They said it had a massive storage capacity, and it was going to be expanded, and kept somewhere safe. What’s the difference if it feels real?
Ironically, what if that’s how our actual reality is even? It’s at least plausible, not that - as you said - it would make any difference if true.
Moreover, there are postulated by string theory to be 11 dimensions (I mean… who knows whether that is true, but we are speaking hypotheticals here regardless of instantiation of any one actual implementation), yet we only occupy 3 spatial and 1 time. The other spatial, and perhaps more interesting the other potential time, dimensions all offer numerous possibilities.
The ancient book Flatland does a pretty great job exploring that concept imho.
And its successor SphereLand is, if not quite in the same league in terms of being ground-breaking (especially for its time), also neat.
The Matrix was cool bc it popularized such thinking, bringing it out to where it was comfortable to talk about it in more mainstream company. But it most definitely was not the first to expouse that idea that truth is partly what we make of it, as well as not that too.
Here’s a rather trippy movie version that doesn’t do such a bad job adapting it - https://youtu.be/avMX-Zft7K4
I doubt I’ll ever read the book but the wikipedia article about it was quite interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
The author died >100 years ago, so the entire text is public domain if anyone wants to read it. https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Flatland
I don’t like reading books on a screen but… it is hard to pass up free - then again, libraries also exist and THIS BOOK IS WORTHWHILE.
I could barely put it down the entire time I read it, it just consumed me.
Just a note, it is actually so offensive to a woman’s role in society that many (most? I have no idea) scholars think that it was so over-the-top that it must have been meant as a critique of the then-status-quo.
This book has fucking VISION, even centuries into the future.
Hopefully it won’t remain so for millennia as well - bc of the thoughts finally becoming commonplace in society; but even then it would remain as a historical milestone towards that fantastic end.:-)
Can’t compare if you’ve never raw-dogged the universe outside of a holodeck.
Although in this case it would be sort of like putting a condom on an extremely realistic dildo that didn’t know it was a dildo.
I’m bad at metaphors.
