From Guy Cox, Sydney, Australia
Nick Bostrom’s reprinted article, which discussed the idea that our reality may be a simulation, doesn’t begin promisingly when he says “we are made of the same stuff as mud” (6 June, p 46). Well, not so much – the essential components of mud are alumino-silicate clay minerals and these play no part in the mammalian body.
I take it that the article was written, if not as a joke, then at least as a jeu d’esprit to provoke discussion, so I won’t go through all the logical inconsistencies. But I will point to the pachyderm on the premises. No civilisation living on a planet in a solar system (and we don’t know of anywhere else a civilisation could live) could obtain enough energy to run such a simulation, at least not without destroying their solar system.
So we can be pretty confident we aren’t living in a simulation.
