Scenarios9/9
The Afterlife · A world with no suffering, computed only when someone’s there.
A painted world that exists only where the person in it is paying attention. It repeats in a cycle and has no suffering. It fits on one of today’s largest supercomputers.
About one of today’s largest supercomputers.
Computer sizemeasured
the biggest supercomputer
Exascale class. It fills a building.
Feasibility
Possible at national scale
Supercomputer territory: large, but it exists.
Universe-computerstextbook
1.2 × 10-86
One universe-computer is every kilogram in the observable universe computing at Lloyd’s bound.
Power draw, Landauer floortextbook
0.0029 W
The thermodynamic minimum for flipping bits at room temperature. The best real hardware uses about five billion times more energy than that.
At the thermodynamic minimum, a wall socket would do.
On every computer on Earthrough
faster than real time
How long it takes, on a clock, to compute one second of simulation on all of humanity’s computers, ~1021 FLOPS.
Real time, on computers we have today.
World actually computedwild guess
1.7 × 10-16%
1.7 × 10-16% of the mass is watched by one observer. The observation dial sets how much of the remainder is computed at the full floor.
- Would you go in, knowing what it is?
- If you remove suffering, do you remove meaning too?
- Can happiness be real with nothing at stake?
- Is it okay to keep the people inside from knowing?
“Worked out a world that’s only drawn in where one mind looks: 10^18 FLOPS.”
Instance report
ONE MIND, DRAWN-IN SURROUNDINGS
ONE MIND, DRAWN-IN SURROUNDINGS
Settings
ScaleEarth
Matter floorPainted set
LobbySingle player
Inner lives8.2 billion · functional
Computed1.7 × 10^-16%
TimeCyclic, live from 2026
SlotA player
Computing needed
1018 FLOPS
Computer sizethe biggest supercomputer
Universe-computers1.2 × 10-86
FeasibilityPossible at national scale
Judged, not measured
The author’s reading. None of these changes the computing total.
SufferingOff
Free willFeels free
Utilitarianleans for
Deontologicaldivided
Virtue ethicsleans against
Existentialistleans against
“Worked out a world that’s only drawn in where one mind looks: 10^18 FLOPS.”
Two of these are rough and three are wild guesses, and each is tagged that way. Change any one dial and you get a different universe.
Matter computingrough
1013 FLOPS
Only surfaces are computed, and only where someone is looking. Anything unobserved is just a stored value.
Mind computingrough
1018 FLOPS
Sandberg & Bostrom 2008, level 4
One fully computed functional mind and 8.2 billion scripted ones.
Inner liveswild guess
8.2 billion
1 real mind, 8.2 billion scripted, 4.5 × 1020 animals as scenery.
Operations so farrough
3.2 × 1025
less than a year on the clock, at 1018 per second.
History that is only storedrough
100%
Computing begins in 2026. 8.2 billion humans are present at the start, with preinstalled memories.