ChrisM

In the summer of 2020, I launched a website called The Vessel Project. It’s a weird, winding, conjecturing exploration into the nature of reality. Some would call it crazy. I don’t necessarily disagree. But the story behind its inception is even weirder. What is now a pet theory, a glorified blog, began as a mission of cosmic proportions. The project is also an artifact of a personal journey. It’s my own reminder of grandiose visions (verging on delusions), a bit of idealistic naiveté, and a whole lot of grappling with my place in the universe. But for an adventure that’s mostly played out between my two ears, I could hardly imagine a more thrilling ride. About a year and a half prior to the website’s launch, I had an epiphany that struck me so hard it immediately changed the way I perceived reality. Wild thing to say, right? Right or wrong, I was convinced I had just peered behind the curtain of reality with a single idea. Ask yourself this: if humans had the ability to simulate reality itself, what would we do with that technology? The question is not new, nor is one commonly posed answer: we’d create ancestor simulations, either to observe the development of intelligent life and the different ways it can unfold, or as a kind of memorial for those we’ve loved. But again, this was not new thinking. I also knew the nascent field of quantum computing was attempting to harness fundamental physical phenomena to perform computations. I figured if there was any technology that could someday simulate a universe like ours, it had to be quantum computing, even if it’s nowhere close to that level of sophistication yet. Some things we observe simply cannot be replicated using classical computing methods. Still, a quantum computing universe was not a new idea. The new part relates to how we’d encode these simulations, and my idea was basically a futuristic take on Noah’s Ark. If we could encode ourselves into another reality, wouldn’t we use our DNA sequence to do so? Our