Perhaps in one of these simulated universes, people are safe from an imminent robot uprising.

#WeCanHope

ikenbot:

Artificial Universe Similar to Ours Built with Supercomputer

Building a universe from scratch that brims with galaxies resembling those around us is now possible on supercomputers for the first time, researchers say.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a spiral galaxy with a broad disk and outstretched arms, as are many in our cosmic neighborhood, such as Andromeda, the Pinwheel and the Whirlpool galaxies. Spiral galaxies are common, but past computer models that aimed to accurately simulate the birth and evolution of the universe over billions of years had trouble creating them. Instead, they often generated lots of blobby galaxies clumped into balls.

New computer simulations can now recreate the kind of galactic communities seen in our universe, starting with the observed afterglow of the Big Bang and evolving forward in time. Harvard’s Odyssey supercomputer allowed simulations that compressed nearly 14 billion years into only a few months.

“We’ve created the full variety of galaxies we see in the local universe,” said study author Mark Vogelsberger at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.