeley, recently asked his colleagues and friends.

In recent years, the idea that our universe, including ourselves and all of our innermost thoughts, is one computer simulationoperating in a thinking machine of cosmic capacity, has permeated culture high and low.

In an influential 2003 essay, Nick Bostrom, An Oxford University philosopher and director of the Institute for the Future of Humanity, has proposed the idea, adding that it would likely be an easy feat for “technologically mature” civilizations wanting to explore their histories or entertain their offspring.

Elon Musk, who is, as far as we know, the star of this simulation, seemed to echo this notion when he once stated that there was only a one in a billion chance we were living in the “earthly reality“.

It’s hard to prove, and not everyone agrees that such a drastic extrapolation of our computing power is possible or inevitable, or that civilization will last long enough to do so.

But we can’t disprove the idea either, so thinkers like Bostrom argue that we should take the possibility seriously.

In some respects, the idea of ​​a Great Simulator resembles the recent theory of cosmologists that the universe is one hologram the edges of which are covered with quantum codes that determine what happens inside.

A couple of years ago, in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, Anderson began discussing the implications of this idea with his teenage son.

If everything were a simulation, it would be enough to modify the computer program that controlled everything to improve it.

“Being a programmer, I thought about exactly what these changes would involve,” he said in an email.

If the software was well written, modifying it would be easy, he reasoned.

Mods could change the laws of physics or add new features to the universe:

menu options, speed filters, subtitles, pop-up blockers… buttons that would do with it life richer or more fun.

Furthermore, if the software that runs the universe were open source—that is, made publicly available for other programmers to inspect and manipulate—these “metahackers” might be receptive to our requests and even seek them out, suggests Dan Werthimer, a colleague. Anderson in Berkeley.

Think of it as a cybernetic version of prayer, a way of doing requests to the Great Simulator.

Anderson recently asked his colleagues how they would change the cosmic algorithm, which he calls Unisim.

​ He posted the responses on his blog, along with comments on how those changes could be implemented and how they might work.

“This was during COVID, when I was spending my free time writing various essays on philosophy, politics and music and posting them on my website,” she explains.

The emphasis was not on eliminating war and injustice, but on features that could help us cosmic fry navigate the vicissitudes of “life”.

For example, Anderson would like to be able to press a button and see all of the steps he’s done glow orange on the ground.

“I can look at where I’ve been in Berkeley and go to the Sierras and see all the hiking I’ve done there,” he says.

Pressing another button would show all the traces I have left.

“Are there places no one has ever been?” she wondered.

His son, he added, would like to know if a joke he’s about to tell will make him laugh.

Some of the requests of the other interviewees:

the ability to pause the simulation long enough to think of a witty reply in conversation or a rewind option cancel a comment unfortunate or to review a missed opportunity, something I would definitely vote for.

As simple as these requests may seem, Anderson notes that using these features may require a fair amount of behind-the-scenes computer engineering.

For example, a brief pause in the universe to reflect would require you to branch out into a temporary parallel simulation; then, when you figured out what you meant, you could hit the Esc key and go back to the original simulation.

Rewinding to fix the past would also cause the simulation to branch, but in this case, Anderson said, you’d continue into the parallel simulation “and never hit the break.”

Of course, he added, “the usual time-travel weirdness applies.” Traveling to the future and back would endow your current self with memories of things that haven’t happened yet. This, in turn, would change the future so that when you get there it won’t be exactly what you remembered from your first visit.

Likewise, going into the past could alter what you remember happening in the future. It might even obviate your own existence, as the time traveler in Ray Bradbury’s classic story “A Sound of Thunder,” stepping on a butterfly and returning to a future where Nazis rule the world.

(Or like Homer in “The Simpsons” episode “Time and Punishment”, inadvertently creating an unknown world for donuts.)

Apparently time travel is the most dangerous thing to do.

For my part, I wish I could press a button upon entering a restaurant that would drop a cone of silence on every other table.

(My hearing isn’t what it used to be.)

My wife says she would like a hologram of her to appear whenever she’s late for an appointment, and to disappear when she arrives, so no one would know she was absent.

A popular modification is what Anderson calls “the death stare,” the pinnacle of road rage:

In the blink of an eye, it could sentence the offending drivers and their cars to be incinerated by a powerful laser.

“Every request like that should create a new universe, for obvious reasons,” Anderson writes on his blog.

“It’s a safe bet that someone would be throwing the deathglow at me in a day or two,” he writes.

“And within a few weeks almost all the drivers would be burned out. So it’s probably best to implement this so that each mortal gaze branches out to a new universe where the required fire occurs, but the original universe continues without it.”

What’s on your cosmic wish list?

How would you modify the supreme algorithm?

The year 2023 is still young; there’s plenty of time to ask for a better deal from cosmic hackers.

Be careful of the butterflies and what you wish for.

c.2023 The New York Times Society