There is this professor here at Oxford, Nick Bostrom, who argues that we are currently living in a simulation:
1) Moore's law holds across worlds.
2) People/beings will, for various reasons (historic, sociological, experimenting, play) want to simulate another world (at a social/molecular/submolecular, etc level).
3) If they simulate one, they'll likely do more.
4) Ergo, there will be more simulated worlds than real ones.
5) Therefore we are more likely to live in a simulated world/universe than in a first order one.
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There is this professor here at Oxford, Nick Bostrom, who argues that we are currently living in a simulation:
1) Moore's law holds across worlds. 2) People/beings will, for various reasons (historic, sociological, experimenting, play) want to simulate another world (at a social/molecular/submolecular, etc level). 3) If they simulate one, they'll likely do more. 4) Ergo, there will be more simulated worlds than real ones. 5) Therefore we are more likely to live in a simulated world/universe than in a first order one.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Think about this when you unplug something in the future...
Close; he doesn't argue that we are living in a simulation, he argues that at least one of the following propositions is true:
- The human species is likely to go extinct before reaching a stage where it can simulate its ancestors.
- Future humanity will have no interest in simulating its ancestors.
- We are almost certainly living in an ancestor simulation now.
I simplified it a bit, and explained the last, optimistic option... :)