science

There’s a book be Greg Egan called Permutation City which postulates something similar to this.

There exists a simulation. It works well but, due to the unbelievable complexity it runs something like 10 times slower than the real word.

They do a series of experiments on someone in the simulation. They count to ten a number of times and ask him if he perceived anything unusual. He didn’t. But what happened outside the simulation is that they did the computations for the simulation in various different ways. They parcel out the data in all kinds of ways and,, for example, send different packets of data to different locations in the world, process it in each different location and then send it back and recompile it. Or they run the data packets in reverse temporal order before recompiling them.

Since the guy in the simulation didn’t notice anything unusual, they determine that time and space is irrelevant when it comes to processing the data of a simulation, at least to the people in the simulation.

So, either through some very clever realistic physics that i didn’t pick up on or, as is far more likely, some science fiction hands-waving, they decide that you can treat every point in space and time as a bit and the presence of matter as a 1 and the absence of matter as a 0. And you can then consider them one giant stack of code and data and how far each point is separated in time and space can be ignored, and therefore you can use all of time and space as one computer and run an effectively infinitely large simulation with it.

It’s a pretty silly idea, but also a clever one. And it makes for a good story.