Illustris

Are we living in a simulation? Is our whole universe just a computer program running on a computer somewhere in “real” physical reality? That’s a question philosophers like Nick Bostrom have asked. One big bulwark against it was an assumption that either humanity will never evolve enough to make such a sophisticated simulation, or that it’s physically impossible. The Illustris project from MIT is starting to make me doubt that limitation. The Illustris project harnesses the latest advancements in computing power to create an amazingly accurate mode of our universe, down to a degree that wasn’t possible before. According to findings recently published in the journal Nature, the Illustris team simulated a 330-million-light-year chunk of the universe with enough detail to include individual galaxies and black holes, then ran it through a simulation starting at 12 million years after the big bang though the 13 billion years until today. Most previous simulations were much simpler, focusing only on the large scale dark matter and dark energy that make up most of