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Comment by Smoosh

2 years ago

Maybe all the other instances crashed, but we got lucky and get to apply the anthropic principle.

The real question is, are we running on bare metal, in a VM, or in a container?

> The real question is, are we running on bare metal, in a VM, or in a container?

We can't be running on the bare hardware; there is clearly an OS enforcing the hardware abstraction (e.g. every electron is identical).

But is each universe its own process? What happens if you fork()?

Why do you ask? Are you hoping to ROWHAMMER a parallel universe?

Genuinely curious if there’s any scientifically useful direction to this question

  • "According to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower – maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations – is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath." in Accelerando

  • I'd watch a movie with that premise.

    • I believe they tried an experiment that was similar to that at the start of Schild’s Ladder — and for their troubles they were rewarded with a vacuum decay expanding through space at about 0.5c.

I’ve never understood the anthropic principle. It’s a very big maybe for seemingly no reason. Existence of a single universe is a pretty hard thing to contemplate, why should we consider multiples of it?