[ExI] BICEP2 and the Fermi paradox

[Anders Sandberg]

Tomaz Kristan <protokol2020 at gmail.com> , 9/4/2014 8:56 PM:
The reason, I am not in an ancestral simulation may be the following:
Since our civilization is a very early one, nobody is making them (those simulations) - yet.
It's the question, will anyone ever make them, but nobody is making them now.
But is now the true year 2014, or a simulation of 2014 run in the year 4,982,944? (where it is being run in a M-brain server together with a billion others) If it is the latter there are indeed ancestor sims being done now (externally chronologically speaking). Our own (as observed by us) civilizational age doesn't give much information about the real civilizational age of the outside.
The earliness part is also problematic. Presumably there will be more simulations of interesting eras, so the far past is probably going to be simulated less than exciting times like the run-up to the singularity. I think one can make a good argument that our era is more consistently exciting than all known past eras, so given what we know we look like a likely simulation candidate compared to 10th century Europe or Africa 1300 BC. Maybe there are way more 400BC Athens than 21st century worlds, but that was a far smaller spatiotemporal domain than the current glorious, awful mess.





Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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