8 Mind-Bending Unanswered Questions About The Universe

2. Is It Real?

It sounds like the paranoid ramblings of an internet conspiracy theorist, but there are a fair few real, proper scientists out there who suspect that reality itself might be an illusion.

There are those, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who think that it's a virtual certainty that our universe is actually being simulated by someone else. Their reasoning is this:

In the past 20 years or so of the computer age, we have made such massive strides in the fields of simulated and virtual reality, that it stands to reason that is would be possible for any sufficiently advanced species to create a perfect simulated universe. It would also be perfectly possible that a self-aware computer program would be capable of simulating its own universe in a kind of technological equivalent of Russian dolls. If we accept that this is possible, which it is, then the chances of us being the very first civilisation (i.e. the "real" one) are extremely slim, it's actually much more likely that we are part of the however-many-other subsequent simulations that has been created from the first.

So, is there any evidence for this?

Well, it could just be possible to detect the underlying grid structure of the simulation by studying high-powered cosmic waves. Some also think that the very fact that the laws of physics are so computable, as discussed in the last entry, are an indication that reality could have been programmed to abide by simple rules.

On the flipside, it's possible that this is all a misplaced anthropocentric existential angst.