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Original post by popsoftheyear This is certainly not my area of expertise, so forgive me if I'm just being ignorant. But it takes all that computing power to simulate a nuclear reaction, or some protein folding. To simulate those biological processes that gave rise to evolution (which itself isn't proven), wouldn't the simulation have to go down to the atomic level? I mean, to play with the idea of evolution, perhaps the moon's gravity played an indirect effect on things. If (BIG if), some how, we simulated a countless numbers of atoms with some vast number of correct algorithms that happened to create another human race, wouldn't the simulation eventually end up simulating people trying to simulate themselves? This would only seem to be possible with the "infini-core" chip mentioned earlier...

A number of misconceptions here. To begin with, evolution is one of the best supported theories in science. We can as sure that the majority of the theory of evolution is correct as we can be sure the sun is rising in the east tomorrow.

To simulate biological evolution "exactly", i.e. not only evolution itself (which has already been done many, many times) but also the underlying biology, for whatever reason, then yes, we'd need to simulate countless numbers of particles. However, unless we did, in fact, have unlimited processing power (or tailored the selection criteria in a way that makes the whole biological simulation redundant), it's extremely unlikely that we would end up with another human race. We would end up with a plethora of species, but remember that evolution is like throwing a gazillion-sided die: you will always get a result, but it is impossible to predict which result. Furthermore, even if we did end up with a simulated race of humans, there is nothing to force them to act identically to us. Just as two identical twins act independently from each other, so would the simulated intelligence act independently from us. It would be like is, it wouldn't be us.