You are living in a simulation.

And Elon Musk agrees.

Alright, hear me out; this might sound ridiculous and like a plot straight out of The Matrix, but there is more evidence to back this theory than you might think. Ever since Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford wrote a seminal paper about the simulation argument in 2003, philosophers, physicists and technologists have been grappling with the idea of our reality being a simulacrum. In his paper, Bostrom imagined a future where one of the following three things could happen: First, humans may go extinct before we have enough power to run a simulation this big. Second, humans choose not to run simulations because it’s unethical or unnecessary. And third, we become a highly technologically developed civilization that possesses immense computing power and needs a fraction of that power to simulate new realities with conscious beings in them. Similar to the popular game The Sims, but exceptionally advanced, to the level where the ‘characters’ have free will, like us. If we do end up at this stage, then the probability that we ourselves are in a simulation is pretty close to 1.

Let me explain why this theory could be correct. Look at virtual reality. When we play games with this technology, we already know that what we are looking at isn’t real, but our reflexes and senses don’t, and thus we act accordingly, i.e., getting surprised, shocked, scared, but at the back of our mind we are still aware that it’s a game.

Now, what if we weren’t informed of that?

For this version of ‘real life’ that we live in, it could be said that it seems real to us just because it is all we’ve ever known; though to the ones that programmed our world, reality could be much different.

Here are some other things that the simulation theory could easily explain:

1. Lack of aliens being discovered:

We’ve spent billions on space travel and space equipment, and if intelligent species exist somewhere in the universe, they would have done the same too, so where are the aliens? Maybe the computer only simulates one civilization at a time.

2. Why our universe has “rules”:

MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark has pointed to our universe’s strict physics laws as possible evidence that we live in a video game. In this theory, the speed of light — the fastest rate at which any particle can travel — represents the speed limit for transmitting information within the network of our simulation.

3. It could explain religion and paranormal events:

If we live in a simulation, gods, who religions call “Creators” could quite literally be creators, but not as some magical higher being, but instead as an engineer coding our world. Ghosts and other spiritual abnormalities that people report seeing could very well be glitches in the system or a sort of spying mechanism for the programmers to enter our world periodically.

But you might argue — if we make a simulated world, there are simply so MANY things, how can we possibly have enough power to simulate it all down to every atom? And well, with our current understanding of physics, this is indeed impossible. But as the following theory goes, we don’t actually need to do that. We just need enough universe to make our programmed inhabitants think that it is real; we just need to simulate the parts they are currently exploring. This is similar to virtual reality video games where we only see the part of the game that is in front of us, the part behind us has not necessarily been rendered, and it only comes into existence for us when we turn around. This implies that all things like cells and stars only exist when we are looking at them. A tree trunk could be completely hollow on the inside and only comes into existence when you try to cut it.

Now, if you doubt if a civilization could ever reach such technological advancement levels, look at Generative Artificial Intelligence. Generative AI is a recently developed technology and refers to programs that can use existing content like text, audio files, or images to create new plausible content. It is one of the most promising advances in the world of AI in the last decade. Generative AI enables computers to learn the underlying pattern related to input and then use this data to generate similar content. Under GAI, there is a technique called GAN(Generative adversarial networks). GAN’s can now be used to create images of fake visuals such as fake faces (Deepfakes). The website thispersondoesnotexist.com generates a new facial image from scratch each time you refresh it. This means that we already have the means to generate people that don’t really exist; what if a superior being has used an even better technology to generate the “people” in your life.

Carl Sagan, a famous planetary scientist and astrophysicist, used to say humans are only in a period of “technological adolescence.”. We don’t yet know what we could achieve in the future or what other beings with intelligence much greater than ours have already achieved. Technology like artificial worlds might only be the brim of their capability. So for us simple humans, all that can be said as off now is — believe what you want to believe but know that we won’t ever be able to definitively prove that we’re not in a simulation because any evidence we could ever collect, could itself be simulated evidence, made to hide the truth.