(ORDO NEWS) — Is our world a complex cosmic illusion? A respected scientist at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory believes this is possible.
This question has crossed our minds for many of us, and the concept is much older than we think. The French philosopher René Descartes was the first to put into words the idea of an entity that deliberately feeds us with complex pipe dreams.
Three and a half centuries later, we still cannot get rid of the feeling that the world that we perceive with our senses may just be a hologram.
Rich Terrill, director of NASA’s Center for Evolutionary Computing and Computer Aided Design, not only believes it is possible; he suggests that humans will be able to create similar vast models in the near future.
According to Rich, a programmer from the distant future could design our universe using computing power far superior to ours. Its reasons are a mystery to us. Perhaps he wanted to see how things could have happened long before his time. Maybe he did it out of boredom or out of curiosity.
If so, then – Wow! Our entire universe would be nothing more than a simulation; our reality would be an intermediate level. But is there any evidence to support this crazy scenario? Strictly speaking – there is.
Amazingly, the universe behaves like part of a simulation . It only exhibits certain characteristics when observed, similar to how the Grand Theft Auto game engine generates only the area in which the player is currently located.
Quantum mechanics may be a puzzle for us and for scientists, but one of its main rules can be explained with almost embarrassing ease: subatomic particles have no definite state if they are not observed .
That is, objects become reality and remain so as long as we follow them . This mystery has long puzzled scientists, and one possible explanation for this behavior is that we live inside a simulation .
To save computing power, this simulation only shows us “what we need to see when we need to see it.”
It also explains why our universe is made up of finite units, pixels, if you will:
“The universe is also pixelated – in time, space, volume and energy,” says Rich Terril. “There is a fundamental unit that you cannot break down into anything less, which means that the universe is made up of a finite number of those units.
It also means that the universe can be a finite number of things; it is not infinite, therefore it is computable. And if she behaves in a limited way when she is being observed, then the question arises: “Is this calculated?”
In our opinion, a simulation of the universe would be indistinguishable from the real one.
NASA supercomputers are already faster than the human brain. Moore’s Law states that in a decade, computers will be able to simulate the entire human life with all its twists and turns in less than a month. Thirty years from now, a game console will do this in less than an hour.
Now that we’re fast-paced to create our own holographic worlds, the idea that we could live inside one of them suddenly becomes less of a fantasy. How do we even know that we are not really a product of the simulation happening in 2050? No way yet, but let’s hope it isn’t.
The implications of this theory are enormous. If we can soon create our own simulations with conscious and intelligent beings, what does that mean?
“This means that we are both God and God’s servants , and that we have all done this. What inspires me is that even if we are in simulation or many orders of magnitude lower in simulation levels, somewhere on the line, something escaped the original program to become us and lead to the simulations that created us. And that’s cool,” says Rich Terril.
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.