I have decided to quickly draft my trippy dreams. Here comes the first one of them:
It was a couple of centuries later. Mars projects had succeeded to start to inhabit the planet and more and more people were moving to spend the rest of their lives there. Things were according to the plan up until a gigantic storm in the hostile atmosphere of Mars destroyed most of the infrastructure and cut several colonies off from each other and from the resources. The geologic planet swallowed those who were going to transform it and colonizers died a sad death without being able to recieve help from Earth.
The project failed and all the budgets were cut and reallocated to overcome environmental disasters on Earth and to advance other technologies including simulating humans and their lives. The aim of that project was to assure that in the event of the climate nightmare that the earth was awaiting, some data from our life and our civilization could survive. The project made a good progress and people started to run simulated copies of the world, and in many different variations. In fact the future data archelogists even simulated their previous generations (including us) based on the data points that was collected from us and found in the rescued data centers. They had looked inside our lives, what we had written to each other, pictures and so on to interpolate the unknown events in between. [Here the resemblance to Black Mirror’s episode “Be right back” is a coincidence, as this dream was seen before me watching the series]
Anyhow after many years someone comes along to revive the idle knowledge and the abandoned technologies of the old Mars projects, but this time with a different purpose: To burry the simlation data centers under the surface of the red planet. So if things on Earth go terribly wrong the simulation can keep going. It must be deep and secured under the Mars’s surface to be kept safe from meteors and geological changes there.
And they succeeded.
Now if such a future scenario for us is imaginable, we may ask: Which one are we? The physical bodies that think we are? Or the Digital ones burried under the surface of Mars, still alive as code while long-dead physically on Earth?
P.S. Also with an accidental resemblence to Black Mirror’s “Playtest” (as well as “White Christmas”) where everything takes place in a fraction of a second, there was also a reference to shorter time constants in the simulation compared to the much longer times things would take in the real world. In fact the most striking revelation about the dream was regarding an “echo-effect”, where people in the simulation also faced their own ecological boundaries and had to make simulations inside that simulation, of course even faster. And that cascade could go on forever in a way that total time series would converge, explaining a “great leap”; perhaps similar to the main idea behind McKenna’s time wave zero! Whatever. Just a dream!