What if we told you that life as we know it is a computer simulation designed by a vastly superior intelligence, meaning that everything we think of as “real,” including ourselves, is only a software-generated illusion — that we are, in effect, living inside a video game and just don’t know it?
We’re guessing you’d scoff, and we wouldn’t blame you.
But what if Elon Musk told you the same thing? Musk, as you probably know, is the brilliant billionaire entrepreneur behind the SpaceX rocket program, Tesla electric automobiles, and other cutting-edge tech ventures. He’s considered a genius in many quarters. Here is what he said about computer simulations overtaking reality during a public appearance in 2016:
I think here’s the strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation, I think is the following: that 40, call it 40 years ago, we had Pong. Two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photo-realistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, have augmented reality.
If you assume any rate of improvement at all then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. They’ll be indistinguishable. Even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is right now. Then you just say, okay, let’s imagine it’s 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing in the evolutionary scale. So given that we’re clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be, you know, billions of such computers or set-top boxes it would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions.
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Source: Snopes