From: Philip Goetz (philgoetz@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Mar 16 2006 - 06:50:51 MST
On 3/7/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> wrote:
> Russell Wallace wrote:
> I agree with Wallace. Many proposed resolutions to the Fermi Paradox
> actually make not the slightest progress on it. The Simulation Argument
> is one of these; presumably a simulator would simulate a "typical"
> ancestral civilization. This being the case, anything atypical that we
> see cannot be explained by the Simulation Argument.
The Sim Argument does explain the Fermi paradox, because one simulates
only as much as one needs. If you wish to simulate a protein folding,
you simulate that one protein by itself, and no others, despite the
fact that in nature it is surrounded by other proteins. The aliens
are not in the simulation because just one other Earth-like planet
would double the computation resources needed.
A clear example of a simulation in which one would simulate only one
Earth (or other unit of convenient size) per simulation would be one
in which the outcome of each Earth sim were used in a genetic
algorithm.
- Phil
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