Assuming our simulation is not designed to auto-scale (and our Admins don’t know how to download more RAM), what kind of side effects could we see in the world if the underlying system hosting our simulation began running out of resources?
I am the only person who lives in the simulaton. You all are computer generated.
I imagine it shows itself where processes get dropped, whether it’s walking into a room and forgetting what you were doing, losing train of thought mid sentence, or even passing out when you laid down to watch something.
The OOM killer goes on the prowl.
We go to sleep and it clears
Great, thanks for the dose of existential dread.
You should check out the short story “Sleepover” by Alastair Reynolds.
An automatic purge process will start to prevent this. It happened several times in the past. Last time between 2019-2022. It removed circa 7 million processes. With regular purges like this it is made sure that the resources are not maxed out before the admins can add more capacity.
The universe starts swapping
I don’t necessarily believe this, but I’ll play along.
To make it appear natural so we don’t notice, death is the first thing that comes to mind. So pandemics, disasters and wars that kill off beings on a large scale to free up memory. A globe with limited surface area seems ideal to stick us on to begin with, with anything outside of that sphere virtually impossible to access. The size of Earth could have been chosen because it fits comfortably within the RAM limits. If Earth is pushing the RAM limits, each planet could be hosted on its own server. So if we someday colonized Mars or the moon, the trip between would be like a server transfer making the RAM issues for interplanetary colonization inconsequential.
If you want to really explore the fringes of this concept, maybe those in the simulation would see glitches that shouldn’t happen if it starts running out of RAM. UFOs, shadows, or synchronicities could become commonplace. People could randomly go catatonic or experience amnesia if they’re personally impacted. If it got out of control across the entire simulation, perhaps a hard reset would become necessary. It may even be a planned cycle of hard resets based on the anticipated maximum lifespan of the simulation before things start to get fucky due to memory errors. So power on = big bang, and hard reset something like big crunch or heat death of the universe.
Wars would use too much ram do Pandemic would make.more sense
Couldn’t they just suspend the simulation until they got more resources? We wouldn’t notice a thing.
I believe you are thinking in terms of a Turing-machine-like computer. I don’t think it’s possible today to “suspend” the bits in a quantum computer. I also don’t think it’s possible to know if the simulation could be paused (or even “added to” without losing its initial state).
There would either be some kind of mass extinction event or something that would be considered “supernatural” would occur to maintain the status quo
I did not expect the responses to this question to be as interesting to read as they are 😃
Render distance would be reduced requiring us to come up with plausible theories to account for the fact that there is a limit to the size of the so-called ‘observable universe’
We would probably see more caching of parts of the universe that don’t typically observe. Given that our current observation can’t see this in current time, we don’t immediately notice.
The interesting bit would be to figure out what parts get cached, since we may not be the only sentient life.
Maybe the system would be configured with some odd laws that constantly shrink the size of the observable universe?
Human music. Huh. I like it!
you know, they’re made out of meat?
Singing meat!
That’s why history repeats itself. It’s doing that more frequently these days because there’s more people remembering more things.
