Asklemmy

We download more RAM.

This is why the Hubble telescope had mirror problems and James Webb was so delayed. The admins had to sneak delays into the simulation while they upgraded the hardware to render more of the universe.

The server shuts down. Admin adds in few more sticks of ram and powers it on again.

The day is reset and we wake up again from the morning of that day where there was a RAM shortage.

Human music. Huh. I like it!

I don't necessarily believe this, but I'll play along.

To make it appear natural so we don't notice, death is the first thing that comes to mind. So pandemics, disasters and wars that kill off beings on a large scale to free up memory. A globe with limited surface area seems ideal to stick us on to begin with, with anything outside of that sphere virtually impossible to access. The size of Earth could have been chosen because it fits comfortably within the RAM limits. If Earth is pushing the RAM limits, each planet could be hosted on its own server. So if we someday colonized Mars or the moon, the trip between would be like a server transfer making the RAM issues for interplanetary colonization inconsequential.

If you want to really explore the fringes of this concept, maybe those in the simulation would see glitches that shouldn't happen if it starts running out of RAM. UFOs, shadows, or synchronicities could become commonplace. People could randomly go catatonic or experience amnesia if they're personally impacted. If it got out of control across the entire simulation, perhaps a hard reset would become necessary. It may even be a planned cycle of hard resets based on the anticipated maximum lifespan of the simulation before things start to get fucky due to memory errors. So power on = big bang, and hard reset something like big crunch or heat death of the universe.

You get stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner and the same movie/media coming out over and over again

I am the only person who lives in the simulaton. You all are computer generated.

This is why older people think slower and lose memories or cognitive functions as side effects. They are depriorizized and moved from ram to pagefiles/swap disk.

If you're unfamiliar, the OS will move process memory onto disk when RAM runs out.

Teleportation based on old location data being deleted

once we run out of ram then the universe starts running on Skyrim physics

adjacent answer, but resource requirements are lower than might be expected since the simulation only needs to capture elements observed by a conscious entity. the vast majority of the known universe has not been observed in any detail that requires significant memory or processing resources. this same technique is employed by computer game designers so that only scenery and elements within view of a player are fully rendered.

The universe starts swapping

Who knows.. maybe we'll experience pointless wars and massive inequality.. selfish douchebags who only care about bolstering their ego might gain power.. heck, maybe even the climate will slowly start changing for the worse.

Given the vastness of space and time, the. Umber of people who die and have yet to learn anything (babies), I’d imagine we’re a system with 32gb of RAM, only consuming a few hundred megabytes.

Besides, I’d imagine that any intelligence capable of constructing and running such a complex simulation would have the ability to scale their system as needed. Using our existing technology, they probably use hot swappable components so that if there is a hardware failure or the need to “download more ram” 🤣 then they can just remove and insert new components on the fly and we’d be none the wiser.

Of course, we being part of the simulation, I’d also wager that unless the creators of said simulation are truly evil and sadistic, we’ll never know because it’s just not part of the programming. And if not we’re, we’d probably already have figured it out by now (beyond guessing and thought experiments). But rest assured, it is fun to think about, in a creepy and existential way.

If we are a simulation, what is the end goal of our creators? Could we be the roadmap for creating anew world in their real life? Maybe they are studying their own history and trying to figure out how their race came into being and evolved over time. Or maybe we are part of a crude video game keeping little Suzie occupied until dinner time. Better yet, maybe Susan is learning about simulations at university and we are part of her post-doctoral thesis.

The server admins run a kill -9 on a few processes. Inside the sim, this looks a lot like the Chicxulub impact.

Stutterers

You should check out the short story "Sleepover" by Alastair Reynolds.

We are the RAM

I'm more concerned with what happens when the hardware invariably fails...

There would either be some kind of mass extinction event or something that would be considered "supernatural" would occur to maintain the status quo

Starts with erectile dysfunction and ends with the little blue pill...

Well, if we're in a simulation, then any assumptions we have about definitions, limitations, they may not apply. So, we think storage needs ram, but outside our restricted simulation, it could be far different.

Like, I frequently ponder how did something come from nothing. But I know I'm making assumptions when I ask that question. It may not be linear, may not be either or, there's something crucial im not seeing.

For a simulation as complex and powerful as the universe. we would be running in a Real-Time OS. So applications couldn't even run if the resources weren't sufficient.