Monday, February 13, 2012

We Are Living in a Simulation: Specifically, Minecraft

[Welcome BoingBoing deviants. You want metal? You want aliens and simulation arguments and singularity stuff? We got all that. Check us out for a while. - Mike]

Forget self-indication assumptions that favor Bostrom's simulation argument. You don't need them. Some parts of the planet don't even bother to conceal the original Minecraft geometry.


From Strange Interesting Facts.



I mean come on. When you see unfinished work like that sitting around, you realize there's no point in worrying whether the Simulators would get mad if we forced them to use more bandwidth by making higher resolution models of the universe. They clearly don't care if we figure it out. This is Roraima Mountain, a tepuy (table mountain of Precambrian basement rock) that lies on the triple point between Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana. Read this for an account of the isolated top, scrubbed of nutrients by time and rain: "Contrary to our expectations the top was far from flat, with strange shapes eroded by both wind and water forming peaks and troughs..." (Non-Euclidean shapes?) The poor nutrition of the rock and "soil" favors carnivorous plants, and some reproductively isolated black frogs scamper on four legs like lizards. Check out the pictures at that link; the flora and geology at the top looks like a little transplanted South Utah in the middle of the jungle.

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