Elon Musk once said it was possible that we were living in a simulation. He is not the first person to come up with this theory. The argument is that if the simulation is good enough, we will never know for sure.
Quite a few people think that might be the case, mostly based on the fact that why not. Our computers are getting more powerful, so who’s to say we won’t be able to produce our own mini universe in the future?
NASA scientist Rich Terrile told The Guardian: “If we continue to advance at the current pace of technology in a few decades, we will very quickly become a society with artificial beings living in simulations in far greater numbers than humans.”
But recently a group of scientists said they ruled out the theory, mainly due to quantum mechanics. So we may not be in a simulation yet; Unless that’s what they want us to think.
Elon Musk once said it was possible that we were living in a simulation. He is not the first person to come up with this theory. The argument is that if the simulation is good enough, we will never know for sure.
Could it be that the screen you look at, the air you breathe, the ground under your feet, and even the smallest particles that make up your body may not actually exist?
Is it possible, or even likely, that the chaos of the world around us is the result of an advanced computer simulation? What if we’re just characters in someone else’s play?
The idea and fear that reality is not what it seems can be seen in films, most famously The Matrix, to the ‘butterfly’s dream’ written by the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi thousands of years ago.
In Morpheus’ infamous words to Neo before revealing the terrible truth:
If you’re talking about what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ are just electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
In 2003, philosopher Nick Bostrom showed that the possibility is inevitable. He argued that future civilizations would have access to such vast amounts of computing power that they could run an almost infinite number of simulations.
If that’s the case, it seems almost certain that we’re in one of billions of historical simulations. Or posthuman societies have no reason to simulate history, or may never achieve this technological proficiency.
Over the next decade, the idea was promoted by Elon Musk (who said the chances of our world being real were ‘one in a billion’) and Neil DeGrasse Tyson (who put the probability down to a still unsettling 50 percent). Silicon Valley billionaires are even reportedly trying to investigate this themselves, with two men going “so far as to secretly encourage scientists to work to save us from the simulation.”
Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, we don’t have anything to get rid of. From what we know so far, it is. This world is real because our universe cannot be simulated, and mathematicians know because they have been trying to do just that for years.
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