{"id":49166,"date":"2021-02-22T12:21:35","date_gmt":"2021-02-22T12:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.currentaffairs.org\/2021\/02\/18403\/"},"modified":"2021-02-23T14:40:09","modified_gmt":"2021-02-23T14:40:09","slug":"why-we-built-the-simulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/22\/why-we-built-the-simulation\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We Built the Simulation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
DISCLAIMER: This is all imaginary, but that doesn’t mean it’s frivolous. If we don’t imagine new worlds, we’ll be stuck with the crummy one we’ve got.<\/em><\/p>\n The simulation was originally little more than an educational tool, a way of making history a bit more compelling for a generation that had been raised on apps and games. Version 1.0, released by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium<\/a> (MECC, which had been revived by the Second New Deal), was literally called A Simulated History of Earth and anyone could download it for desktop or mobile, though it was slow and buggy on a phone.\u00a0<\/p>\n Essentially, the program looked like an isometric \u201csim\u201d video game, though because the user couldn\u2019t change anything and there was nothing to \u201cplay,\u201d it was more like a film or diagram. Opening the software would reveal a big globe with a timeline, a search bar, a zoom in\/zoom out tool, play\/pause\/stop\/fast forward\/rewind buttons, and closed caption\/spoken word options. <\/p>\n The user could punch in any time in history, go to any place on Earth, and see what was happening there at the specified time. It was no more complicated than a SimCity <\/em>or Civilization, the difference being that it was designed by educators to show everything we know about what actually <\/em>happened on Earth at any given time. So if you went to 12th century Paris, you could watch the early portions of Notre Dame cathedral being erected. If you went to what is today Mexico during the 15th century, you could see the mighty Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, reconstructed as accurately as possible. (You could also see it destroyed by the Spanish.) Pick any event\u2014the Turkish Siege of Vienna in 1529, Hannibal crossing the Alps in 218 BC, and if you went to the right part of the Earth on the exact right date and time, you could watch little pixelated figures act it out.<\/p>\n The Simulated History of Earth, even in its rudimentary version, was fun to spend hours poking around. It gave a much better appreciation of how exactly historical events unfolded in space and time. One could watch Kennedy\u2019s limousine snake through Dallas before passing fatefully in front of the Schoolbook Depository, or see the buses pull in and the crowds assemble for the March on Washington. Because every <\/em>historical moment was displayed, not just the highlight reel, it was possible to watch the cleanup <\/em>of the March on Washington or the aftermath <\/em>of the Kennedy assassination as well, which could be unexpectedly enthralling. The billions of actors on the world stage all enacted the great drama before your eyes.<\/p>\n Perusing the Simulated History, one is struck by just how exceptional and rare the events we lump together as \u201chistory\u201d are. If you dump your cursor at any given place at any given time, not much is happening. People are depicted waking up, going about their business, eating, chatting, laboring, and going to bed. You have to know exactly what you\u2019re looking for and exactly where it happened to see anything truly momentous. Show up at 4:00 p.m. for an event that happened at 11:00 a.m., and you\u2019re out of luck. You can see, if you drag the map away from the scene, just how many people missed it or didn\u2019t know about it. If you can pinpoint the Boston Massacre, you can watch it (and there is of course, a tool for helping you find all the \u201cimportant\u201d stuff), but if you go two blocks away, you\u2019d see people completely unaware that the Boston Massacre is going on.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the Simulated History\u2019s virtue is that it puts things in perspective. Kings and emperors and dictators and presidents are tiny little figures, declaiming from pixelated balconies, and they appear almost comical. The entire piece of software is like a digitized representation of Shelley\u2019s “Ozymandias,” as human beings strive for greatness and quickly disappear. You can watch them be born, grow up, die, decompose, and be forgotten. You can see complacent people totally unaware of the forces about to destroy them\u2014I once watched a full week of life in Pompeii in the lead-up to Vesuvius\u2019s explosion.\u00a0<\/p>\n One of the problems in building the Simulated History was that we actually know hardly anything about history. We know a great deal about \u201cnotable\u201d people\u2019s lives, but most people who have lived have not had their day-to-day activities tracked and logged. Even with a famous person, say, Ralph Ellison or Lucille Ball, we might know that they attended a particular awards ceremony on a particular day, but we don\u2019t know what time they got up on November 5, 1952, or all the people they talked to and what exactly they said, or what those people did with the information and what consequences it had. We do not know if they tripped over their cat at breakfast time and it caused them to leave the house five minutes later which unleashed a string of events that would ultimately result in two divorces, four marriages, and a death that would not otherwise have occurred. The \u201cbutterfly effect\u201d can be speculated upon, but it is impossible to map out the consequences of any given butterfly on any given event.<\/p>\n MECC did what they could. A team of historians and research assistants at the University of Minnesota began to compile records of everything that could possibly be known for certain about everything that has ever happened, and exactly where and what it looked like. The Simulated History, in creating a picture of events, necessarily had to speculate when filling in the gaps between the data points. We know approximately <\/em>how many soldiers Suleiman the Magnificent brought to the Siege of Vienna, and approximately <\/em>what they would have been armed with and what they would have worn. We do not know what each of their names was or how they styled their moustaches or where and when they went to the bathroom, but the Simulated History builds an approximation of these things that is consistent with the known facts.<\/p>\n Thus, it could be the case that much of the Simulated History is not accurate. Perhaps Paul Revere was not wearing that outfit in reality. MECC gave him what he might have been wearing, accurate to the period. But not a single thing depicted in the Simulated History is known to be inaccurate\u2014<\/em>that is to say, every piece of data we do have is faithfully represented, and only the areas where the truth is unknown are filled in speculatively. The end goal of the Simulated History was for every single thing we do know to appear in the software, and for a completely consistent story to be told, hewing as closely to reality as possible.<\/p>\n This necessarily involved a staggering amount of effort. At the beginning, when MECC confined itself to showing the evolution of life on Earth (from the primordial ooze to the hominids) and the crucial events of world history, there was nothing groundbreaking about the project from a technical perspective. But in its successive iterations, as its designers sought to make it richer\u2014and to leave no known fact un-depicted\u2014it became epic in its scope.\u00a0<\/p>\n Because every human life that has ever been lived needed to be depicted, exhaustive research had to be done. Copies of every memoir, biography, and collection of papers ever published were obtained, a vast team compiling each known date, place, and activity. The makers tried to collect every photograph ever taken, and figure out exactly where and when it had been produced, so that frequently a stone or a toy or a Coca Cola bottle could be made to appear exactly where it was at the time it was there. This did mean that the Simulated History might have a more accurate depiction of your grandmother\u2019s wallpaper\u2014if a photo of it happened to find its way into the data\u2014than the Battle of Hastings. Such is the consequence of the fragmentary recordkeeping of ages past.\u00a0<\/p>\n All objects in the program had to come <\/em>from somewhere and go somewhere, meaning that when a Coca Cola bottle did appear, one could trace that individual bottle from its creation to its destruction, seeing the raw materials that made it, their locations, and every part of the industrial process. Not every one of history\u2019s soda bottles has been tracked from moment to moment, of course, so the Simulated History simply had to construct paths through spacetime for each object that were consistent with the known historical record.<\/p>\n Where accounts conflicted, an international panel of historians was convened to produce a \u201cbest approximate theory\u201d of what actually occurred, which could be represented in the simulation. (It was decided early on not <\/em>to depict alternate possibilities, because\u2014amusingly, considering what the software became\u2014this would be \u201ctoo complicated.\u201d However, because it was an open-source public project, game developers created interactive versions where one could play out different alternate histories by tweaking some small factor or other, or re-fighting a historic war to a different outcome. The original, though, was always scrupulously committed to never depicting a known falsehood.) Every field of study had to be exhaustively mined for the information it could reveal about the past: the laws of physics had to apply exactly to the Simulated History, the biological processes of plants and animals had to occur exactly correctly. The whole ecosystem had to function. Slowing down to real time, one could watch individual animals stalk and eat other animals. Speeding up, one could watch the evolutionary process at work. If you wanted to watch the dinosaurs go about their lives, you could spend years of your own life directly observing years of theirs. (Each individual dinosaur for which we have a fossil record, of course, was replicated in the simulation.)<\/p>\n Every word of every book ever written eventually had to be incorporated into the Simulated History, of course, because each book is a fact from the past. This caused considerable copyright trouble, as might be expected, until the establishment of the universal free knowledge database<\/a> under the socialist world government, after which it was possible not just to watch any film ever made within the program, but to attend any particular screening of that film that had ever been known to occur. Likewise, if one wanted to go and sit through the entire Woodstock festival in 1969, one could watch a tiny simulated Jimi Hendrix play the guitar early in the morning, the actual soundtrack imposed atop it. This was true not just of historically famous concerts, of course, but of all <\/em>concerts that had been recorded. Those that hadn\u2019t were replicated with a representative set list of the era and genre. This meant that new music that might possibly have existed <\/em>was created specially for the project\u2014if we did not know what kind of solo Miles Davis had played on some particular <\/em>night, because there was no record of it, a panel of the world\u2019s top jazz trumpeters were convened to create a representative audio clip showing what, according to the best available knowledge, he most likely sounded like. (The Simulated History did have an option for users to see exactly which of its parts were based on fact and which were carefully-constructed conjecture using the tools of all the sciences. There was even a spectrum of \u201ccertainty layers\u201d that one could apply or remove, showing, for instance, all that was known with 99.9 percent confidence, 80 percent confidence, etc., and which data was used to substantiate any given part of the simulated reality\u2019s claim to authenticity.)<\/p>\n As I say, early versions had rudimentary graphics. A city would look something like this, even fully zoomed-in:<\/p>\n