I love this idea from Clifford Pickover:

“Somewhere inside the digits of pi is a representation for all of us — the atomic coordinates of all our atoms, our genetic code, a coding of our motions and all our thoughts through time, all our memories…. Given this fact, all of us are alive, and hopefully happy, in pi. Pi makes us live forever. We all lead virtual lives in pi. We are immortal.”

It is similar to the whole idea of infinite monkeys typing Shakespeare, but exisiting in a single irrational number.

Pickover’s idea is that we must be immortal, because every moment of our existence, rendered numerically, exists within Pi. The only argument against this is perhaps the universe has aspects that cannot be described with numbers. Prove that, and living in a simulation becomes impossible.

One of the presumptions behind the theory of us living in a simulation is that there are limits to what is simulated. For example, if “our” universe is infinite, but we can’t see it all, is there any point rendering places we could never visit or observe?

Closer to home, is there any point rendering the center of the planet in precise detail if we will never achieve anything better than guesses and simulations as to what is down there?

Recently living organisms have been discovered deep in the Earth’s crust. As deep as 3600m below the Earth’s crust (in a South African gold mine, see New Scientist, 27 April 2013, page 37).

“The discovery floored me,” says Tullis Onstott, a geologist at Princeton University, who discovered these nematode worms swimming in the water-filled fissures of the Beatrix gold mine in 2011.

The fact is, complex organisms just shouldn’t be able to live so far beneath the Earth’s surface. The nourishment and oxygen that animals need to survive are in short supply just tens of metres below ground, let alone 1.3 kilometres down. Noting that the worms shunned light like a mythical devil, Onstott’s team named them Halicephalobus mephisto, after Mephistopheles, the personal demon of Dr Faustus.

Travelling even deeper into South Africa’s crust, they found more surprises. On a trek down into TauTona, the country’s deepest gold mine, they came across another species of nematode worm at 3.6 kilometres below ground?- making it the deepest land animal found to date.

[Found here]

The point is, if we would happily accept that life cannot exist down there, why create it for us to see in the simulation? It would take a lot of processing power for no need.

Of course we don’t know if out makers even have limitations on processor power…