FRIDAY, JUNE 25, 2021
HYPOTHESIS ROOM, McGUIRE AIR FORCE BASE
Tired people are argumentative. Exhausted people a lot less so. It’s six o’clock in the morning when Adrian, Tina, and their first twenty experts settle into a command room. By seven o’clock, with the rate dictated by helicopters arriving at McGuire, there are forty of them. The sofas and interactive boards have been installed, and a soldier is plugging in the espresso machine.
It takes a minute to reveal the situation. Then come ten minutes of questions, and Tina and Adrian fall back on repeating the unbelievable: the people in this hangar are the self-same ones who already landed in the same plane one hundred six days earlier. The dialogue between Adrian Miller and Riccardo Bertoni—who’s in the running for the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on dark matter—summarizes the general mood:
“Are you jerking us around, Professor Miller?”
“If only.”
At nine o’clock, when Tina Brewster-Wang is still running interdisciplinary meetings in the Hypothesis Room, Adrian comes back to talk to the task force. Meredith comes with him, as well as a tall thin guy with exuberant gray hair and steel-blue eyes. Silveria points to a conference call screen featuring familiar faces.
“Professor Miller, we have the president of the United States live, along with the secretaries of state and defense.”
“This phenomenon is extraordinary, Mister President,” Adrian starts the conversation, then clears his throat before adding, “but, as Arthur C. Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We’ve reached ten hypotheses, seven of them are jokes, three have caught our attention, and one of those gets support from most of us. Let’s start with the simplest.”
“Please, yes,” says Silveria.
“The ‘wormhole.’ I’ll let the topologist Meredith Harper explain it.”
Meredith picks up a black pencil and a sheet of paper from the desk and folds the paper in two. She gets the distinct feeling she’s playing the schoolroom scene from a very low-budget sci-fi movie, but hey.
“Thank you, Adrian. Let’s imagine space can fold back on itself like a sheet of paper…but in a dimension that’s beyond our scope, none of the three dimensions that we know. If our universe really does operate according to string theory, then hyperspace could be in ten, eleven, twenty-six dimensions. In this model, every elementary particle is a string that vibrates differently from every other, and its dimensions are folded back on themselves. Are you with me?”
The American president sits openmouthed, showing a marked resemblance to a fat grouper with a blond wig.
“Once space is folded over, then, we make a ‘hole’ in it…” Meredith pierces the paper with the tip of the pencil and puts her index finger into the tear, “…and we can get from one point in our three-dimensional space to another very easily. That’s what’s called an Einstein–Rosen bridge, a Lorentz wormhole with negative mass…”
“I see,” says the president, frowning.
“This respects the laws of classical physics. We’re not exceeding the speed of light in our Einsteinian space. But, by opening up a vortex in hyperspace, we can travel between galaxies in a fraction of a second.”
“The idea’s common in fiction,” says Adrian who thinks Meredith is being too abstract. “In Frank Herbert’s Dune, and plenty of others. And it’s also used in films like Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. Or the spaceship USS Enterprise in Star Trek…”
“Star Trek! I saw those, yes,” the president exclaims suddenly.
“Usually—well, in a manner of speaking,” Meredith continues, “usually you travel through time and space instantaneously, and there’s no reason for anything to be duplicated. Here, though, we have these two planes…”
“It’s like the USS Enterprise popped up in two points in space,” Miller enthuses, “with two Captain Kirks, two Mr. Spocks, two—”
“Thank you, Professor Miller,” Silveria says, “we get the picture…So, what’s the second hypothesis?”
“We call it the ‘photocopier’ theory, we’ve been working on it with Brian Mitnick of the NSA.”
Mitnik nods with a little curl of his lip, like a good student who’s quietly proud to get a mention.
“As you know,” Miller continues, “the bioprinting revolution has started…”
“Excuse me? Could you be clearer?” Silveria asks, anticipating the president’s irritation and taking on the role of the simpleton himself.
“We can use 3D printing to make biological matter. Nowadays we can make a mouse-sized human heart in the space of an hour. The resolution has doubled in ten years, and printing speeds have too, as has the size of objects that can be reproduced. If we follow exponential curves in each of these areas, and if we’re conservative ab—”
“I am conservative,” interrupts the president, and Miller wonders briefly whether it’s a joke.
“Then,” the mathematician pursues his train of thought, “in less than two centuries, we’ll be able to scan something like this plan in a fraction of a second and print it just as quickly, with atomic-level definition. But a couple of problems: One, where was the printer? Two, where did the raw materials come from to make the plane and its passengers?”
“The point is…” Meredith intervenes, “this image of a ‘photocopier’ presupposes an original and a copy. And with our desktop photocopiers, what comes out first is always the copy.”
“I see,” Silveria thinks out loud. “The ‘copy’ plane landed on March 10. It’s the ‘original’ that just landed yesterday. In that case, why treat the members of the two groups differently, on the grounds that the first plane…”
“…came out of the ‘photocopier’ first,” Meredith concludes.
“I wanted to mention the last hypothesis,” Miller resumes. “It has quite broad support, but it’s also the most shocking.”
On the screen, the president is shaking his head, then knitting his brows to prove that he’s concentrating.
“Are you talking about an act of God?” he asks.
“Um, no, Mister President…no one’s raised that hypothesis,” Adrian replies, surprised.
Silveria mops his brow.
“Let’s hear the third theory, Miller.”
“We call it the Bostrom hypothesis, which is named after Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who teaches at Oxford. At the turn of the century, he—”
“That’s a long time ago,” the president sighs.
“At the turn of this century,” Miller clarifies, “in 2002, to be precise. I’ll hand over to Arch Wesley from Columbia University, he’s a logician.”
The tall guy with the wild hair walks over to a whiteboard and writes out an equation:
Fsim = (fpfiNi) / ((fpfiNi) + 1)
and then turns to the screen with a genial smile and a good dose of excitement.
“Good morning, Mister President. Before explaining this equation, I’d like to start by talking about ‘reality.’ Any reality is a construction, and even a reconstruction. Our brains are sealed away in darkness and silence inside our skulls, their only access to the world is via the receptors of our eyes, ears, nose, and skin: everything that we see and feel is transmitted to the brain by electric cables, our synapses…our nerve cells, Mister President.”
“I got that, thank you.”
“Of course. And the brain reconstructs its reality. Based on the number of synapses, the brain carries out ten million billion operations a second. A lot less than a computer, but with more interconnections. But in a few years we’ll be able to simulate a human brain, and that program will achieve a degree of self-awareness. Eric Drexler, the nanotechnology specialist, conceived of a system the size of a sugar lump capable of reproducing one hundred thousand human brains.”
“Stop with all your billions already, I don’t understand any of it,” says the president, “and neither do my aides. Move along with your demonstration, please.”
“Okay, Mister President. I’m going to ask you to imagine superior beings whose intelligence is to ours what ours is to an earthworm’s…Our descendants, perhaps. Let’s also imagine they have computers so powerful that they can re-create a virtual world in which they can bring back to life very precise replicas of their ‘ancestors’ and watch how they evolve in different scenarios. With a computer the size of a very small moon, the history of the human race from the birth of Homo sapiens could be simulated a billion times. This is the digital simulation hypothesis…”
“Like in The Matrix?” asks the president, baffled.
“No, Mister President,” Wesley replies. “In The Matrix machines exploit the bodily energy of real humans, real flesh-and-blood slaves who are kept imprisoned. They make them live in a virtual world. In our hypothesis it’s the other way around: we’re not real living beings. We believe we are humans when we’re actually just programs. Highly evolved programs, but programs all the same. As Agent Smith says in The Matrix, Mister President. Except that Agent Smith knows that he’s a program.”
“So right now I’m not sitting at a table drinking my coffee?” asks Silveria. “The things we feel, smell, and see…are simulated too? It’s all fake?”
“It doesn’t alter the fact that you’re at this table drinking a cup of coffee, General,” Wesley replies, “it only alters what the table and the coffee are made of. It would be easy: the maximal sensory bandwidth of a human isn’t very wide—simulating every sound, image, touch, and smell would be only a negligible expense. Our environment itself isn’t too complicated to counterfeit, it all depends on the level of detail. ‘Simulated humans’ wouldn’t notice anomalies in their virtual environment, they’d have their houses, their cars, their dogs, even their computers while we’re at it.”
“Like in the British series Black Mirror, Mister President,” Adrian whispers.
The president frowns, and Wesley keeps going.
“In fact, the more we learn about the universe, the more it seems to be based on mathematical laws.”
“With all due respect, Professor,” Silveria interrupts, “couldn’t an experiment be used to demonstrate that you’re talking garbage?”
“I’m afraid not,” Wesley says, amused. “If the artificial intelligence that’s simulating us states that a ‘simulated human’ is going to observe the world on a microscopic level, it just needs to supply that individual with enough simulated details. And in the event of any errors, it would just have to reprogram any ‘virtual brains’ that might have noticed an anomaly. Or maybe just rewind by a few seconds, with a sort of ‘undo,’ you see, and relaunch the simulation in such a way as to avoid any problems…”
“What you’re describing is ridiculous,” the president explodes. “I’m not some kind of Super Mario and I’m certainly not about to explain to the American people that they’re programs in a virtual world.”
“I understand, Mister President. But on the other hand, a plane that appears out of nowhere and is an exact copy of another plane, with all the passengers, even down to the tiniest ketchup stain on the carpeting, is also unbelievable. Will you allow me to explain the formula I wrote out?”
“Go ahead,” the president spits out, furious. “But make it quick.”
“I’ll lay out the general idea. I’d like to demonstrate that it’s fairly probable that we are some kind of simulated consciousness. There are only three possible fates for a technical civilization: it can of course die out before reaching technological maturity, as we’re so magnificently demonstrating with pollution, climate change, the sixth extinction, et cetera. I personally believe that, simulated or not, we’re going to die.”
The president shrugs, but Wesley keeps going.
“That’s not the question. Let’s imagine that, in spite of everything, one civilization in a thousand doesn’t destroy itself all on its own. It reaches a post-technological phase and becomes equipped with unimaginable computing powers. And then let’s imagine that, among all the civilizations that have survived, only one in a thousand feels an urge to simulate its ‘ancestors’ or ‘competitors’ of those ancestors. So, that one-in-a-thousand technical civilization could single-handedly simulate, say, a billion ‘virtual civilizations.’ And by ‘virtual civilizations,’ I mean in each instance hundreds of virtual millennia during which there would be a succession of millions of virtual generations giving birth to hundreds of billions of equally virtual thinking beings. So, for example, in fifty thousand years of existence, fewer than one hundred billion Homo sapiens have walked the earth. To simulate Homo sapiens, in other words us, it’s a simple question of computing power. Do you follow?”
Wesley doesn’t even look at the screen, on which the president is rolling his eyes.
“Here’s the important point,” he continues, “a hypertechnical civilization can simulate a thousand times more ‘false civilizations’ than there are real ones. Which means that if we take a ‘thinking brain’ at random, mine or yours, it has nine hundred ninety-nine chances in a thousand of being virtual and one chance in a thousand of being a real brain. In other words, the ‘I think therefore I am’ of Descartes’s Discourse on Method is obsolete. It’s more like: ‘I think therefore I’m almost certainly a program.’ Descartes 2.0, to use the formula of a certain topologist in the group. Are you following me, Mister President?”
The president doesn’t reply. Wesley studies his face, still wearing its furious, stubborn expression.
“So you see, Mister President,” he concludes, “I was aware of this hypothesis, and until today, I estimated the probability that our existence was just a program on a hard drive as one in ten. With this ‘anomaly,’ I’m now as good as certain. Apart from anything else, it would explain the Fermi paradox: if we’ve never met any extraterrestrials, then it’s because they haven’t been programmed to exist in our simulation. I think we’re even dealing with some sort of test. To take the idea further, it may be precisely because we can now envision the idea of being programs that the simulation is offering us this test. And we’d better get it right, or at least make something interesting of it.”
“Why’s that?” Silveria asks.
“Because if we fail, the entities running this simulation could just shut it down.”