Marsday Speculation: “the world being run by a futuristic computer geek”

So in case you haven’t heard yet, according to Dr. Nick Bostrom at Oxford University, chances are pretty good that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation. The professor puts our chances of living in a simulation at 20 percent, based on his gut feeling. I agree with the journalist, John Tierney, when he figures the chances are higher than this. Especially when you consider scientists figured out how to simulate an out-of-body experience this week.

But what kind of simulation? Is reality a World of Warcraft/Second Life world, where we jump into it, live a life, die, and get booted out to the real world exclaiming, “Wow! What a ride!”? Having no memory of another reality or former life would add to the immersibility of the virtual world. Your adventures in WoW would be that much more intense if you thought you actually were your character, and your avatar’s death was indistinguishable from your personal death.

This hypothesis, which lacks the virtue of being falsifiable, makes sense to me. I mean, it’s pretty obvious. The more I think about it. Reality is so fake! It would certainly explain why we haven’t found evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations in the form of gigantic equilateral triangles floating in space or laser-lightshow-generated “Eat At Joe’s” signs dancing on the Cat Eye Nebula, because rendering that level of detail would cause the creator’s servers to lag something fierce.

It would also explain why I am not Supreme-Master-of-the-Universe (yet), because the programmer’s a jerk (no other possible explanation for this injustice).

And, as the NYT article points out, here we are, working to build newer and more realistic virtual worlds all the time. If this is a simulation, then we are traveling further “down the rabbit hole,” to borrow The Matrix’s borrowing of Alice in Wonderland’s imagery.

And the programmer’s reality? Maybe it’s like The Thirteenth Floor, where those simulating us are also living in a simulation.

Maybe… (Cue the Twilight Zone Theme) …it’s simulations all the way down…