Relax, there's not going to be a tranny sex scene coming up; any sex stuff here is purely for ambience.
It's been mentioned before, but not delved into in any detail, but there is a history of violent conflict between the normal human colonists of Triton-Neptune and the mooners who inhabit the subterranean ice caves of Triton. It was a time of great strife throughout the Commonwealth, and not a situation anyone is in a hurry to experience again. But mooner fanatics attacking a peaceful colony could mean big trouble is on the horizon.
Despite a super high level of technological and scientific advancement, there are still plenty of religions in the universe of this comic. As such, I thought it might be fun from time to time to explore some of these belief systems in detail. So today, we'll take a look at the mind-bending doctrine of Simulacrumism.
The mediocrity principle states that, if an item is drawn at random from one of several sets or categories, it's likelier to come from the most numerous category than from any one of the less numerous categories.
Keeping that in mind, for contemporary computers capable of performance measured in yottaflops, the task of creating simulated universes is a trivial feat. The number of simulated humans in a single simulation may be counted in the hundreds of trillions. And there may be thousands, if not millions, of simulations currently being run. So this leads us to question: If it is impossible for you to know the difference between the real universe and a simulated universe, and the number of simulated people is hundreds of billions of times more than the total number of “real” humans who have ever lived… how likely is it that you are not a simulation? The mediocrity principle, as well as elementary probability, tells you that this likelihood is astronomically small. Without overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you must accept that you almost certainly are living inside a simulation.
One of the great philosophical challenges of our time, is what is mankind to do when we achieve a truly post scarcity civilization? Will life have no purpose? Will innovation and discovery end? It is indisputable that suffering and conflict are the great engines of human invention. But how do we continue harnessing these tools in a world where there is no suffering, and there is no conflict? It is the belief of Simulacrumism that, upon reaching post scarcity, humankind chose to utilize simulated universes to incubate their future generations. This simulacrum sends the pupil to a time just before we crossed over, to a time where suffering and want were still a concern. This crucible will shape them, and force them to use all the spiritual and intellectual talents with which they have been imbued.
What about people born into hopeless situations? What about infants who die before they've lived a single day? How is this simulation fair for them? Well, not everyone in the simulation is a real person. Many of them are just there to lend credibility to your simulated universe, and it is impossible to know who is and is not a player in the Great Game. You only know that You are real, and the universe in which you find yourself is a test to see if you can achieve Enlightenment in the time you have been given.
That is the Great Mystery. It is not clear what The Creators want of us. Is the Simulacrum just a stage of spiritual infancy, from which we all emerge into paradise? Or is it a test, and only those who achieve their divine goal will cross over, while those who fall short will simply be “switched off” when their time is over? Different sects have different beliefs on this matter.
And then of course, there are those who believe that, once you cross over, you are only crossing over into a higher simulacrum, from which you must again achieve transcendence. But we all know those guys are crazy.
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