Astrophysical constraints on the simulation hypothesis for this

Universe: why it is (nearly) impossible that we live in a simulation

Franco Vazza (1,2)

1 Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università di Bologna, Via Gobetti 93/2, 40122, Bologna, Italy;
2 INAF, Istituto di Radioastronomia di Bologna, via Gobetti 101, 41029 Bologna, Italy
arXiv:2504.08461v1 [[Link]-ph] 11 Apr 2025

Abstract
We assess how physically realistic the ”simulation hypothesis” for this Universe is, based on physical con-
straints arising from the link between information and energy, and on known astrophysical constraints. We
investigate three cases: the simulation of the entire visible Universe, the simulation of Earth only, or a
low resolution simulation of Earth, compatible with high-energy neutrino observations. In all cases, the
amounts of energy or power required by any version of the simulation hypothesis are entirely incompatible
with physics, or (literally) astronomically large, even in the lowest resolution case. Only universes with
very different physical properties can produce some version of this Universe as a simulation. On the other
hand, our results show that it is just impossible that this Universe is simulated by a universe sharing the
same properties, regardless of technological advancements of the far future.

Keywords
cosmology, information, simulations, black holes

1 Introduction
The ”simulation hypothesis” (SH) is a radical and thought-provoking idea, with ancient and noble philo-
sophical roots (for example, in works by Descartes 1641/1984 and Berkeley 1734) and frequent echos in
the modern literature, which postulates that the reality we perceive is the creation of a computer program.
The modern version of the debate is usually referred to an influential article by Bostrom (2003), although
several coeval science fiction movies contributed to make this theme extremely popular 1 .
Despite its immense popularity, this topic has been rarely investigated in a scientific way, also because
at first sight it might seem to be entirely out of the boundaries of falsifiability, and hence relegated to social
media buzz and noise.
A remarkable exception is the work by Beane et al. (2014), who investigated the potentially observable
consequences of the SH, by exploring the particular case of a cubic space-time lattice. They found that
the most stringent bound on the inverse lattice spacing of the universe is ∼ 10−11 GeV−1 , derived from
the high-energy cut off of the cosmic ray spectrum. Interestingly, they proposed that the SH can be tested
through the distributions of arrival direction of the the highest energy cosmic rays, through the detection of
a degree of rotational symmetry breaking, associated with the the structure of the underlying lattice. Our
1
For example, it was the central topic of the 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, featuring several astrophysicists and
physicists: [Link] This theme still periodically surges and generate a
lot of ”noise” in the web, both indicating the fascination it rightfully produce on the public, as well as the difficulty to debunk it.
work will also use ultra high energy cosmic rays and neutrinos to put constraints on the SH, even if in a
totally different way (e.g. Sec.3.3).
Our starting point is that ”Information is physical” (Landauer, 1999, 1996), and hence any numerical
computation requires a certain amount of power, energy, computing time, and the laws of physics can clearly
tell us what is possible to simulate, and under which conditions. We can use these simple concepts to assess
the physical plausibility- or impossibility - of a simulation reproducing the Universe 2 we live within, and
even of some lower resolution version of it.
Moreover, the powerful physical nature of information processing allows us to even sketch the properties
than any other universe simulating us must have, in order for the simulation to be feasible.
This paper is organised as follows: Section 2 presents the quantitative framework which we will use to
guess the information and energy budget of simulations; Sec.3 will present our results for different cases
of the SH, and Sec.4 will critically assess some of the open issues in our treatment. Our conclusions are
finally summarised in Sec.5.

2 Methods: the holographic principle and information-energy equiv-

alence
In order to assess which resources are needed to simulate a given system, we need to quantify how much
information can be encoded in a given portion of the Universe (or in its totality). The Holographic Prin-
ciple (HP) arguably represents the most powerful tool to establish this connection. It was inspired by the
modelling of black hole thermodynamics through the Bekenstein bound (see below), according to which
the maximum entropy of a system scales within its encompassing surface, rather than its enclosing volume.
The HP is at the core of the powerful ”AdS/CFT” correspondence (where AdS stands for anti-de Sitter
spaces and CFT for conformal field theories) which links string theory with gravity in five dimensions, with
the quantum field theory of particles with no gravity, in a four-dimensional space (e.g. Maldacena, 1998).
According to the HP, a stable and asymptotically flat spacetime region with boundary of area A is fully
described by no more than A/4 degrees of freedom, or about 1 bit of information per Planck area, defined
as:

lp2 = Gh̄/c3 = 2.59 · 10−66 cm2 . (1)

p
where obviously lp = h̄G/c3 ∼ 1.6 · 10−33 cm is the Planck scale. While in a local classical field
theory description there are far more degrees of freedom, the excitation of more than A/4 of these degrees
of freedom will trigger gravitational collapse (e.g. Bousso, 2002; Bekenstein, 2004; Suskind and Lindesay,
2005, for reviews). The total entropy contained with the holographic area A follows from the generalised
second law of thermodynamics, giving the Bekenstein bound, which applies to systems which are not
strongly self-gravitating and whose energy is E ≈ M c2 :
ER
S ≤ 2πkB
= A/4 (2)
h̄ c
where R is the circumferential radius of the smallest sphere that fits around the matter system, assuming
(nearly) Euclidean spacetime for simplicity, and M is the mass of the system.
2
As a sign of respect for what this astrophysicist honestly thinks is the only ”real” Universe, which is the one we observe
through telescopes, I will still use the capital letter for this Universe - even if for the sake of the argument this is at times assumed
to be just a simulation, being run in another universe.
 Next, we can use the classical information-entropy equivalence (Szilard, 1929), which states that the
minimum entropy production connected with any 1-bit measurement is given by:

H = kB log(2) (3)
where the log(2) reflects the binary decision. The amount of entropy for a single 1-bit measurement (or
for any single 1-bit flip, i.e. a computing operation) can be greater than this fundamental amount, but not
smaller, otherwise the second law of thermodynamics would be violated.
Therefore, the total information (in [bits]) that can possibly be encoded within the holographic surface
A is:
S ER
Imax == 2π . (4)
H h̄ c log(2)
How much energy is required to encode an arbitrary amount of information (I) in any physical device?
Computation and thermodynamics are closely related: in any irreversible 3 computation, information must
be erased, which is a physical reduction of the number of possible states of one physical register to 0. This
necessarily leads to the decrease of entropy of the device used for computing, which must be balanced with
an equal (or larger) increase in entropy of the Universe. Thermodynamics thus leads to the necessity of
dissipating energy (via heat) to erase bits of information. The related cost of erasing one single bit is thus
given by the ”Brioullin’s inequality”:

∆E ≥ kB T log(2) (5)
where T is the (absolute) temperature where the energy gets dissipated. If we apply this to the maximum
information within the holographic sphere, we get:
ER
.
EI = 2πkB T (6)
h̄c
It is interesting to compute the ratio between the enclosed energy within the holographic surface, E, and
the energy required to encode the same information, EI , which scales as
EI T E T M
χ= ≈ 27.5 ◦ ≈ 0.04 ◦ (7)
E 1 K 1erg 1 K mp
This physically means even at the low temperature of ∼ 1◦ K for computing, the minimum energy required
to fully describe all internal degrees of freedom of system becomes larger than the actual energy that the
system contains, already for systems with a mass M ∼ 25mp , or more. This is enlightening, as it shows how
the full simulation of any macroscopic (or astronomical) object is bound to require an astoundingly large
amount of energy, which in turn allows us to assess the plausibility of the SH against known astrophysical
bounds.
The exact bounds derived from Eq.4 depend on what systems are considered and on how R, E, and S
are defined (e.g. Page, 1982; Bousso, 2002). It must also be stressed that a key assumption in Bekenstein’s
derivation formula is that the gravitational self–interaction of the system can be neglected, as it highlighted
by the fact that the Newton constant G does not appear. Although in the application explored in this work
this assumption is reasonably verified, we notice that the estimates for black holes can significantly differ
(e.g. Bousso, 2002, and references therein).
3
It must be noted that also reversible computation, with no delation of bits or dissipation of energy, is possible. However,
irreversible computation is unavoidable both for several many-to-one logical operations (AND or ERASE) as well as for error
correction, in which several erroneous states are mapped into a single correct state (e.g. Sandberg, 1999; Lloyd, 2000).
3 Results: Information requirements and energy bounds
3.1 Full simulation of the visible Universe
Based on the above formulas, we can first estimate the total information contained within the holografic
surface with radius equal to the observable radius of the Universe, RU ≈ 14.3Gpc (comoving), and assum-
ing a critical density ρc = 8.5 · 10−30 g/cm3 , which is valid for a flat Universe at z = 0 and using a value
for the Hubble constant H0 = 67.4 km/s/Mpc. This gives a total energy
4π 3
EU =R ρc c2 ∼ 2.7 · 1078 erg (8)
3 U
Based on Eq.4 this results into a maximum information of

IU ∼ 3.5 · 10124 bits (9)

which requires
EI,U ∼ 8.9 · 10108 erg (10)
of encoding energy, assuming a computing temperature equal to the Microwave Background tempera-
ture nowadays (TCMB = 2.7◦ (1 + z)K).
As anticipated, since EI,U ≫ EU , there simply is not enough energy within the entire observable Uni-
verse to simulate another similar universe down to the Planck scale, in the sense that there are not even
remotely available resources to store the data and even begin the simulation. Therefore, the SH applied to
the entire Universe is entirely rejected, based on the energy beyond imagination it requires.
As noted above, slightly different estimates for the total information content of the Universe can been
obtained replacing the Bekenstein bound with the Hawking-Bekenstein formula, which computes the en-
tropy of the Universe if that would be converted into a black hole:

GM 2
′
Imax =∼ 2.0 · 10124 bits (11)
h̄c
which is in line with similar estimates in the recent literature (Egan and Lineweaver e.g. 2010, once we
rescaled the previous formula for the volume within the cosmic event horizon, rather than from the volume
within the observable Universe; see also Profumo et al. 2024 for a more recent estimate), and obviously
incredibly larger than the amount of information which is generated even by the most challenging ”cosmo-
logical” simulations produced to-date in astrophysics (e.g. ∼ 1.6 · 1013 bits of raw data in the Illustris-1
simulation, Vogelsberger et al. 2014).
This leads to the FIRST CONCLUSION: simulating the entirety of our visible Universe at full
resolution (i.e. down to the Planck scale) is physically impossible.

3.2 Full simulation of planet Earth

Next, we can apply the same logic to compute the total memory information needed to describe our planet
(R⊕ = 6.37 · 108 cm , M⊕ = 5.9 · 1027 g and E⊕ = M⊕ c2 = 5.46 · 1048 erg). We assume here that a planet
is the smallest system that ”the simulator” must model to recreate the daily experience that humankind
collectively considers the reality 4 .
4
For the sake of the argument, since we surmise here the existence of a skilled simulator which somehow can use computing
centres as large a planet-sized black hole, we can concede with no difficulty that it can also create a consistent simulation of the
 Again based on Eq.4 we get

Imax,⊕ = 9.81 · 1074 bits (12)

and for the total energy needed to code this information:

Emax,⊕ = 2.55 · 1059 erg (13)

assuming, very optimistically (as it will be discussed later) that T = TCMB . The amount of energy
required to even start the simulation of our planet is enormous, and it can be easily put into astrophysical
context:

• this is of the same order of the rest mass energy of globular clusters, like Palomar2 (Mgc ∼ 3.3 ·
105 M⊙ , e.g. Baumgardt and Hilker 2018): Erm,gc = Mgc c2 ≈ 5.6 · 1059 erg;

• this is also of the order of the potential binding energy of the halo of our Galaxy (Mgal ∼ 1.3·1012 M⊙
2
and Rgal = 287kpc, e.g. Posti and Helmi 2019): Urm,gal ∼ 3GMgal /(5Rgal ) ∼ 3.1 · 1059 erg.

Therefore, the initialisation of a complete simulation of ”just” a planet like Earth requires either to
convert into energy the entire stellar mass of a typical globular cluster, or to use the equivalent energy
necessary to unbind all stars and matter components in the Milky Way.
Elaborating on the implausibility of such a simulation, based on its energy cost, is straightforward: while
this is indeed the requirement just to begin the simulation, roughly the same amount of energy needs to be
dissipated for each timestep of the simulation. This means that already after ∼ 106 timesteps, the required
energy is equivalent to the entire rest mass energy of the Milky Way, or roughly to the total potential energy
of the most massive clusters of galaxies in the Universe.
Moreover, while the minimum mass required to contain this information corresponds to a black hole
mass prescribed by Eq.11 , which gives ∼ 0.32M⊙ using Imax,⊕ , the actual energy required to encode the
entire amount of bits, Emax,⊕ , can at most be confined at within a radius corresponding to the Schwarzschild
radius given by:
2 GEmax,⊕
RS = ∼ 4.95 · 109 cm (14)
c4
which is 70% of the radius of Jupiter (RJ = 6.99 · 109 cm), meaning that planetary-sized computer must
be deployed for this simulation. The equivalent mass enclosed within such radius will be of course very
large: Mmax,⊕ = Emax,⊕ /c2 = 1.68 · 105 M⊙ . Moreover, such computing Jupiter must be continuously
supplied with a similar amount of energy for time step, while all dissipated energy is somehow released
outside of the system (and even without raising the computing temperature), which makes this scenario
even more implausible.
Interestingly, such planetary-sized computers were theoretically explored by Sandberg (1999), who
presented a through study of all practical limitations connected to heat dissipation, computing power, con-
nectivity and bandwidth, arriving to a typical estimate of ∼ 1047 bits for a realistic Jupiter-sized computer.
This is impressive, and yet 27 orders of magnitude fewer than what is required to encode the maximum
information within the holographic surface containing our planet. Even setting aside the tremendous dis-
tance between hypothetical and realistic memory capacity of such colossal computer, the next problem is
experience of ≤ 103 astronauts that have temporarily left our planet and have probed a larger portion of space. The simulator must
also use a modest amount of extra computing resources to produce fake data to constantly keep astrophysicists and cosmologists
busy while they think they study the Universe.
 SIMULATION SYSTEM SIZE MIN. RESOLUTION MIN. INFORMATION MIN. ENERGY
[cm] [cm] [bits] [erg]
31 −33 124
Full Res. Universe 4.47 · 10 1.64 · 10 3.5 · 10 8.9 · 10108
Full Res. Earth 6.37 · 108 1.64 · 10−33 9.8 · 1074 3.0 · 1059
Low Res. Earth 6.37 · 108 1.24 · 10−21 1.65 · 1051 4.3 · 1035

Table 1: Summary table of the tested simulation hypothesis, and of their memory and energy requirements.

that concentrating so much mass and energy in such a limited volume will inevitably produce levels of high
energy emission and heating, as in standard black holes and their related accretion discs.
If a black hole actively accretes matter, the kinetic temperature acquired by accreted matter is very large:

GMmax,⊕ mp 2mp c2
Tacc ∼ ∼ , (15)
3RJ kB 3 kB
i.e. regardless of the actual mass and radius of the black hole into consideration, the temperature ac-
quired by accreted particles is in the ∼ (m/mp ) · 107 K regime, for a generic particle with m/mp relative
to the proton mass. Such temperature is manifestly much larger than the very optimistic CMB temperature
we previously assumed to compute the minimum energy necessary to encode the full information of the
simulation, i.e. Tacc ∼ 107 TCMB . From E ∝ kB T IMAX (Eq.4) it follows that the actual energy requirement
is a factor ∼ 107 larger, even in the most optimistic configuration, requiring now a computer with radius
∼ 5 · 1017 cm, i.e. ∼ 0.16 parsecs.
This leads to a SECOND CONCLUSION: simulating planet Earth at the full resolution (i.e. down
to the Planck scale) is practically impossible as it requires to access to a galactic amount of energy.

3.3 Low-resolution simulations of planet Earth

Next, we shall explore the possibility of ”partial” or ”low resolution” simulations of planet Earth, in which
the simulation must only resolve scales which are routinely probed by human experiments or observations,
while using some sort of ”subgrid” physics for any smaller scale.
The Planck scale lp is at the core of physics as we know it, but it is not a directly measurable scale
by any means. In the framework of the SH, it is well conceivable that lp appears in the equations of our
physics, but that the simulation instead effectively works by discretising our reality at a much coarser scale,
thus providing a ”low-resolution” simulation 5 .
What is the smallest scale, ∆xmin that a realistic simulation of our Planet should resolve, in order for the
simulation not to be incompatible with available human experiments or observations done on the Planet?
High energy physics, through the De Broglie relation, λ = hc/E ∼ h/p, establishes an effective link
between observed energy particle phenomena and spatial length-scales. So the smallest resolution that the
simulation must have depends on the highest energies which are routinely probed by human experiments.
On Earth, the smallest high energy scale probed by man made experiments is in ∼ 10−16 cm ballpark based
on the particle collision energy scale reached with the Large Hadron Collider (e.g. Soldin, 2024, for a recent
review). However, this is true only limited to the portion of the terrestrial surface where the LHC is deployed
(i.e. a ring of 27 km at most 200 m below the sea level).
5
As a matter of fact, in almost any conceivable numerical simulation which is run in physics, the Planck constant and its
associated length scale lp are at the core of many physical relations, and yet the effective spatial resolution of simulations is
coarser than by many orders of magnitude.
 A much larger energy scale is probed by the detection of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs)
as they cross our atmosphere and trigger the formation of observable Cherenkov radiation and fluorescent
light (e.g. Aloisio et al., 2014; Abbasi et al., 2015). Observed UHECRs are characterized by a power-law
distribution of events, and the largest energy ever recorded for an UHECR is ∼ 3 · 1020 eV (1991, ”Oh my
god particle”, e.g. Bird et al. 1995) while the second probably exceeded the ∼ 2.4 · 1020 eV range (2022,
”Amaterasu” particle, e.g. Unger and Farrar 2024). The precise determination of very energetic is subject
to absolute energy calibration uncertainties, also due to their uncertain composition, hence we can use
EUHECR = 1020 eV = 1.6·108 erg as a conservative limit: this yields a length scale λUHECR ∼ 1.2·10−24 cm.
However, a hardcore proponent of the SH might still argue that this spatial scale is not really the most
stringent experimental limit on the minimum spatial scale of the global Earth simulation, because UHECRs
probe only the last ∼ 102 km of air above the ground level, where particle cascades and airshowers are
triggered by the interaction between UHECRs and air molecules. Hence, the majority of the simulated
volume of our Planet might still be kept a much lower level of spatial resolution by the simulator, in order
to limit computing resources. And indeed, the best resolution which is currently sampled for the interior of
Earth, based on the advanced analysis of seismic shear waves diffracting along the core-mantle boundary,
is ”just” of order ∼ 102 km (e.g. Jenkins et al., 2021; Li et al., 2024).
Luckily, high energy astrophysics still comes to the rescue, due to the detection of very high energy
extragalactic neutrinos crossing the inside of our planet. Since the first discovery of energetic neutrinos by
the IceCube observatory (IceCube Collaboration, 2013; Aartsen et al., 2013), the existence of a background
radiation of neutrinos, likely of extragalactic origin, in the 10TeV − 2PeV energy range, has been firmly
established. Such neutrinos are very likely produced in external galaxies, even if the exact mechanism is
highly uncertain (e.g. Buson et al., 2023; Neronov et al., 2024; Padovani et al., 2024, for recent works).
In any case, the maximum energy scale probed so far reaches about Eν ∼ 1017 eV (KM3NeT Collabora-
tion et al., 2025), i.e. lower than the maximum energy reached by UHECRs but in line with theoretical
expectations about the likely hadronic production mechanisms at the source. Unlike UHECRs, however,
neutrinos cross our planet entirely, since they are extremely weakly interacting with anything else. As a
matter of fact, the IceCube observatory is more sensitive to events which are produced on the other side of
the planet, with respect to its location on the South Pole as this reduces the contamination by lower energy
neutrinos of atmospheric or solar origin. Therefore, the established detection of this event can be used to
constrain the minimum length scale which must be effectively adopted by any low-resolution simulation of
our planet: λν = hc/Eν ∼ 1.2 · 10−21 cm 6 . A simulation with an effective resolution coarser than this will
be incompatible with our experimental data on neutrinos. Less straightforward is how to use this knowledge
to estimate the information required for such reduced resolution simulation of planet Earth, using the holo-
graphic principle as before. The most conservative choice, appears to be to still apply the HP approach, but
rescaling the application of Eq.4 to the minimum element of area possible in the low resolution simulation
(∝ λ2ν ), instead of the Planck area (Eq.1). Therefore, the minimum necessary information to be encoded
follows from rescaling Eq.12 for the ratio of the two areas:

lp2
I⊕,low ≈ Imax,⊕ · 2 ≈ 1.65 · 1051 bits. (16)
λν
6
Especially because we focus here on the simulation of Earth, a reasonable question would be whether such low resolution
simulation would still be capable of reproducing the observed biological process on the Planet. A ∼ 10−21 cm length seems to be
safely smaller than any process known to be relevant for biology, and thus a hypothetical simulation using an efficient sub-grid
modelling of processes below such resolution might correctly reproduce biology on Earth. If instead some biological processes
will be shown to depend on < 10−21 cm scales, this can be used to revise our constraints on the smallest scale to be resolved by
the simulation, and call for an even more implausibly large amount of energy or power.
 This gives a minimum encoding energy

E⊕,low = 4.31 · 1035 erg (17)

if we very conservatively use T = TCMB as above (which we are going to relax later on).
At the face value, this energy requirement is far less astronomical than the previous one: it corresponds
to the conversion into energy of ≈ 2.4 · 10−19 M⊙ , or ≈ 7.9 · 10−14 M⊕ (∼ 4.8 · 1014 g). This is still equal to
the total energy radiated by the Sun in two minutes, considering the solar constant (L⊙ ∼ 3.8 · 1033 erg/s),
yet it is an amount of energy which a fairly advanced civilisation might possibly access to.
Eq.11 gives the size of the minimum black hole capable of storing I⊕,low : MBH,low = 4.4·10−13 M⊙ . The
radius relative to this mass is also fairly small: RBH,low = 1.3 · 10−7 cm. Therefore, while the total energy
required for the initial encoding of the simulation’s data is still immense by modern human standards, it is
tiny in astrophysical terms. However, next we are going to show that the only way to process the data of
such simulation to advance it at a large enough speed, is the access to unattainably large computing power,
which makes this last low resolution scenario impossible too.
We largely refer here to the seminal work by Lloyd (2000) for the computing capabilities of black holes.
The ultimate compression limit of a black hole can provide in principle the most performing computing con-
figuration for any simulation. Thus by showing that not even in this case the simulation can be performed,
we can argue about its physical impossibility. Based on the classical picture of black holes, no information
is allowed to escape from within the event horizon. However, the quantum mechanical view is different as
it allows, through the emission of Hawking radiation as black holes evaporate, to transfer some information
on the outside. Following Lloyd (2000), even black holes may theoretically be programmed to encode the
information to be processed within their horizon. Then an external observer, by examining the correlations
in the Hawking radiation emitted as they evaporate, might be able to retrieve the the result of the simulation
outside. Even such a tiny black hole has a very long evaporation timescale: tev ∼ G2 MBH,low
3
/(3h̄c4 k), with
−3 −2
the constant k ∼ 10 − 10 depending on the species of particles composing the bulk of the BH mass,
which gives tev ≥ 1035 s.
The temperature relative to the Hawking radiation for such a black hole is given by:

h̄c3
TH ∼ ∼ 1.4 · 105 K. (18)
8πGMBH,low kB
Quantum mechanics constrains the maximum rate at which a system can move from one distinguish-
able quantum state to another. A quantum state with average energy Ē needs a time of order (at least)
δt ∼ πh̄/2Ē to evolve into another orthogonal and distinguishable state, and hence the number of logical
operations per unit time (i.e. the computing frequency) that can be performed by a computing device is
the inverse of the timescale from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: f ∼ 1/δt ∼ 2Ē/(πh̄). If such
black hole calculator uses all its storage memory, its maximum computing power per bit (i.e. the number
of logical operations for each single bit) is estimated to be:

kB 2 log(2)Ē
Nop = (19)
πh̄S
where S is the black hole entropy. The link between thermodynamic entropy and temperature here is
given by T = (∂S/∂ Ē)−1 . By integrating the relationship linking T , S and Ē we get T = C Ē/S, in
which C is a constant of order unity, which depends on the actual medium being used (e.g. C = 3/2 for
an ideal gas or C = 4/3 for photons of a black-body spectrum). The dependence between the computing
power and the working temperature is manifest: ”the entropy governs the amount of information the system
can register and the temperature governs the number of operations per bit per second it can perform”, as
beautifully put by Lloyd (2000).
Estimating the working temperature of such a device is not obvious. As an upper bound, we can use the
temperature of accreted material at the event horizon of an astrophysical black hole from Eq.15 (T ∼ 107 K)
and get:

kB 2 log(2)T
Nop ≈ ∼ 5.6 · 1017 [operations/bit/s]. (20)
πh̄
By multiplying for the total number of bits encoded in such a black hole, we get its total maximum
computing power:

Pop ∼ Nop · I⊕,low ∼ 9.5 · 1068 [bits/s], (21)

On the other hand, if the black hole does not accrete matter, the lowest temperature at the even horizon
is the temperature relative to the Hawking radiation: TH ∼ 1.4 · 105 K for this mass. We thus get:

′
Nop ≈ 8.0 · 1015 [operations/bit/s]. (22)
In this case, we get for the total computing power:

′ ′
Pop ∼ Nop · I⊕,low ∼ 1.3 · 1067 [bits/s]. (23)
This computing power may seem immense, yet it is not enough to advance the low resolution simulation
of planet Earth in a reasonable wall-clock time. We notice that the minimum timestep that the simulation
must resolve in order to consistently propagate the highest energy neutrinos we observe on Earth is ∆t ≈
λν /c ∼ 4.1·10−32 s. In the extremely conservative hypothesis that only a few operations per bit are necessary
to advance every bit of the simulation forward in time for a ∆t timestep, ∼ O(1031 ) operations on every bit
as necessary for the simulation to cover just 1 second of evolution of our Universe. The two previous cases
instead can at best achieve ∼ 8 · 1015 − 5.6 · 1017 operations per bit per second, depending on the working
temperature. In that conditions, a single second in the low resolution simulation of planet Earth requires:
• tCPU ∼ 4.2 · 1013 s of computing time, i.e. ∼ 1.4 · 107 yr, using the computing power given by Eq.20;
• tCPU ∼ 3.0 · 1015 s of computing time, i.e. ∼ 1 · 108 yr using the computing power given by Eq.22,
which are in both cases absurdly long wall clock times. Therefore, an additional speed-up of order
×1015 − 1017 (or larger) would be necessary in to advance the low resolution simulation of Earth faster than
real time 7 . In this case, the necessary computing power will be just impossible to collect:
• dE/dt ∼ 1.1 · 1073 erg/s if the working temperature is ∼ 105 K,
• dE/dt ∼ 9.4 · 1074 erg/s if the working temperature is ∼ 107 K,
which means to convert into energy many more than all stars in all galaxies within the visible Universe
(and using a black hole with mass ∼ 10−13 M⊙ for this). No known process can even remotely approach
this power, and thus also this scenario appears absurd.
This leads us to the THIRD CONCLUSION: even the lowest possible resolution simulation of
Earth (at a scale compatible with experimental data) requires geologically-long timescales, making it
entirely implausible for any purpose.
7
It should also be considered that the time dilatation effect of General Relativity will also introduce an additional delay factor
between what is computed by the black hole, and what is received outside, although the amount of the delay depends on where
exactly the computation happens.
4 Discussion
Needless to say, in such a murky physical investigation several assumptions can be questioned, and a few
alternative models can be explored. Here we review a few ones which appears to be relevant, even if it is
anticipated that the enthusiasts of the SH will probably find other ways out.

4.1 Can highly parallel computing make the simulation of the low resolution Earth
possible?
A reasonable question would be whether performing highly parallel computing could significantly reduce
the computing time estimated at the end of Sec.3.3. In general, if the computation to perform is serial, the
energy can be concentrated in particular parts of the computer, while if it is parallelisable, the energy can
be spread out evenly among the different parts of the computer.
The communication time across the black hole horizon (tcom ∼ 2R/c) is of the same order of the
time to flip a single bit (∼ πh̄/(2Ē), see above), hence in principle highly parallel computing can be
used here. However, the somewhat counter-intuitive result of Lloyd (2000) is that the energy E is divided
among Nproc processing units (each operating at a rate ∼ 2E/(πh̄Nproc )) the total number of operations per
second performed by the black hole remains the same: ∼ Nproc 2E/(πh̄Nproc ) = 2E/(πh̄), as in Sec.3.3.
This strictly follows from the quantum relation between computing time and spread in energy explored
in Sec.3.3. Thus if the energy is allocated to more parallel processor, the energy spread on which they
operate gets smaller, and hence they run in a proportionally slower way. Finally, if the computing is spread
to a configuration significantly less dense than a black hole, by keeping the same mass, higher levels of
parallelisation can be used, but the computing time will increase as a black hole computer already provides
the highest number of operations per bits per second (Eq.19).

4.2 What if the time stepping is not the one given by neutrino observations?
What if (for reasons beyond what our physics can explain) high energy neutrinos can be accurately prop-
agated in the simulation with a time stepping much coarser than the one prescribed by ∆t = λν /c ∼
4.1 · 10−32 s? In this case, the next constraint to fulfil is still very small, and given by the smallest time
interval that humans could directly measure so far in the laboratory: this is ∆t′ ≈ 10−20 s (e.g. Ossiander
et al., 2017). In this case, applying the same logic of Sec.3.3 we get tCPU ∼ 40 − 104 s depending on the
computing temperature, which still means a simulation running several orders of magnitude slower than the
real time. Moreover, even in this scenario the amount of power to process is (literally) out of this world:
dE/dt ∼ kB T log(2) · Pop ∼ 1044 − 1047 erg/s if we rescale Eq.21-23 for the new time rate. This power
is astronomically large but not entirely impossible: mergers between massive clusters of galaxies, which
are among the most energetic exchanges of matter in the Universe, ”only” produce ∼ 1045 erg/s of power
(e.g. Markevitch and Vikhlinin, 2007). Distant quasars can radiate energy up to ∼ 1047 erg/s (e.g. Vayner
et al., 2024), while supernovae can release up to ∼ 1052 erg/s, mostly in the form of energetic neutrinos and
only in the the first ∼ 1 − 10 seconds of their explosion. Gamma Ray Burst from Hypernovae can dissipate
up to ∼ 1054 erg/s on timescales of days (e.g. Mazzali et al., 2014). Finally the detection of gravitational
waves by merging black holes (with masses of several tens of M⊙ ) probed energy dissipation rates of sev-
eral ∼ 1056 erg/s, but limited to the short timescale of the coalescence (e.g. Abbott et al., 2016). In anycase,
conveying in a steady way such gigantic amount of energy through the microscopic black hole required for
this very low resolution scenario appears as an impossible task.
4.3 What about quantum computing?
By exploiting the fundamental quantum properties of superposition and entanglement, quantum computers
are more performing than classical computers for a large variety of mathematical operations (e.g. Simon,
1994). In principle, quantum algorithms are more efficient in using memory and they may reduce time
and energy requirements (e.g. Chen, 2023, for a recent take), by implementing exponentially fewer steps
compared to classical programs. However, these important advantages compared to classical computers do
not change the problems connected with the SH analysed in this work, which solely arise from the relation
between spacetime, information density and energy. According to the HP, the information bound used here
is the maximum allowed within a give holographic surface with radius R, regardless of the actual technique
used to reach this concentration of information, or to process it. Moreover, our estimated computing power
does not stem from the extrapolation of the current technological performances of classical computing,
but it already represents the maximum possible performance, obtained in the futuristic scenario in which
a black hole can be used as ultimate computing device. In summary, while quantum computing might in
principle be the actual way to get to the maximum computing speed physically allowed at the scale of black
holes (or in any other less extreme computing devices), this technology will not be able to beat the currently
understood limits posed by physics.

4.4 What if the holographic principle does not apply?

One possibility is that the HP, for whatever reason, does not apply as a reliable proxy for the information
content of a given physical system. It is worth reminding that the HP prescribes the maximum information
content to scale with the surface, and not the volume, of a system: hence it generally already provides a very
low information budget estimate, compared to all other proxies in which information scales with the volume,
instead. In this sense, the estimates used in this paper (including in the low resolution simulation of Earth in
Sec.3.3) already appears as conservatively low quantities. If the HP is not valid, then a larger amount of bits
can be encoded within a given surface with radius R (in contradiction with our understanding of black hole
physics). This will allow the usage of smaller computing devices, but at the same time it will require even
more computing power, making the SH even more implausible. On the other hand, while the HP prescribes
the maximum information which can be encoded with a portion of spacetime, the actual evolution of the
enclosed system might be described with fewer bits of information. For example, in recent work Vazza
(2017, 2020) we used mathematical tools from Information Theory (e.g. Adami, 2002; Prokopenko et al.,
2009) to show that, on macroscopic scales, the statistical evolution of the cosmic web within the observable
Universe can be encoded by using (only) ∼ 4 · 3 · 1016 bits of information. This is of course incredibly
less than the IU ∼ 3.5 · 10124 bits estimate quoted in Sec.3.1 and following from the HP. However, the
latter includes all possible evolution on all scales, down to the lp fundamental length, in which a plethora of
multi-scale phenomena obviously happens. While the concept of ”emergence” and efficiency of prediction
for complex multi-scale phenomena is a powerful and useful tool to compress the information needed to
describe physical patterns forming at specific scales (e.g. Shalizi et al., 2001), a full error-less simulation of
a multi-scale system seems to require a much larger amount of information. In essence, we shall conclude
that while it is well conceivable that the actual information needed to fully capture the evolution of multi-
scale phenomena emerging on different scales can be further reduced, it is implausible that the information
budget quoted in this work can be reduced by several orders of magnitude.
4.5 Plot twist: a simulated Universe simulates how the real universe might be
Our results suggest that no technological advancement will make the SH possible in any universe that works
like ours.
However, the limitations outlined above might be circumvented if the values of some of the fundamental
constants involved in our formalims are radically different than the canonic values they have in this Uni-
verse. Saying anything remotely consistent about the different physics operating in any other universe is an
impossible task. And let alone, to guess which combinations of constants would still allow the development
of any form of intelligent life. Nevertheless, just for the sake of the argument, we make the very bold as-
sumption that in each of explored variations some sort of intelligent form of life can form, and that it will be
interested in computing and simulations. Under this assumption, we can then explore numerical changes to
the values of fundamental constants involved in the previous modelling, to see whether combinations exist,
which can make at least a low resolution simulation of our Planet doable with a limited use of time and
energy.
So, in a final plot twist whose irony should not be missed, now this Universe (which might be a sim-
ulation) attempts to Monte-Carlo simulate how the ”real universe” out there could be, in order for the
simulation of this Universe to be possible. We assume that all known physical laws involved in our formal-
ims are valid in all universes, but we allow each of the key fundamental constant to randomly vary across
realisations. For the sake of the exercise, we shall fix the total amount of information required for the low
resolution simulation of our Planet discussed in Sec.3.3 (I⊕,low = 1.65 · 1051 bits) and consider the Hawking
temperature relative to the black hole which is needed in each universe to perform the simulation.
The simulation consists in a Monte-Carlo exploration of the 6-dimensional parameter space of the fun-
damental constants which entered our previous derivation: G, mp , kB , c, h̄, to which we now add H, i.e. the
”Hubble-Lemaitre constant” 8 to compute the cosmic time. From 106 randomly drawn universes, we select
all realisations in which the low-resolution simulation of our Planet is ”possible”. Each constant is let free
to randomly vary across 40 orders of magnitudes around its reference value. Our simplistic definition for
possibility for the simulation here stems from two conditions:

• the simulation can be run at least in real time, or faster than real time, in the universe where the
simulation is produced. This means that a time interval of 1s in this Universe is simulated in the
equivalent of 1s in the other universe. However, any other universe can have different evolutionary
timescales than this one, depending on their H. By considering that 1 s ≈ 3 · 10−18 tU , where tU is the
age of this Universe, we require that one second of this Universe can be simulated in ∆t = 3 · 10−18 tU
of computing time in any other universe. To easily compute tU , we assume for simplicity Einstein-
de Sitter cosmology in every other universe, hence tU = 2/(3 H), here H is the Hubble-Lemaitre
constant of other universes.

• The used power to produce the simulation is ”reasonable”. How can we guess what ”reasonable”
would be in any other universe? We cannot, of course, but for the sake of the exercise we use
1 GW of power as goal: this is about the power provided by a modern nuclear reactor, and it is
∼ 102 − 103 higher than the typical power consumed by the best High Performance Computing
centre to-date. Thus it represents some extreme power budget available to numerical astrophysicists
of the remote future. As in the previous case, we must scale this power for the properties of other
universes, and to do that we consider that 1 GW equates to ∼ 6.6 · 1018 protons (∼ 10−33 of the mass
of Earth) converted into energy in a second (where for the second, we again use the normalisation of
8
Very likely to be named in a different way in any other universe.
Figure 1: Examples of the distribution of allowed values of the fundamental constants (rescaled to their
value in this Universe) necessary to perform a low-resolution simulation of Earth in other universes, as
predicted with Monte-Carlo simulations. Each axis gives the allowed value for each constant, normalised
to the value it has in this Universe.
 the previous step). Therefore, we assume that in any other universe there are planets (or something
conceptually equivalent) and that a very tiny fraction of their mass can be used to support computing.

We give in Fig.1 the results of the Monte-Carlo simulation, in which we show samplings of the dis-
tribution of allowed combinations of constants, normalised to the value each of them has in this Universe.
Although the exploration of the full 6-dimensional parameters space is complex, a few things can be noticed
already. First, two well correlated parameters here are c and h: for a given value of the age of the universe,
the computing timescale scales as ∝ h/TH , so if c increases, the Hawking radiation temperature of the black
hole increases too (lowering the computing timescale), while at the same time proportionally larger values
of h are allowed. An other couple of correlated constants is (c,G), which stems from the condition on the
power: from this condition it follows that c3 /G ∝ mp , hence an order of magnitude of increase in c must
be compensated by a three orders of magnitude increase in G, for a fixed value of mp . Most of the other
combinations of constants (e.g. (mp , kB ) and (H, c) in Fig.1) show instead lacks of obvious correlation.
In general, this simulation shows that combinations of parameters exist, to make the SH for a low-
resolution version of planet Earth possible (and similarly, also for higher resolution version of the SH), al-
though they require orders of magnitudes in difference compared to the physical constants of this Universe.
It clearly is beyond the goal of this work to further elaborate if some of the many possible combinations
make sense, based on known physics, if they can support life and whether that hypothetical forms of life
will be interested in numerics and physics, as we are 9 .

4.6 What if the universe performing the simulation is entirely different than our
Universe?
Guessing how conservation laws for energy and information applies in a universe with entirely different
laws, or whether they should even apply in the first place, appears impossible and this entirely prevents us
from guessing whether the SH is possible in such case. For example, hypothetical conscious creatures in
the famous Pac-Man video game in the ’80s will just be incapable of figuring out the constraints on the
universe in which their reality is being simulated, even based on all the information they can gather around
them. They would not guess the existence of gravity, for example, they would probably measure energy
costs in ”Power Pellets”, and they would not conceive the existence of a third dimension, or of an expanding
space time, and so on. Even if they could ever realise the level of graininess of their reality, and make the
correct hypothesis of being living in a simulation, they would never guess how the real universe (”our”
Universe, if it is real indeed) function in a physical sense. In this respect, our modelling shows that the
SH can be reasonably well tested only with respect to universes which are at least playing according to the
Physics play book - while everything else appears beyond the bounds of falsifiability and even theoretical
speculation.

5 Conclusions
We used standard physical laws to test whether this Universe, or some low resolution version of it, can be
the product of a numerical simulation, as in the popular Simulation Hypothesis (Bostrom, 2003).
9
The full direct simulation of such cases, possibly down to the resolution at which conscious entities will emerge out of the
simulation and start questioning whether their universe is real or simulated, is left as a trivial exercise to the reader.
 One first key result is that the Simulation Hypothesis has plenty of physical constraints to fulfil, because
any computation is bound to obey physics. We report that such constraints are so demanding, that all
plausible approaches tested in this work (in order to reproduce at least a fraction of the reality we humans
experience) require the access to impossibly large amounts of energy, or computing power. We are confident
that this conclusively shows the impossibility of a ”Matrix” scenario for the SH, in which our reality is a
simulation produced by future descendants, machines or any other intelligent being in a Universe which
exactly is at the one we (think we) live in - a scenario famously featured in the ”The Matrix” movie in 1999,
among many others. We showed that this hypothesis is just incompatible with all we know about physics,
down to scales which have been already robustly explored by telescopes, high energy particle colliders or
other direct experiments on Earth.
What if our reality is instead the product of a simulation, in which physical laws (e.g. fundamental
constants) different than in the reality are used? A second result of this work is that, even in this alienating
scenario, we can still robustly constrain the range of physical constants allowed in the reality simulating
us. In this sense, the strong physical link between computing and energy also offers a fascinating way to
connect hypothetical different levels of reality, each one playing according to the same physical rules. In
our extremely simplistic Monte-Carlo scan of models with different fundamental constants, a plethora of
combinations seems to exist, although we do not dare to guess which ones could be compatible with stable
universes, the formation of planets and the further emergence of intelligent life. The important point is
that each of such solutions implies universes entirely different from this one. Finally, the question whether
universes with entirely different sets of physical laws or dimensionalities could produce our Universe as a
simulation, seems to be be entirely outside of what is scientifically testable, even in theory.
At this point, we shall notice that a possible ”simulation hypothesis”, which does not pose obvious con-
straints on computing, might be the solipsistic scenario in which the simulation simulates ”just” the single
activity of the reader’s brain (yes: you), while all the rest is a sophisticated and very detailed hallucination.
In this sense, nothing is new from Renee Descartes’ ”evil genius” or ”Deus deceptor” - i.e. for some reason
an entire universe is produced in a sort of simulation, just to constantly fool us - from its more modern ver-
sion of ”Boltzmann Brains” (de Simone et al., 2010). Conversely, a more contrived scenario in which the
simulation simulates only the brain activity of single individuals, appears to quickly run into the limitations
of the SH exposed in this work: a shared and consistent experience of reality requires a consistent simulated
model of the world, which quickly escalates into a too demanding model of planet Earth down to very small
scales as soon as physical experiments are involved 10 .
At this fascinating cross road between physics, computing and philosophy, it is interesting to notice that
the last egotistic version of the SH appears particularly hard to test or debunk with physics, as the latter
indeed appears to be entirely relying on the concept of a reality external to the observing subject - be it a
real or a simulated one. However, the possibility of a quantitative exercise like the one attempted here also
shows that the power of physics is otherwise immense, as even the most outlandish and extreme proposal
about our reality must fall within the range of what physics can investigate, test and debunk.
Luckily, even in the way most probable scenario of all (the Universe is not a simulation), the amount of
mysteries for physics to investigate still appears so immense, that even dropping this fascinating one cannot
make science any less interesting.
10
A possibility for such model to work, may be that all scientists actually are similar to ”non playable characters” in video
games, i.e. roughly sketched and unconscious parts of the simulation, playing a pre-scripted role (in this case, reporting about
fake measurements).
6 Additional Requirements
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relation-
ships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments
I have used the Astrophysics Data Service (ADS) and arXiv preprint repository extensively during this
project and for writing this paper, the precious online Cosmological Calculator by E. Wright, and
the Julia language for the simulations of Sec.4.5. This peculiar investigation was prompted by a public
conference given for the 40th anniversary of the foundation of Associazione Astrofili Vittorio Veneto, where
the author took his first steps into astronomy. I wish to thank Maksym Tsizh, Chiara Capirini for their useful
comments on the draft of the paper, and Maurizio Bonafede for useful suggestions on the geophysical
analysis of the core-mantle boundary used in Sec.3.3.

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