Aaron Brown – Welcome to The Matrix. You’ve lived here all your life. Everything you have ever done or will do could simply be the product of a highly-advanced computer code. Every relationship, every sentiment, every memory could have been generated by banks of supercomputers.
This was the terrifying theory first proposed by British philosopher Nick Bostrom.
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.
In his paper, Dr. Bostrom suggested a race of far-evolved descendants could be behind our digital imprisonment.
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.
Sound crazy? Well, it turns out NASA thinks Dr. Bostrom might be right.
The Standard Model of Physics does not yet hold an explanation for the force of gravity.
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.