I recall a recent book proposed that there will be a global catastrophe when the Earth supports so many people that local reality is over-observed, leading to catastrophic breakdowns in the quantum reality around us. That’s the problem with the simulation paradox: the system crashes when there are too many entities within it interacting. This would make a great disaster for a novel: the heroes are in a world which will crash, say in 2012, because the simulation will break down. At that point, most of the population will be destroyed by the system tools who are trying to do a new build to get reality up and running again. Our heavenly sysop may have to declare an apocalypse, and once things are working again, he may have to monitor it for quite a while to make sure it doesn’t crash again….. … We can also test for the simulation by deliberately looking for problems in phenomena where we know that simulating them is computationally intensive. Basically, we need to think like beta testers and try to get reality to crash in some informative but non-lethal way. So yes, we can test the simulation hypothesis.
— heteromeles in a comment here
