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A comment on Researchers have identified 100 mysteriously disappeared stars in the night sky. Parent comment

Re:Researchers have identified 100 mysteriously disappeared ... by bsdetector on Monday December 23, 2019 @04:46PM (#21867724)
What if these stars are disappearing as part of an orderly shut down procedure of some grand simulation, taking millennia from our perspective.

Civilizations would get to a level of science where they find out and even if they could reach us before the reset, there'd be no point. Like when you're playing a video game and you get "server shutdown in 30 minutes", you log off right away or mess around until it happens.

The Great Filter is only limited by our imagination and doesn't even have to involve us at all.

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Re:Researchers have identified 100 mysteriously disappeared ... by NeedMoreTea on Monday December 23, 2019 @04:57PM (#21867818)
Seem to vaguely remember a Twilight Zone or similar along those lines.

There's a planet that's trying to achieve peace. They're in the middle of a cold war, looking rather like earth, half hour ends with the failure of talks and a nuclear war. Camera pulls back to two alien teens playing an intergalactic arcade game, now showing "game over".

Perhaps the one playing the sim got bored and started star killing their own solar systems.

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Re:Researchers have identified 100 mysteriously disappeared ... by perl4ever on Tuesday December 24, 2019 @12:06AM (#21870019)
In SimEarth, there was always the temptation to destroy everything with asteroid strikes...
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Re:Researchers have identified 100 mysteriously disappeared ... by ncmncm on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @01:05AM (#21877130)
Arthur Clarke, in his throwaway short story The Nine Billion Names of God, had an obscure cult that believed humanity's, and the universe's, purpose was to write down all of God's names. They are well along before they rent a computer with a line printer, and finish the job in a few weeks. Then the stars start to go out.
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