A terrifying theory once given by a British philosopher Nick Bostrom stating, everything we have ever done or will do could simply be the product of a highly-advanced computer code and that every relationship, every sentiment, every memory could have been generated by banks of supercomputers is chilling at best. That was until it was backed up by NASA.
The shocking hypothesis was penned four years after Andrew and Lana Wachowski wrote and directed The Matrix, a film set in a dystopian future in which humans are subdued by a simulated reality. The futuristic beings – human or otherwise – could be using virtual reality to simulate a time in the past or recreate how their remote ancestors lived.
Now, Rich Terrile, director of the Centre for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has spoken out about the digital simulation.
“Right now the fastest NASA supercomputers are cranking away at about double the speed of the human brain,” the NASA scientist told Vice. “If you make a simple calculation using Moore’s Law [which roughly claims computers double in power every two years], you’ll find that these supercomputers, inside of a decade, will have the ability to compute an entire human lifetime of 80 years – including every thought ever conceived during that lifetime – in the span of a month.
“In quantum mechanics, particles do not have a definite state unless they’re being observed. Many theorists have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how you explain this.
“One explanation is that we’re living within a simulation, seeing what we need to see when we need to see it.
“What I find inspiring is that, even if we are in a simulation or many orders of magnitude down in levels of simulation, somewhere along the line something escaped the primordial ooze to become us and to result in simulations that made us – and that’s cool.”
He also goes on to say that the idea that our Universe is a fiction generated by computer code solves a number of inconsistencies and mysteries about the cosmos.
