Are we living inside a Matrioshka brain? How advanced civilizations could reshape reality

Author: Paul Ratner / Source: Big Think

Advanced civilizations are likely to create megastructures to harness the energy of the stars.
These megastructures could be nested, creating “Matrioshka Brains” – the Universe’s most powerful supercomputers.
Matrioshka Brains could be used to simulate reality and remake the Universe.

To some people, like Elon Musk, the troubling thought is that we don’t really know whether we live in a “real” or impressively-rendered digital world. What makes the prospect of us living in a simulation more than a tired billionaire’s flight of fancy is the possible existence of Matrioshka brains, theoretical megastructures that can harness the power of stars.

To understand how they work, we need to look very far into the future.

With the advent of scientific thinking, humans discovered a seemingly reliable method for probing the world around us. We learned much about what the world is made of and how to bend some parts of it to our will. But what we learned and developed technologically is likely negligent compared to what’s about to come, especially if we project our current rate of progress. One prediction is that the needs of an advanced society for more energy will at some point lead to the creation of megastructures called Dyson Spheres. These would encircle stars like our Sun to harness their energy.

Freeman Dyson, the physicist would came up with the idea of Dyson Spheres saw their possible existence as something to keep in mind when searching for alien life. His 1960 paper “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation” advocates looking for unusual emission signatures of hypothetical structures like Dyson Spheres to spot other spacefaring civilizations.

But as inventor Robert Bradbury wrote, Dyson saw his spheres as quite specifically a “layer of habitats for human beings orbiting the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.” What Bradbury came up with is an extension of this idea – what if a Dyson sphere was turned into a computer, the most powerful machine in the Universe?

“If extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist and have reached a high level of technical development, one by-product of their energy metabolism is likely to be the large-scale conversion of starlight into far-infrared radiation,” wrote Freeman Dyson. “It is proposed that a search for sources of infrared radiation should accompany the recently initiated search for interstellar radio communications.