Time Magazine ran an article, exploring whether we actually live in a simulation:
University of Oxford physics professor Nick Bostrom wasn’t the first person to suggest reality could be computer-fied — the idea’s been around since I was a kid, at least, reaching a kind of pop-cultural critical mass in the Matrix films — but he may have been the first to take a stab at a “red pill” explanation, laying out his theory in an actual paper published in 2003. Call it another version of the strong anthropic principle, except the universe’s catalyst would in this instance be an advanced civilization running an unfathomably sophisticated massively multiplayer, um, cosmos game.
In his paper, Bostrom argued that at least one of the following things must be true:
(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
