this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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Asklemmy
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Not sure either of these counts fully as what OP is looking for, but -
The idea of the technological singularity feels right to me. There's a whole section on the wikipedia page about scientific objections to it, and I get that, but if we don't kill ourselves before then, it seems like an event that almost has to occur at some point, to me. And maybe it zigs instead of zags and we get star trek. Or maybe it zags and we get terminator. But probably neither of those I'm guessing, and these days it's hard to imagine that it would put humanity on a worse trajectory than we seem to be on today.
Similarly, but less seriously (for me) I like to consider the whole "maybe we're in a simulation" theory.
Yeah I kinda adhere to the simulation thing too. As a videogames programmer, every time I try to learn about quantum mechanics I learn about some new quirk that really makes it sound like some game engine limitation
On the surface, it does seem like there is a similarity. If a particle is measured over here and later over there, in quantum mechanics it doesn't necessarily have a well-defined position in between those measurements. You might then want to liken it to a game engine where the particle is only rendered when the player is looking at it. But the difference is that to compute how the particle arrived over there when it was previously over here, in quantum mechanics, you have to actually take into account all possible paths it could have taken to reach that point.
This is something game engines do not do and actually makes quantum mechanics far more computationally expensive rather than less.
I thought you were going to say
when I like to gain perspective and imagine how useless we are on this meaningless little planet in a massive galaxy universe etc I just imagine the lonely little Boltzmann brain that's actually just imagining the whole thing for a few nanoseconds before it returns back to quantum foam