Odds are we are living in someone else's video game, says Tesla CEO Elon Musk

Musk challenges anyone to find fault with his reasoning

Have you ever felt like nothing goes according to plan? What if we were to tell you that you were a character in some advanced civilisation’s video game? Well, at least that’s what Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, believes.

"There's a one in billion chance we're in base reality," Musk said at Recode's annual Code Conference.



Musk puts forward his argument which he believes is the strongest in favour of our being in a simulation. “Forty years ago we had pong. Like two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, forty years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it's getting better every year. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality.”

He goes on to say that with time, the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. So, imagine if it's 10,000 years in the future, which, according to him, is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

“So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions,” he added.



Musk hopes that it’s true. “Arguably we should hope that that's true, because if civilisation stops advancing, that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilisation. So maybe we should be hopeful this is a simulation, because otherwise we are going to create simulations indistinguishable from reality or civilisation ceases to exist. We're unlikely to go into some multi-million year stasis.”

He challenges anyone to find fault with his reasoning. “Tell me what's wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?”

Can you find a flaw?

This article originally appeared on Vox.

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