This was written by my 11 year old son and I had absolutely no input or edits on this piece.

Proud Mad Computer Scientist Dad

In some movies, it is depicted that humans live in computer simulation that is indistinguishable from ours. Some movies like The Matrix and Vanilla Sky follow this setting. It astonished my 11 year old brain in the year 2019 to think of a world completely simulated. Then I thought, are we in a simulation? This lead to me searching online and me typing this blog. So, are we in a computer simulation?

The Simulation Theory states that all of life is in fact an artificial simulation, specifically and most likely, a computer simulation. Look at it this way, 47 years ago, we had Pong. It was two rectangles and a dot. 28 years after Pong, we got The Sims. Now 40 years later, we can make photorealistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously. Each year the simulations get better. If we go 10,000 years in the future. It’s possible that if we get there, civilization will be entirely gone because of our ceiling to our advancement. It could be global warming or self-replicating robots. To quote Elon Musk, “…if civilization stops advancing, that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization.” But, if we keep advancing and assume that everything in this physical world can be simulated,  eventually, we’ll simulate ourselves. When that happens we would send tiny self-replicating robots to other planets, which would turn the planet into a huge computer. And then the simulations would start to build their own simulations. That would make billions of universes that are practically the same from our own. If the theory about living in a simulation is true, we would be in one of those simulations. This suggests that there is a higher power like in most religions but it is another version of us.

The thing about humanity making simulations and those simulations making simulations is that Elon Musk thinks there is around a 70% chance of the simulation theory being real while Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher, believes there is only a 20% chance of it being true. In fact, there are two more possibilities, one is that humanity goes extinct before we can make simulations, and the other one saying that humanity stops making simulations because it was either wrong or boring. Unlike Nick Bostrom, I would agree with Elon Musk that there is a more likely chance of the world we live in to be a simulation. First, lets look if humanity went extinct before we can make a simulation. In this possibility, we better hope that we are in a simulation or civilization will cease to exist. To quote Elon Musk, “Either we’re going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will cease to exist. Those are the two options.” Now lets look at the other possibility-maybe future humans don’t want to run ancestor simulations. To quote Vox,” Maybe they think it’s unethical, because there is a tremendous amount of suffering in the world. And that suffering would still feel real to simulated humans. Or maybe they have other priorities.” But I don’t think that both of these possibilities are the result. First off, we would make simulations similar to reality in order to keep civilization from extinction. Also, just because if the suffering of the simulation is like our suffering, humans would still do it anyway. Humans want knowledge and they will do almost anything for knowledge. So therefore, there is a good chance that we are in a computer simulation.

So to answer the question, are we in a computer simulation. Well, we don’t know the answer yet but, based on the data showed to you before, there is a pretty good chance that we are in a computer simulation. Based on humanity’s advancement, humans made simulations and those simulations made more simulations. So out of many identical universes, ours could be part of the other 99.99% of simulations possibly made.