Assuming our simulation is not designed to auto-scale (and our Admins don’t know how to download more RAM), what kind of side effects could we see in the world if the underlying system hosting our simulation began running out of resources?
We go to sleep and it clears
The OOM killer goes on the prowl.
An automatic purge process will start to prevent this. It happened several times in the past. Last time between 2019-2022. It removed circa 7 million processes. With regular purges like this it is made sure that the resources are not maxed out before the admins can add more capacity.
We can see that already when something approaches the speed of light: time slows down for it.
This simplification horribly misunderstands what time-dilation is, and I love it.
I have a running theory that that’s also what’s going on with quantum physics, because I understand it so poorly that it just seems like nonsense to me. So in my head, I see it as us getting into some sort of source code we’re not supposed to see, and on the other side some programmers are going “fuck I don’t know, just make it be both things at once!” and making it up on the fly.
Limitations of hardware resources show up as “Natural Limits”, like the speed of light, in the simulation. The amount of RAM consumed translates to the Hubble Bubble, or the greatest distance light could have traveled since the beginning of our universe, and moreso to the amount of matter and energy contained within it, which is a constant. Energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed, only changed forms allowed, so a set amount from the beginning.