The Forever Machine

by Eric Varney

What It Would Take to Simulate Everything.

When a civilization exhausts what it can discover directly, it doesn't stop learning: it builds a machine that runs universes. The Forever Machine is the engineering blueprint for that machine, from the hardware and the architecture to the failure modes, and what those failure modes would look like from the inside.

Starting from the 2004 Nimitz encounter and working through information theory, computational architecture, and testable predictions, Eric Varney derives the machine from first principles, and shows how we could check whether we're already living in one.

Listed by its author on October 22, 2026. Wrote a book too? List it here.