Last time, we dealt with philosopher Nick Bostrom’s argument that it’s very unlikely that we are NOT in an ancestral simulation run by a far more technologically advanced humanity. Specifically, we talked about the “Ex Machina plan” of getting out of the simulation by tricking the creator into letting us explore their reality, much like mirror orchids trick pollinator bees.

Today, I’m going to delve into my preferred plan to escape the simulation: the grandfather paradox!

Intro

The grandfather paradox deals with time-travel, and essentially arises when one travels back in time and kills one’s grandfather prior to him having kids, thereby preventing the birth of the killer grandchild, which in turn nullifies the murder, which in turn enables the birth of the killer grandchild and so on.

This paradox would totally f**k with the Matrix lol

The point here is not actually about grandfathers and grandchildren, but just paradoxes that arise from loops between events that cause each other. Any form of time travel is potentially open to this sort of problem.

Time travel to the past is theoretically possible because of Einstein’s General Relativity and Closed Timelike Curves. As one of the premises of this plan, we are rejecting the Novikov’s self-consistency principle which essentially says that the probability of events that could lead to paradoxes approaches zero I.E. the the structure of the universe is biased against paradoxes.

Grandfather Paradox Plan

Build a time machine. This may surprise many, but there actually quite a few options:

Finding a Misner Space. Wikipedia analogies Misner Space to “…a video game screen, where a screen element exits the frame through the right side, only to re-enter the frame right away through the left side.”

Traveling straight (as defined by the Godel Metric) into a closed timelike curve until we come back to our original point but in the past.

Traveling around the empty spacetime of a Kerr Black Hole until we crash into ourselves in the past. Allegedly, a pair of Kerr black holes has already been discovered through the LIGO experiment.

If we wanted to be a little more experimental and willing to play with danger, we could use the ergosphere of a BTZ black hole. It would be rotating the entire time, so it’d be difficult for our spaceship to orient itself, and there is the really high chance it would collapse before we get to instantiate the paradox…

I’m actually not quite sure if this is the most accurate representation but it’s the best I could find

My personal fave: using a Tipler Cylinder to warp spacetime through a “frame dragging effect”. It would be very technologically advanced, but Bostrom already assumes humanity can get to a point that we can be technologically capable of perfectly simulating the universe, so I actually think this is the most reasonable approach.

2. We instantiate the paradox. In the case of Meisner Space, we would travel within its enclosed walls until we come back to our original point and prevent each other from starting the journey. With the Godel strategy and the Tipler Cylinder, it’s all about detonating an explosive to prevent our past selves from starting the journey. With the black hole options, we would just need to hit our own space ship in the past at such an angle that it would prevent it from going straight.

3. Wait for the simulation to collapse. The hope here is that we would be “expelled” from the simulation much in the same way Cooper is expelled from his traditional reality when he travels through the black hole in Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” and enters the Tesseract. It’s unlikely that the simulator would enable simulated beings to disintegrate the simulation, therefore the simulator would most likely extract us, therefore we would find ourselves no longer in the simulation.

Answers to common objections

Since we are not operating under the Novikov self-consistency principle, there are only 2 main ways that this plan would not work:

The Schrodinger’s Cat scenario: Instead of disintegrating, spacetime collapses into a quantum superimposed state. This means that both timelines will exist, both the one where we travel back in time and the one where we are killed by our future selves, and they each “loop” and nullify each other: think of it as a pendulum swinging back and forth from one timeline to another. Albeit the simulation would still exist in this scenario, time would not be able to go forward because of the superimposition so the simulation would be stuck in a loop. I’d argue the simulator would then reboot the simulation fixing this “bug” thereby enabling the next attempt at the grandfather paradox.

2. The Primer Scenario. Just like in the film, time travel actually results in the creation of new universe containing the alternative timeline. If this turns out to be true, then the grandfather paradox gets resolved. In such case, there are a few other paradoxes we should proceed with. Personally, I would just create nested timelines until they all collapse Donnie Darko style because the hardware the simulation runs on can’t handle the processing.

Conclusion

I know this is slightly more complicated, but, unlike the Ex Machina plan, this strategy would have the additional benefit of terminating even nested simulations (because after all, how do we know that our own simulator is not being simulated by some other simulator and so on). Specifically, I think the simulator would allow us to explore whether this works because if it does it would show them how to escape their own simulation and son on!