Tag Archives: uncertainty

Fictional Planetary Emergencies

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Decorative photograph of a wind-shaped tree on a hillside in fogA little while ago, when looking for something to read when visiting someone’s house, I picked up ‘The Complete Short Stories: volume 2’ of JG Ballard and started reading from the last story in the collection, ‘Report from an Obscure Planet’.  I was surprised to discover its similarity to a fictional piece I posted on this blog last year, see ‘Where has the blue planet gone?’ on July 3rd 2024.  Then I was shocked to realize that some readers of my blog might have thought I had plagiarised Ballard’s short story, whereas I was completely unaware of it when I wrote the post.  In Ballard’s story, a rescue mission has just landed on a remote planet from which frantic emergency signals had been received; however, their aerial reconnaissance of hundreds of cities spread across the planet found no inhabitants.  They accidentally activate the planet’s extensive, and apparently undamaged, computer networks when broadcasting a signal of greeting and friendship.  The networks react with ‘a sudden show of alarm, as if well used to mistrusting these declarations of good intent’.  The visitors’ research reveals that war was the most popular sport of the inhabitants, with nations maintaining huge arsenals.  They conclude that the computer networks sent out the emergency signals in an attempt to save themselves from a danger that was about to overwhelm their planet.  In my version, the rescue mission finds a planet transformed by a climate change and mass extinct induced by an asteroid strike or the activities of the inhabitants.  Ballard wrote his story in 1992, so more than thirty years before me, and perhaps twenty years after the first data centre had been built by IBM.  The first convincing evidence of the warming effect of carbon dioxide was found in the 1960s and scientists started ringing the alarm bells in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for instance at the 1988 Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere – so perhaps too early to feature in Ballard’s story.  Of course, I could also have written about artificial intelligence being the only sign of life found on the planet but that really would have looked like wholesale plagiarism!

Reference:

JG Ballard, ‘The Complete Short Stories: volume 2’, Harper Perennial, London, 2006.

Virtual reality and economic injustice in a world with limits

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Decorative photograph of a pile of carved stonesIt is sometimes suggested that materialism and greed are key drivers of our social and political system that largely refuses to acknowledge that we live in a world of limits.  However, Rowan Williams has proposed that we have a ‘culture that is resentful about material reality, hungry for anything and everything that distances us from the constraints of being a physical animal subject to temporal processes, to uncontrollable changes and to sheer accident.’  In other words, it is our desire to be in control of our lives and surroundings that drives us to accumulate wealth and build our strongholds.  Education and learning lead to an understanding of the complexity of the world, a realisation that we cannot control the world and perhaps to unavoidable insecurity, particularly for those people who thought they had some distance between themselves and uncontrollable events.  It is more comfortable to believe that we are in control, adhere to the current out-dated paradigm, and ignore evidence to the contrary. This is equivalent to living in a virtual reality.  This approach not only accelerates uncontrollable changes to the planet but also leads to economic disparities because, as Williams states, economic justice will only arrive when everyone recognises a shared vulnerability and limitation in a world that is not infinite.

Source: Rowan Williams, Faith in the public square, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

Image: a pile of carved stones in the cloisters of Hereford cathedral where I bought a second-hand copy of ‘Faith in the public square’ while on holiday [see ‘Personale mappa mundi‘ on November 1st, 2023].

Reflecting on the future of RealizeEngineering

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Decorative image of a flowerMy recent summer vacation [see ‘Entropy and junkies‘ on August 2nd, 2023] was a period of relaxation, recuperation and reflection.  One of my reflections was on the future of this blog.  It has become more of a commentary from an engineer than the ‘engineering commentary’ referred to in the tagline in its masthead.  Perhaps this was inevitable when I have been writing a weekly post for more than a decade, starting in January 2013 [see ‘500th post‘ on February 2nd, 2022]. There is an archive of almost six hundred posts available for you to browse, including about twenty written before I started weekly posting.  I have decided that I will aim to complete twelve years of weekly postings and then probably return to random postings in early 2025.  About five years ago, I wrote ‘Sometimes it is a joy to order my thoughts and commit some of them to writing; other times it is a chore and a challenge to dream up something vaguely interesting to tell you’ [see ‘Thinking more clearly by writing weekly‘ on May 2nd, 2018]. Recently, it has become more often a chore and less often a joy so I hope to temporarily redress the balance by creating an end-point without taking a precipitious decision to stop weekly posts now.

Are we in a simulation?

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Decorative photograph of trains at terminusThe concept of digital twins is gaining acceptance and our ability to generate them is advancing [see ‘Digital twins that thrive in the real-world’ on June 9th, 2021].  It is conceivable that we will be able to simulate many real-world systems in the not-too-distant future.  Perhaps not in my life-time but possibly in this century we will be able to connect these simulations together to create a computer-generated world.  This raises the possibility that other forms of life might have already reached this stage of technology development and that we are living in one of their simulations.  We cannot know for certain that we are not in a simulation but equally we cannot know for certain that we are in a simulation.  If some other life form had reached the stage of being able to simulate the universe then there is a possibility that they would do it for entertainment, so we might exist inside the equivalent of a teenager’s smart phone, or for scientific exploration in which case we might be inside one of thousands of simulations being performed simultaneously in a lab computer to gather statistical evidence on the development of universes.  It seems probable that there would be many more simulations performed for scientific research than for entertainment, so if we are in a simulation then it is more likely that the creator of the simulation is a scientist who is uninterested in this particular one in which we exist.  Of course, an alternative scenario is that humans become extinct before reaching the stage of being able to simulate the world or the universe.  If extinction occurs as a result of our inability to manage the technological advances, which would allow us to simulate the world, then it seems less likely that other life forms would have avoided this fate and so the probability that we are in a simulation should be reduced.  You could also question whether other life forms would have the same motivations or desires to create computer simulations of evolutionary history.  There are lots of reasons for doubting that we are in a computer simulation but it does not seem possible to be certain about it.

David J Chalmers explains the probability that we are in a simulation much more elegantly and comprehensively than me in his book Reality+; virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy, published by Penguin in 2022.