Reading Rollback recently and listening to a recent Escape Pod episode (I didn’t really care for that story but did find the premise interesting) has gotten me to thinking…

We’re getting to a point, or will be there in the future, where we can create such intricate virtual worlds that we will eventually create beings within them who do not realize they are within them. We could program all the details, thus creating our own Matrix for virtual citizens to populate. A little daughter universe from our own.

But are we really that special? If we can get to that point, can’t others as well? Maybe we, too, are in a daughter universe created by beings of a higher order than ourselves.

Remember in high school when you got to make ridiculous assumptions in physics like “assuming a frictionless surface”? Well, if we simplify a bunch of physics in our universe significantly, when you get really small, the smallest units for the measurement of time and distance are:

Planck’s length: about 1.616 x 10^-35 m
Planck’s time: about 5.391 x 10^-44 sec

When you get down to that, it can’t be any smaller. Something is either at this location, or the one beside it. Here or there. 1 or 0. Digitized. Perhaps this is how some supercomputer in a parent universe to ours has managed to create us.

Thinking along these lines, some interesting questions arise:

What would that mean about God? It would mean that we have a creator: Though he or she (or even some team of individuals) are programmers. They’ve created us, were probably pleased with the result and generally are interested in how we fair, but probably don’t care about us as individuals. They don’t care if some teenager gets asked to the prom or if I get a new and better job. I wonder what they think of our religions?

How would this reflect in the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment? While the box is closed, the cat is alive and dead. To save CPU time, the computer running our daughter universe doesn’t bother resolving the equation or picking which happens until the box is opened. At that point, the computer realizes that its short cut to save processor flips has to end and it picks and renders something and the cat is observed as dead or alive.

So maybe keep an eye out for glitches and let me know, will ya?