Are we living in a simulation? "There's a one in billions chance we're in base reality" - Elon Musk

Question

"The strongest argument for us being in a simulation, probably being in a simulation, is the following: 40 years ago, we had Pong, two rectangles and a dot…That is what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, the games will become indistinguishable from reality." - Elon Musk

Answer 1

It's a interesting argument! (I linked our posts together)😊
https://www.sololearn.com/discuss/376574/?ref=app

Answer 2

what if we r already living in a simulation that aliens have made to experiment on us???

Answer 3

Yup, and by his words if humanity continue advancing even in smallest percent, creating billions of simulations in future is for sure, so the chance that we are living in one is very high.

Answer 4

Human will produce super intelligence in a decade time. They will keep on explore the unknown, and eventually tell us what reality actually is.

Answer 5

Elon's argument that we live in a simulation also includes the idea that the universe is billions of years old. So the idea is that if there is even the tiniest rate of improvement in technology then over billions of years the result would be so incredibly advanced that it could create something like alternate realities.

There's a problem with Elon's idea, though. The raw materials that make up our planet, our machines, and our bodies originated inside stars. Those stars went super nova and spread their heavier elements into the universe. Some of those heavier elements formed solar systems and new stars. This process alone takes billions of years, and it's necessary to setup the _conditions_ for the incremental improvement argument.

And that's not the only process that took billions of years. Life on Earth started about 3.7 billion years ago. Humans arrived on the scene only a couple hundred thousand years ago with Homo genus arriving a couple million years ago. Basically, all of those billions of years of life on Earth have been spent in a very basic form of evolution - without any technological evolution - because there hasn't been a species with a large enough brain (or any brain for most of it) to have intelligent life.

I doubt we're in a simulation. It's been a 13 billion year construction project to get the foundations for humans (if you want to look at it that way). Here we are... and now, if we can keep the improvement going we just might realize Elon's idea. Unless someone else has beat us to it and all the stuff I just mentioned (including the evidence for a 13 billion year old universe) is just part of the simulation. But now I'm entering into a different kind of thought train...