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When I lived in the bay, I would meet my friend Jaron Lanier to study the effects of strange and spectacular experiments in thought.
Curious thoughts have been central to the intellectual history of science, but the issue is not the rarity itself. The reward for thinking strange things like Schrödinger’s cat, an evil cat that is both alive and dead at the same time, is not necessarily something we should “believe” in the existence of that cat. Instead, we can hope that strange ideas will lighten the dark edges of our thoughts; In the case of Schrodinger’s cat, when dealing with the subject of superposition. The point is not to confuse or banboat people, but to find a way to think that makes sense in the end and is a little less obscure.
The strange idea I want to consider here arose from a discussion of the search for forms of alien life. There are many ways in the universe to look for signs of alien life, which usually include a large number of telescopes. One view is perhaps based on the hope that astronomers will be lucky and able to broadcast a foreign radio. But in the thought experiment that Lanier and I explored, we explored different and much more dramatic possibilities.
Suppose there are many alien civilizations that use Google and other enormous quantum computers that have begun to be built on Earth. This begs the curious question: would a quantity of very distant quantum calculations have an effect on astronomical observation? Could we humans see the evidence for a universe full of quantum computers by carefully examining the night sky?
We thought there were many ways this could have been possible, but in the end we focused on a wonderful opportunity. Here it is: First, alien quantum computers can tell the mystery dark energy, because calculations made by many alien beings throughout the universe distort (or rather disintegrate) the universe as a whole. As we observe the influence of dark energy, accelerating the expansion of the universe, this means that we have seen that we are proving that our universe is alive above us — we have not recognized it! And we found, fortunately, that seeing this almost unthinkable idea has a practical payoff on a human scale: it helps us shed light on how we think about the credible relationship between gravity and quantum information. (If you think that’s weird, you should read some competing ideas. A recent article suggests that dark energy is a sign that time is really about time and instead of space. Then we’d be frozen. With time, but be four-dimensional. Compared to that, our proposal, with all the foreigners, is almost submissive.)
Let’s go through step-by-step argument: What is a quantum computer, and why would foreigners use it?
Suppose, like us, that many foreign civilizations want the best computers for one purpose or another. Because of the arguments, we can assume that foreigners want to enjoy high-quality virtual reality and therefore build computers to make it so. If computers using alien VR are the classic types we use today (based on the mathematical framework established by pioneering computer scientists John von Neumann and Alan Turing in the mid-20th century), then foreigners would generally suffer from a lower level. virtual world experience. One might think that classic computers should do the job – after all, the special effects in movies are becoming quite realistic and classic computers are able to calculate those effects – but they are not. Remember that movies are prepared in advance. Virtual reality, however, must create sensations for the human body to fly and as fast as reality.
Classic computers can’t run that fast. Moreover, there are cases where human beings are able to respond to reality at the highest possible level of sensitivity. For example, the retina can in some cases elicit a neural response to a single photon. In such a case, the human body has become as discriminatory as physics allows. Just as classical computers cannot be as fast as the universe, they cannot be so wise. Elsewhere if we believe that aliens have been sensitive to quantum levels of reality in special cases as clear as we are, then they try to design a non-quantum supercomputer and VR device that can simulate reality at the ultimate level. in detail, they would have problems. That’s one of the reasons we guess that aliens would seek the power of quantum computers to operate in their virtual world.
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