“One topic I feel the financial independence community hasn’t really tackled is the idea that we all might not exist.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Have you heard of simulation theory?  Great.  That’s really great.  This is important information in your pursuit of FI specifically, and a better life generally.  The basic idea is we could very well be living in a simulation and we’d have no way of knowing.  We aren’t real humans, just a simulation of humans.  “Real” humans might not even exist, or they might be watching us as their entertainment.

You might be thinking that this is an asinine topic. I don’t blame you.

Anyway.

Think of how far technology has come in the last two decades.  Video games from twenty or thirty years ago are clunky and hardly share a resemblance to modern video games.  Imagine what video games will be like in another three decades.  Go on. Imagine it.

Remember the game The Sims?  Imagine that, but it’s us.

Imagine how much more realistic we could make The Sims game in a few hundred years.

Take a minute to imagine the most impressive technology you can dream of.  Now, imagine humans improving on that technology for a few decades.  It doesn’t take a huge leap to imagine us one day being able to do just about anything.  Making a realistic computer simulation of the past might be no big deal.

Editors note: Look up synonyms for 'imagine' but don't use any of them.

“I’d be able to tell if I was in a simulation!”- guy who dreamed he was flying on a unicorn while being chased by clowns and had no idea it wasn’t real life until he woke up

All it would take for the simulation theory to be true is for humans at any point in the future to gain the technology to be able to pull it off.  It doesn’t have to be done in the next few centuries or even millennia.

“But, those people don’t exist yet, because they’re in the FUTTUUUUREEEE, idiot.”- random heckler

Well, maybe.  Or, maybe it’s not actually the year 2019.  It could very easily be the year 43210 in the real world and we’re just a simulation that’s currently running in the year 2019.

Statistically it’s more likely that we ARE in a simulation than we AREN’T.

Admittedly, I’m not super great with statistics, but hear me out.

From the year 2000 to 2010, The Sims sold over 125 million copies.  That means every time someone bought the game and installed it on their computer, an entirely new Sims universe was made.  They were all very similar, but none were exactly the same.

Fast track technology another few centuries and it’s possible we’d be able to make The Sims so realistic that the characters themselves become sentient.  Maybe that’s already happened and we’re the characters.

Not only is our universe just a game, it could be one of a billion copies.

Our whole universe might be a computer program in a 12-year-olds bedroom.  The neighbor next door has the same game with a slightly different universe.

This would explain a lot:

How did we get here?

Science says a Big Bang happened and boom shaka laka here we are.  Almost every civilization on Earth has a creation story to explain how we got here. The truth is, we just don’t know.  We all tend to believe whatever story we were told as kids and rationalize it to be the most likely.

Maybe we got here by someone turning on a computer program and running the Humanity simulation.

Religion- God is real, and he’s twelve.

A lot of people are instantly turned off of the Simulation Theory because they feel it negates their religion.  Actually if you have a few drinks, and squint a little bit, it dovetails quite nicely.

Have you ever wondered why people in the past seemed to have more interaction with God? I think there are two main reasons for this.

1) It could be that they just didn’t understand basic science so every unexplained event was a direct connection to the divine (i.e. lightning was God being mad, floods= God being mad, rainbows= God’s sorry, kittens= God loves you, famine=mad, plague=mad, etc.).  God seemed to have a lot of anger to work out in the early stages of humanity.

The more we learn about our world the more things once attributed to a divine being are easily explained.  Maybe God isn’t mad, maybe it’s just the wet season.

2) We haven’t heard from God in a while because his mom made him go downstairs to eat supper.

Those are the best two explanations according to studies and anonymous sources.

Time Ratio of Simulations vs. Reality

In any computer simulation, time doesn’t pass at a 1:1 ratio.  It would take way too long to get anything done.  If God really was a 12-year-old kid, then it would make sense for hundreds if not thousands of Earth years to pass without his direct influence.

Maybe God has aged a few years since he started playing the game and now plays with a more nuanced touch.  He had just uploaded the game Humanity- This time they think it’s real and was messing with the controls and toggles.  He started off by talking directly to the first characters but it didn’t take long for the entire game to go off the rails.

No one was doing what they were supposed to and this greatly upset God.

Instead of doing ctrl + alt + delete on the whole thing, he decided just to flood us and start over.

Next group of folks got some rules to follow, but for various reasons they weren’t doing a great job either.

Eventually, God created a special character and inserted him into the game to get his other sentient simulated characters to start behaving.  Then…God had to run downstairs and eat dinner.

And…here we are

Just waiting for God to finish dinner so he can keep playing.  Or maybe God went to school for the day, or off to college, or grew up and stopped playing the game entirely.

Depending on what time ratio God set the simulation to, he might have just walked out of the room a minute ago or he might have stopped playing years ago.

While unconventional, this idea doesn’t contradict the Bible all that much.  As far as we’re concerned, this God IS all powerful, he’s everywhere at once, and he’s watching us all the time.  Even Heaven and Hell could be part of the simulation.  After we die our character is deleted from Humanity- This time they think it’s real and uploaded to the expansion pack Humanity- Heaven and Hell Edition.

This would also clear up some angst over how a loving God could send anyone to hell.  If we’re just a simulation, then he’s not sending real people to hell, just computer programs.

Still, if technology expands to the point where we can make computer programs sentient, it becomes a bit of a moral gray area on what rights they should have. For instance, if we can create a sentient Alexa, is it fair to trap her in a box and make her order us stuff from Amazon all day? Again though, God might be twelve and not really concerned with being fair to a bunch of simulated humans.

Maybe we aren’t a game at all

Being a game in a kids bedroom doesn’t make us feel very special.  Maybe we aren’t a game.  Maybe we’re a very fancy simulation in a museum.  We are the beginning portion of a humanity that continues on for hundreds of thousands of years.

We might be on one side of the Great Filter that humanity eventually makes it through.  The folks on the other side of the Great Filter made a recreation of what humanity was like before the Great Filter.  People might come from galaxies around to visit and peer in to see what humanity was like back when we were so fragile, just barely clinging to one rock in space.

The Great Filter

Oh right. I should probably explain this a little bit.  To understand the Great Filter we need to understand the Fermi Paradox.  The Fermi Paradox basically asks, why haven’t we yet come across any other intelligent life?

Either a) we are the first intelligent life in the entire universe to make it this far- playing the numbers this would be incredibly unlikely,  b) other life forms are aware of us but they see how dickish we behave and want nothing to do with us, or c) all other civilizations eventually run into The Great Filter.

The Great Filter is an event that eventually wipes out almost all forms of life.  There are three main candidates for the Great Filter: Technology, lack of technology, and life itself.

Technology is a strong candidate for being the Great Filter.  It wouldn’t be at all surprising if we ended up blowing ourselves up at some point.  If bombs keep getting more and more powerful, eventually someone will get a hold of a bomb big enough to blow the entire world to pieces.

The lack thereof option is if humanity doesn’t figure out a way to populate space and eventually Earth becomes uninhabitable.  Whether through our own pollution or the sun simply burning out, humanity can’t survive on Earth indefinitely.

The third candidate for the Great Filter is life itself.  Maybe simply by being the planet that was able to sustain life we’ve already made it past the Great Filter.  The reason we don’t see or hear from anyone else is because nobody else was able to make it.

This is the idea behind the Great Filter.  Every other potential life form throughout the history of the universe has eventually succumbed to it, except for us.  The reason we haven’t been taken out by the Great Filter is either a) we already passed the Great Filter when life was able to get a foothold on Earth. Or b) we haven’t come to the Great Filter, yet.

If a) then wahoo! We did it! If b) gulp.

Back to the Museum

So maybe some future Elon Musk type character is able to pull humanity through the future Great Filter and civilization continues to grow and spread for the next several hundred thousand years.

Maybe they wanted to pay homage to us, so they created a simulation of early humanity.  We aren’t us, we’re the simulation of us.  Got it?

In this case, we’re a lot more special and appreciated than merely one of a billion copies of a video game.  We’re still not “real” but then again who’s to say those fake simulated humans who simulated us are real?

Thanks for going down the rabbit hole with me.

If you enjoyed this article please share it with your potentially not real friends and enemies

While you’re here, here’s a few more asinine articles you may enjoy:

Forever Will Happen and Why It’s Incredibly Upsetting

Being Famous Would Be Awful and Why It’s Ok Nobody Will Remember You

Being a Kid was Harder Than We Remember (With Illustrations)