From Stephen Baxter, Science fiction author
I was intrigued by Nick Bostrom’s notion that we might be living in a giant virtual-reality simulator maintained by far-future humans (27 July, p 48).
This is a staple notion of science fiction, as in my own Manifold series. And in an article published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 2001 I explored the Matrix idea as a resolution to Fermi’s Paradox (if aliens exist we should see them).
But the energy required to maintain a high-quality simulated world is large, and grows larger as our domain of understanding increases. I estimated that if we could establish a colonisation bubble 100 light years wide, the energy requirements to keep up the simulation would be larger than the mass-energy of the Universe. Beyond that point, presumably, we will know the truth.
Prestwood, Buckinghamshire
