Two of the world’s leading astronomers have issued a statement suggesting that humans may be living in a virtual universe, and there is evidence to support this hypothesis.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, a famous astronomer from the United States and Brian Greene, a renowned theoretical physicist and leader in string theory, were about to become the first to do so. Green made this extraordinary statement that life is not what we inherently know.
They discussed Nick Bostrom’s 2003 philosophical paper, Are You Living in a Simulation? The two experts point out that there are three clues to be found.
Mr Bostrom says future generations will be able to create so powerful computers that we can’t distinguish between reality and simulation. Because if the simulation is very nuanced, people become conscious.
So it’s possible that this is the case: the vast majority of people like us are not primitive species, but people simulated by the advanced offspring of primitive species. It can then be argued that if this were the case, it would be reasonable to assume that we might be in a simulation rather than a primitive organism.
Discussing this theory, Dr. Tyson and Dr. Green point to three pieces of evidence to look for, which proves that what we are doing is not true.
First of all, we must look for “failures.” Because the real universe is not faulty, but computers may have bugs, however, this can be difficult. Because if this is a very powerful simulation, it must be able to erase the fault and fix it, and then the simulated creature is completely unaware of it.
Second, such advanced simulations do not allow their internal presence to prove that it is a simulation, which we may never be able to do.
Finally, when running this state-of-the-art simulation, this will lead to a large-scale power shortage in the original universe, because simulation of each universe requires electricity consumption.
The concept of a virtual universe
According to Nick Bostrom, the philosopher of Oxford University, the concept of the unreal universe can be imagined as “a nuanced human-simulating computer software made by an extremely sophisticated and advanced civilization, and its virtual content includes the ancestors of humans.”
Bostrom, for example, can understand the concept of the virtual universe, as in The Matrix:
“The brain is not a sensory signal full of virtual information, but the brain itself is virtual content. (The entire universe) can be like a big computer that can virtualize anything, it can simulate everything in the human brain, including neurons and the connections between neurons.”
Why can we only see the past?
Jillian Scudder, an astronomer at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, said:
‘Why do astronomers see things from the past? Perhaps we are limited by the speed of light and space”.
The universe we can observe at present is not really the universe now. In Jupiter’s case, what we see from Earth now is 30 minutes ago, not the image of what was happening on Jupiter, because the light is about 30 minutes from Jupiter to Earth. The vast majority of the planets we see today are actually images from a few years ago, hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, or even hundreds of millions of years ago, not today.
Perhaps the current planet has exploded and disintegrated, but it takes a few more years to know the scene of the exploded planet, because it takes a long time for the light to reach earth. In other words, the universe we can see is only the past of the universe. Specifically, when observing different planets, what you see is only the planets at different times in the past, and what you see is almost not the situation of the current planet.
Can space change faster than light, so that we can see the future universe?, Jillian added.
Space describes everything and where the universe is, but space does not exist for the sake of human observation. Perhaps, we can only learn from the past experience and lessons, before we can wait to enter the future.
