Have you ever thought about the possibility that you could be controlled by someone else, or that this reality isn’t real? And how can we really know the answer?
Author: Luka Takki
As computer simulations and virtual reality begin to develop further, we might someday not be able to tell what is true and what is not. VR glasses already lie to our brain and eyes about what we see .If technology keeps advancing the way it has done in the past few years, we likely won’t be able to tell the difference between a simulated world and a real world in a few hundred years, which begs the question : how can we know that we don’t live in a simulation already? This might sound crazy, and we don’t know how likely it is, but we can say for sure that both you and I may be just bits in a giant simulation.
To start addressing this problem we will first answer three questions. If there is a simulation, who would make one and why? How can such a giant simulation be possible to make? And how can we tell if we live in a simulation and how likely it is?
We can think about the question of how humans work. Humans are naturally curious and it is reasonable to assume that any successful alien species would be as well. The thing about us humans is that we always want to know every little detail from our past, present, and future. That is the reason that humans in the future or another alien species mightwant or try to simulate our world or humanity. Maybe they just want to see how things went in the past, how things are going, and how likely it is that certain things happen a certain way. A simulation of the universe or your species could easily determine what is going to happen to you tomorrow, or could tell historians who started a giant war or what led to the extinction of a species.
Now you may say that such simulations are so big that they would be impossible to make, because in the end you would have to simulate the whole universe, which is impossible because you would need more energy than there is available in this universe. Instead, the species running the simulation could do something our simulations do too, they just show and process what a character sees – everything else doesn’t exist until the character looks at it.
Even though simulating billions of minds and an entire planet would need vast amounts of energy, more than humanity can ever harvest with the technology we have now. In a hundred years, humanity may have advanced to other solar systems and built settlements throughout the galaxy, if technology keeps progressing at the speed that it is now. Probably, a potential giant nuclear catastrophe wouldn’t kill us all, because humans could attempt to build a Dyson sphere. A giant millimeter-thin construction built around a star to use all of its energy and power to build a universal supercomputer.
If we look at the problem the other way, a species might also try to simulate the entire universe to see what will happen to it or to see how it works. This would work if we could look right at the Big Bang (which we can because the light from there has just had enough time to travel to us) and then find the exact number of matter back then and its location. Since the universe was just as big as a basketball it would be easy to simulate everything after the universe was born. To get the computing power to simulate a universe, you would basically have to create and maintain an entire universe. You would need to borrow energy from other universes, which is impossible, for now. But because we might live in a multiverse, where there are multiple universes, and we are just in one of the few universes, a simulation like this might become a reality sooner than we think.
That is how scientists have expressed the simulation theory and shown the whole world that it can be true indeed. Some famous billionaires have even hired teams to try and break the simulation, which should be impossible for a species as undeveloped as ours, that might just be a tiny part of the simulation. Whichever way we look at it, the simulation theory will always remain a big debate. Some will always argue that it is impossible to simulate something so vast and complex as our planet or the universe, but really all we can say for now is that it is indeed possible.
Cover picture by: Yassay – Pixabay
Edited by: Sophie Van Den Berge, Johanna Larsson Krausová
