This post is not about Nostradamus, although I have written something about him. It would also be easy to write me off on the strength of what I wrote there, but the approach here is very different and in fact suggested by the opinions of the Zizians and other rationalists. It’s based on probability.
We are first of all aware that the way things were before Trump’s election, the human race was due to die out in the 2060s from respiratory paralysis, along with all reptiles, mammals and fish, the last for other reasons. With the change in policies regarding carbon emissions in the US, that date has now been brought forward, but this is not about that. I now realise that I’ve told you two things this isn’t about.
You might remember my post on the Doomsday Argument (there’s probably more than one) a few years ago. The basic idea behind this is based on an estimate of when the Berlin Wall would come down by someone who visited it in the 1960s. In 1969 CE, when the astrophysicist J Richard Gott III visited the then eight year old Berlin Wall, he posited that the Copernican Principle, that there’s nothing special about a particular observation, individual and so forth, meant that the best assumption about how far through the total number of visitors to the Wall was that he was about halfway through. He gave an estimate of 50/50 that it would be gone by 1993. In fact it came down in 1989, which is quite close. The Doomsday Argument is that from the perspective of an individual human life, one’s birth is best estimated as being about halfway through the total number of human births. With the population growth during the twentieth century of doubling every thirty years and an estimate of the number of human lives being lived so far at seventy five thousand million since 600 000 BP, and taking my own birth in 1967 as an example, it being the only one I can, it appears that the human species will probably be extinct by 2133. There are numerous flaws in this argument, but it’s important to note that it isn’t an argument that overpopulation will cause extinction or that any cause in particular will do so. There will of course be a cause but we don’t seem to be able to tell from this argument what that would be. Nonetheless it is the case that if population growth slows, the prediction extends further into the future and it also depends substantially on assumptions about which entities are likely to have those thoughts, that is, when we became human and started to conceive of the idea of the end of the world, the human race and so forth. In fact, population growth is indeed decelerating and this stretches our probable prospect well into the future. I’ve talked about all of this before, but I think it’s a measure of the occurrence of the thought and not the occurrence of humans. An outbreak of optimism about the future of the human race by the early 22nd century would mean that no more ideas of that kind will occur, or that they’ll be rarer, so maybe what we’re really measuring is the extinction of doomerism, not that of humanity. There are all sorts of reasons why this might happen. It could be that our descendants are all parasitic tumour cells with no brains and therefore no expectations, that we’re all wiped out by AI which doesn’t have that thought or that things are going to get a lot better. Hence this apparently cold mathematical argument has so many hidden variables that it may be worthless.
There is another, similar, argument which I’ve used to predict a future without human space exploration, and it goes like this. Suppose there are a million habitable exoplanets which will one day be within human reach, or alternatively the same area in the form of artificial space habitats of some kind. This is a very conservative estimate as it would mean that only one star system in four hundred thousand would have such a planet or that the technology to produce such habitats is very inefficient. Now suppose that each of these planets (I’ll use the planet settlement scenario for simplicity’s sake) only has an average population of a million, with each such population being considered as a discrete number per century, so for example there are a million people on one such planet and then a century later they’ve died but another million people have replaced them. Suppose this goes on for ten thousand years. That’s 100 x 1 million x 1 million, which is 10¹⁴ people. Going back to the original figure of 7.5 x 10¹⁰ people having lived so far, that makes that a tiny fraction of the number of people who will live in this scenario, namely 0.075%. This means that the probability of living at a time before this has happened, i.e. not being one of these people, is only one in around 1300. These are ridiculous betting odds which nobody rational would risk their money on. Also, the estimate I’ve made is extremely conservative. The Galaxy has been estimated to contain around 300 million habitable planets which will continue to be habitable for on average several hundred million years each and could support a population of ten thousand million people each. If the other scenarios are explored, a much wider variety of stars could support a Dyson swarm, i.e. a roughly spherical shell of space habitats with many times Earth’s land surface area which would dwarf even the second estimate at the order of 10²⁵. If one considers one’s life as a random sample from human history, with these odds it can be guaranteed that if humans settle in space substantially in the future, one would be living during that era and not this one. Our very existence now makes it practically certain it’ll never happen. It doesn’t give the reason for it though.
I actually think this is more productive than the Doomsday Argument, but it’s also flawed. Suppose you consider the much greater probability of being born. The chances of that for each person are lower than one in six hundred thousand million, assuming three hundred ovulations per lifetime and 200 million sperm per ejaculate. This also assumes that our identity depends on genes, which I strongly disagree with, but it’s an interesting thought with substantial basis in reality. It’s still a tiny probability, but even so, every one of us does exist. That probability, incidentally, could perhaps be multiplied by the number of generations since the point at which a single allele could be definitively traced to an individual, which is actually only around sixteen, or by the number of generations since the start of sexual reproduction, although since fish, for example, don’t ovulate single eggs but produce similar numbers of eggs as they do sperm, the numbers get wild before about four hundred million years back. Nevertheless, here we are.
But suppose the argument works. It seems to have predictive power of some kind, although what exactly it predicts is unclear. It might simply mean that we won’t make a Dyson swarm, that distances between stars are too large or even that there isn’t enough phosphorus. It’s also closely coupled to the Fermi Paradox, because whatever stops that from happening may also stop other cultures from doing the same, which is why there are no aliens in contact with us, so maybe we’re about to find out why that is. I personally think it means that something will, or is, happening which will prevent that future from unfolding. It could be something positive. Maybe we will achieve a degree of enlightenment which leads us to stay on our planet and make it an earthly paradise which nobody will want to leave. Or, maybe we’ll just bomb ourselves to bits or die in the ocean acidification scenario, or whatever. Just thinking of this in the wider “where are all the aliens?” setting, it’s also possible that the Great Filter only applies to us because there are no intelligent aliens. Just to spell it out, the Great Filter is the idea that an event takes place everywhere life might be expected to develop and prevents it from getting to the point where intelligent representatives start visiting other star systems. It could be that Earth-like planets are rare, phosphorus is too scarce and vital for life of any kind to develop, there aren’t enough mass extinctions to stimulate evolution, there are usually too many of those for intelligent life to evolve, that intelligent life is just unlikely, that intelligent life is common but tends to develop at the bottom of the ocean, that it’s common but really bad at maths, those all being the past Great Filters, and in the future that AI takes over, we wipe ourselves out through war, pandemics put paid to us, we get too engrossed in online activities to bother and that space exploration is a flash in the pan. There are plenty of others. If there are no spacefarers because there’s no life elsewhere, many of those still apply to us.
Ultimately, we only have the brute fact that we’re intelligent tool using entities which have not colonised the Galaxy. It’s difficult to draw conclusions from that. Lack of information also tend to stimulate speculation too much. Venus is a good example. At some point, astronomers realised that the reason Venus looks so bright is that it’s covered in clouds. They couldn’t see any surface features. Because the only clouds they knew about back then were the ones here on Earth, they drew the erroneous conclusion that Venerean clouds were also made of water vapour, and in fact this is a parsimonious decision because it doesn’t posit that they are made of anything else in the absence of information. From that, they further concluded that Venus must be warm (fair enough, it being near the Sun) and humid, perhaps being covered in swamps, rainforests or just a global water or carbonic acid (fizzy water) ocean. Since at the time it was thought that the planets further from the Sun were older, some scientists also wondered if it was home to dinosaur-like creatures. All this, as Carl Sagan observed by the way, from the fact that you can’t see any surface features through a telescope. Lack of knowledge begets dinosaurs.
We don’t actually know we’re not doing something similar from this lack of knowledge but it’s hard to restrain oneself from trying to fill in the gaps. I want, though, to start from the position that it does seem to be a good argument that this will never happen, for whatever reason. I do think it’d be good if it did, because for example the overview effect influencing a lot of people would make the world a better place. The overview effect is the influence seeing Earth from space has on astronauts, where they begin to see humanity as one and the planet as a precious and delicate place worth preserving. It’s been described as “a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus”. When people have spent some time in space, they come back changed, usually positively so, and actually settling in space, I think, would have a lot of other positive results including those which would promote radical left wing and Green political activism here on Earth, which is why I’m so focussed on it. All that said, it doesn’t follow that it would be a good thing in the end and staying here on Earth and turning our back on all that is seen by many people as a good thing. There’s a pretty good case for this too, as the sums of money and resources spent on space while there are starving people down here. . . well, you know the argument. There’s a famous poster by the artist Kelly Freas from the early 1970s which comes across as being finely balanced in this respect:
The motivation behind this picture is to encourage support for the Apollo space program and more widely the space program in general, but I think to a 21st century viewer it comes across as emphasising the problems here and makes the Saturn V seem like a wasteful attempt to escape this and distract the world, along the lines of Gil Scott Heron’s ‘Whitey’s On The Moon’. In other words, the simple possibility that astronauts’ days are numbered can be regarded as a neutral fact rather than utopian or appalling. This still appears to be able to predict the future.
A while ago, I raised questions about the Artemis program. If it’s to be conjectured that a probable result of the return of humans to the lunar surface is a large number of people living in space, which then increases until it outnumbers the population ever having lived on Earth, the probabilistic argument I offered above predicts that that’s unlikely to happen. It could still happen if the number of people in space always stays very small or even if it’s relatively large but short-lived. Something will have to stop this from happening unless it’s along the lines of a pointless publicity stunt. Paradoxically, Elon Musk seems to think that it’s vital for humans to settle on other planets for the sake of the long term survival of the species, and that may well be true but he seems to be very good at preventing that from happening due to incompetence and overreaching himself, plus the mere fact that he’s close to being a (long scale) billionaire (he’s only a billionaire using the American system). To be highly specific, this argument in the current period seems to predict that Artemis will fail. Weirdly, this appears to be a form of retroactive causation — the cause follows the effect. Because one can have a high degree of confidence that there will be no significant human space program in the future, one can conclude that Artemis will fail. It’s as if the failure is caused by the way things are in the future rather than the other way round.
This of course has a Zizian flavour, and more broadly Roko’s Basilisk (don’t look it up – it’s almost certainly wrong but in case it’s right, it’s better not to know what it is). Both of these seem to be examples of the future influencing the past, and that makes it appear to be possible to predict certain aspects of the future. A really obvious one appears to be that time machines which travel back before the first instance of one will never be invented, as if they were we might expect to have witnessed time travellers and we haven’t. There may be some stipulations here, and it’s worthwhile putting in the work to determine exactly what we’re attempting to predict, hence for instance the proviso that they can’t travel back before their first instance. There might be other elements. For instance, it might be that time travel backwards is possible but it kills the time traveller, erases them from ever having come into existence or that it makes them undetectable. We would have to be precise about what we know, but once we’ve reached that precision, we basically have a way of predicting certain facts about the future on our hands and also revealing a weird reverse causality phenomenon. It’s pretty revolutionary in itself that effect can precede cause in some situations.
Something rather similar can be done regarding the present moment and the past. Our existence guarantees that we live in a Universe which is not entirely hostile to intelligent tool using entities, which in our case arose through the appearance and evolution of biochemical life. We also know that Earth formed, is currently habitable, and that there was no time between the appearance of life here and today when it was completely wiped out. However, one thing we don’t know is how improbable it is that we’ve come into existence. Just because we’ve lived on a planet which has been hit by a few comets and asteroids without killing all life on it or been sterilised by a gamma ray burst doesn’t mean that it’s unlikely, because our existence today is a given. That could happen tomorrow for all we know, and there may be nothing keeping the future like the past at all. We just don’t know how precarious our situation is.
I want to talk about something similar now and I don’t quite know how to link it but I’m convinced it’s similar. The past being as it has been in certain ways is assured by “survivorship bias”: we have no option currently but to live in circumstances where we’re still here and where we came into existence. Survivorship bias is a logical error. One example of it is successful guesses made of the psychic test cards with different shapes on them, where a researcher with a large number of subjects might select a subject she thinks is psychic because they’ve guessed correctly each time. Suppose there are 1024 subjects being asked to guess a sequence of cards with one of four symbols on each. Given the null hypothesis, statistically, 256 of them will guess correctly the first time, 64 the second and so on until after five guesses, one person will have done so every time. However, suppose further that there are 1024 of these studies going on in universities all over the world. In this situation, there will be variation in the number of successful guessers and in some of them there will be “super-guessers”, meaning that there can statistically be expected to be one person in the whole group who guesses correctly ten times in a row. Moreover, there’s a twenty-five percent chance that someone will do it eleven times, a chance of one in sixteen that one will do it twelve times and so on, and once it reaches below one in twenty, that reaches the arbitrarily chosen threshold for responsibility and a researcher can publish her result suggesting the statistical significance of guessing in at least one subject thirteen times in a row, and there’s then a danger of that paper receiving all the attention while the papers showing nothing remarkable remain unpublished. This is supposed to be avoided because it distorts the results. Negative findings are as important, if not more so, than positive ones. This is potentially an aspect of academic research which is distorted by a need to be perceived as doing something notable, because it means negative results are buried.
Survivorship bias may influence our perception of how typical our history and planet, and possibly even our universe, are. We’re here, so it follows, for example, that Earth hasn’t recently been hit by a large asteroid and that Covid didn’t wipe us all out – it wasn’t actually that kind of virus anyway, although it could’ve been a lot worse. The fact that the former didn’t happen dictates that the asteroids mainly orbit in a belt far from our orbit rather than us being situated in the middle of an asteroid belt, but it may also be that that kind of solar system is short-lived or rare anyway. We may seem to have lived charmed lives in a sense, and this is where things could be extended into the future.
Quantum immortality is a concept whose scientific respectability has never been clear to me. The idea is that as the timelines branch (I actually don’t think they do branch as such, but that’s not something I want to go into just now), we inevitably end up in the ones where we continue to be conscious. For instance, when I was eight, I rushed out of my primary school and was almost hit by a car, but survived of course. There are, depending on how firm determinism is, other timelines where I was fatally injured, but I’m obviously not in any of those, at least in the current year. In fact I couldn’t be, just given the simple fact that I’m still here typing this. The extension of this thought is that in fact, none of us ever die, and in fact our consciousnesses never end, not just subjectively but in terms of continuing to survive as observed by others. Every time a potentially consciousness-terminating event occurs, we take the road where our consciousness continues. Note that I’m talking about the permanent cessation of consciousness here, since we’re clearly temporarily unconscious on a regular basis during dreamless sleep. Hence the idea is that subjectively each of us will never die. A way of linking it to quantum ideas more clearly is to imagine a machine gun which works like the Schrödingers Cat thought experiment, except that the radioactive particle is replaced by a radioactive sample whose decay gives the firing of each bullet a 50% chance of happening, one bullet per second. The subject sits in front of the gun, aimed at their head. Subjectively, the gun will never fire because there will then be no observer to be aware of the bullets not firing, and of course the death of the observer would mean there is no such observer. This is rather sloppily put together but I hope you get my point. After five minutes the gun has potentially fired up to three hundred times and the probability of it not having fired is equivalent to one against a number more than three hundred thousand times greater than the number of atoms in the observable Universe, so it can be almost guaranteed that no-one else not in the firing line will observe the victim still alive at the end of the five minute period, but for the “victim” the situation is one hundred percent safe. Of course, somewhere out there in the Multiverse there is someone who has the reputation of being fantastically fortunate. Other people exist.
Extending this to every event while keeping the quantum component, it’s easy to imagine that each timeline begins with a quantum event which ends up determining the whole future in that timeline until it’s observed, and since it has to keep being observed, there has to be at least one immortal being in each. This means that in the majority of universes, which appear often to be merely composed of hydrogen rather sparsely distributed throughout space, there are no observers and therefore they actually don’t exist, although this would be countered by either panpsychism or the existence of an omniscient deity. I am of course panpsychist myself. A more conventional way of understanding it is that you are immortal in any timeline you actually experience. The bullet misses you, the car crash isn’t fatal, you recover from the infection and your cancer goes into remission.
However, this is not a recipe for ceasing to worry about the future. If you’ve read ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, you’ll know about the Struldbrugs of Luggnagg, who are born with a red dot above their left eyebrows which changes colour until it’s black. Swift obviously did a better job than I’m about to, so you can read his own words on them here. It’s in Chapter Ten. It won’t surprise you to learn their immortality is not a blessing but a curse. The condition’s not hereditary and a baby of this kind is only born every few years in the whole country. Lemuel imagines Struldbrugs to be mentally liberated from the prospect of death and able to become extremely wise, passing on their wisdom to the younger generations as a positive jewel to the land. However, what they actually do is serve as a dreadful warning to the populace which makes them feel relieved that they’re mortal, as their presence is a constant reminder of old age. They have, as the phrase has it, years in their lives but no life in their years, because they continue to age despite being immortal. Just as the old in our society tend to be world-weary, think they know more than they do and have contempt for the young (don’t shoot the messenger – this is Swift talking here, not me), they have all the more vices owing to their knowledge that they’ll never die. They’re ” not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection”, and they don’t care about any of their descendants beyond their grandchildren. They’re mainly envious and frustrated, and basically wish they were dead the whole time, lamenting at funerals because they know they’ll never have that release, and past the age of eighty, if they’re married to each other the state mercifully dissolves their union out of compassion, because otherwise their marriage will become a living hell out of being totally sick of each other. They’re also declared dead at eighty in order that their heirs can inherit and although they are either allowed to continue on a pittance from their own estate or receive welfare, they can’t own property or even rent it. Any diseases of old age continue, though they don’t get worse, and due to changes in language, after about two hundred years they cease to be able to hold any conversations with people outside their generation, who in any case are very few, and they also have dementia.
Swift wasn’t the only person to make this observation, although this is of course typical of him. There’s also an ancient Greek myth about Τιθωνός, lover of Eos, who scooped up a handful of sand and was granted to live as many years as there were grains in his hands, but forgot to ask for eternal youth and ended up walled up in a room insane until he was mercifully turned into a cicada. There’s also an Asimov story, ‘The Last Trump’, where the dead and the living are given eternal life and youth and initially suppose they’re in paradise but soon realise that they’re damned and that eternal life will become unbearably boring. They’re then reprieved on a technicality when an angel points out that the date of resurrection is different in different calendars, so it can’t have been a proper doomsday.
For this is what quantum immortality is. You don’t die, and you remain conscious, but you also deteriorate without end so your life becomes unbearable. It’s also entirely compatible with dementia to some extent. You don’t need a good memory, only to be able to sense things in one way or another, perhaps with the last remaining cone cell in one retina. Perhaps you occasionally notice a red dot and then forget about it immediately. It isn’t good, really. In fact it wouldn’t even be good if you retained all your faculties because your life would be poisoned by boredom and over-familiarity.
This raises a few questions. One is that of what ageing actually is. In a sense, not all organisms do actually age or die of old age. There’s a species of petrel, a bird, which is effectively immortal, and a jellyfish who responds to injury by regressing to infancy and beginning to mature again. However, these are not in fact immortal. Both, for example, would die in a fire or if eaten by a predator, and this raises the question of what ageing actually is. Is it the accumulation of internal insults and health problems which eventually proves fatal? If so, it’s effectively the same as accidental death – it’s just that the accidents are things like oxidative stress, cardiovascular deterioration or cancer. Or, do we have an allotted span such that we die after a certain number of years determined by an internal clock? This clearly does affect many species which die immediately after reproducing, which is just as well because otherwise they would use up the resources needed by their children, who would then starve, or end up eating their children shortly after hatching. Some might say that this is what one current generation of humans in positions of wealth and power is actually doing right now. We hang around for our children and grandchildren, but on the whole we need to die to get out of the way for future generations.
Presumably with quantum immortality, the former scenario is assumed to be in play. We don’t have an inherent life expectancy, but simply accumulate injuries until they become fatal, but in each subjective case those injuries never end up killing us. Obviously we’re not surrounded by immortals, so each of us has their own private world in this scenario, dying in an increasing number of timelines but persisting in a dwindling number of them, which, however, never reaches zero. One major problem with this is that it seems to be solipsistic, as all the “people” around you are still mortal and are just shadows with no consciousness. You’re in your own world. This may, however, have a form of retrocausality too. For instance, two ways of living longer are to be lucky with your genes and to inherit or adopt health-promoting attitudes from your family or community, meaning that you are, for example, more likely to have particularly healthy and long-lived relatives in your personal timeline. This doesn’t rule out straightforwardly accidental death, but it does mean you’re likely to have selected long-lived relatives. Therefore, if you believe in quantum immortality it would often be reasonable to conclude that your relatives, while not immortal, might end up living a particularly long time or be especially healthy in old age. It might even go further than that, with the possibility of living a relatively charmed life in a stable political environment, free from local wars and famines for example, or with a particularly low rate of serious crime.
This raises an ethical problem. It could make you complacent. You’d know that everyone else was subjectively immortal and also that you’ll never encounter potentially fatal dangers. Therefore you might well be less motivated to do good to others or even particularly bother to look after yourself. In the initial example, you could just wander in front of the quantum machine gun secure in the knowledge that you’ll be unharmed despite the increasingly vast odds against that being so. But you and others still wouldn’t have life in your years, and that would be worth preserving. It’s a heady prospect, but probably not a good one because you might stop caring about those affected by the troubles and hardships of the world, although suffering would still exist, more in fact than it does if we’re mortal.
Hugh Everett was a prominent proponent of this idea, although I have to say it’s a fairly obvious one so I doubt he was the first. He was the first well-known theorist of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, which is the apparently branching paths (in fact they’d probably always have existed but be indiscernible) idea of innumerable parallel universes forking at each probabilistic event. He believed he would never die because of this. From our perspective, he is in fact dead, although this may not have any bearing on whether he’s immortal as if he was right, he would be “elsewhere”: we just happen to live in one of the majority of universes where he is in fact deceased. He died suddenly of a heart attack on 19th June 1982 at the age of fifty-one, having smoked sixty a day, consumed excessive alcohol and being grossly obese, never exercised and never went to the doctor. His son was very angry with him after his death that he never took care of himself, although he also observed that he just did what he wanted without interference and then just died without withholding any pleasures from himself. He also wanted to be cremated and have his ashes thrown out with the rubbish, something his widow wasn’t keen on for a few years after his death but eventually complied with. Incidentally, if you know the band The Eels, that’s the son who commented thus and there’s an album inspired by his death. Of course, this album doesn’t really exist because Hugh Everett is immortal! It seems to me that this kind of self-neglect may have resulted precisely from his belief in quantum immortality – there’s simply no point in looking after your health in his view.
I’m not sure this follows, to be honest. I think that apart from anything else you probably would want to be healthy for as long as possible in order to enjoy life, and also to spare the feelings of people close to you. Also, what if you’re wrong? I don’t think many people who have recently touched grass, as the phrase has it, would willingly step in front of that machine gun. Certain persons, of course, haven’t done that recently.
The Doomsday Argument and Quantum Immortality feel like they’re from the same stable, so it’s worthwhile working out what they have in common. They both start from a kind of Descartes-like position of noting that one is currently conscious and attempting to draw conclusions from that bare fact, though unlike Descartes they neither raise the possibility that the physical world doesn’t exist nor that God does, which gives them greater traction on the consensus view of reality and the Universe. Both constrain the Universe through the fact that we’re observing it, like the anthropic principle that the Universe must have certain physical constants and laws to produce conscious beings. Both involve vast numbers of items. In the Doomsday Argument, this is everyone who has or will ever live, and in Quantum Immortality it’s the number of possible worlds in which one has existed or currently exists. In fact I don’t believe the many worlds are strictly separate but that’s an argument for another time. Oddly though, they draw opposite conclusions from their reasoning. The Doomsday Argument concludes we’re all going to die but Quantum Immortality decides each of us is individually, though perhaps unhealthily, immortal, and that our consciousness will never permanently end. Neither of them are amenable to observational testing. The former can’t be observed by human scientists because it says there won’t be any, and the latter can only be observed by all the lonely people, but individually.
Another significant concept linked to both of these is Roko’s Basilisk, which we cannot talk about. A fourth one is the Simulation Argument. This is an argument which has been popular with Elon Musk but doesn’t seem to work. This is that we are much more likely to be living in a simulation than the real world because any civilisation which existed for long enough and became advanced in computing will eventually decide to simulate the world. Those simulated worlds will then simulate other worlds when their own simulations are sophisticated enough to do so, and so forth. This would mean that of all instances of apparently real worlds, almost all are simulated. This argument compared to the others seems almost trivially easy to refute. Firstly, taking it at face value this means a cascading tree of simulations, each generation more numerous than the last and also more simplistic and therefore less realistic due to lack of computing power, so the fact that the universe is more complex than it might be means we aren’t in the most numerous types of simulation, so why would we be in a simulation at all? Secondly, again taking it at face value, the three-body problem and beyond can in most cases eat up all available computing resources. I actually don’t think this argument works because in the non-special cases a pseudorandom number generator could just be used to prevent this from happening and the chances are nobody would be any the wiser, since the movements of the large number of bodies is in fact unpredictable. I suppose this could be tested by looking at one’s own simulations of three-body problems using various pseudorandom generator algorithms or for that matter true randomness. But beyond all this, the really big assumption seems to be that any civilisation would inevitably end up bothering to simulate the world in the first place. As I’ve said before, apart from anything else they might just be really bad at maths, and with anything else maybe they’ve got more important things to do.
All of these seem to have a self-centred element to them. There’s also an arrogance to them, in that they boldly assert that the person proposing or learning of them has taken everything into consideration and nothing can assail the argument. The Simulation Argument is obviously full of holes, but the holes are the blind spots of a probably autistic sociopath in that the assumption is that just because one person or a group of people working in a particular field would try to do this, thereby incidentally becoming a God to the sims, everyone else would, regardless of their personality or neurodiversity. Quantum Immortality and the Simulation Argument both seem to leave us with “non-player characters”, i.e. zombie shells of people who aren’t really conscious and don’t really matter, so that’s sociopathy and lack of empathy again. They seem to provide an excuse to ignore people’s needs. The Doomsday Argument assumes that humans all contemplate the end of the world or the human race and are all that matters, rather than it being the thought of the end of the world which is significant. There needs to be a cut-off point or certainty that we are the only conscious beings in the Universe for it to work.
In the end, although these arguments are interesting I think they really say more about the people who think of them than the actual world they’re supposed to be applied to. I do think that something will prevent the Artemis Project from succeeding, and that is because of the future galactic civilisation thing, but there could be really positive reasons why it won’t. As for the others, well, they all have a kind of solipsistic and self-centred air to them which it doesn’t seem healthy to entertain. But who knows? Maybe there are other kinds of argument of this nature which do have real predictive power, and if there are that would be fascinating and also useful.
A Box Of Chocolates 