Are We Virtual Reality Prisoners?
British philosopher Nick Bostrom says he believes that the reality we perceive around us may be the product of a highly-advanced computer program, much like the plot of the Matrix movies – and surprisingly NASA have said they agree with him.
Dr Bostrom proposed in a paper he wrote that an evolved race of aliens have imprisoned the human-race in what he refers to as a “digital imprisonment”.
These aliens, or super-humans, are using virtual reality to simulate space and time, according to Bostrom
NASA scientist Rich Terrile, director of the Centre for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, thinks Dr Bostrom may be onto something.
Speaking to Vice the NASA scientist said, “Right now the fastest NASA supercomputers are cranking away at about double the speed of the human brain …If you make a simple calculation using Moore’s Law [which roughly claims computers double in power every two years], you’ll find that these supercomputers, inside of a decade, will have the ability to compute an entire human lifetime of 80 years – including every thought ever conceived during that lifetime – in the span of a month.”
Express.co.uk reports:
“In quantum mechanics, particles do not have a definite state unless they’re being observed.
“Many theorists have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how you explain this.
“One explanation is that we’re living within a simulation, seeing what we need to see when we need to see it.
“What I find inspiring is that, even if we are in a simulation or many orders of magnitude down in levels of simulation, somewhere along the line something escaped the primordial ooze to become us and to result in simulations that made us – and that’s cool.”
The idea that our Universe is a fiction generated by computer code solves a number of inconsistencies and mysteries about the cosmos.
The first is the Fermi Paradox – proposed by physicist Enrico Fermi during the 1960s – which highlights the contradiction between the apparent high probability of extraterrestrial civilisations within our ever-expanding universe and humanity’s lack of contact with, or lack of evidence for, these alien colonies.
“Where is everybody?” Mr Fermi asked.
It could simply be that Earth and mankind truly is the centre of the universe.
Another mystery explained by Dr Bostrom’s Matrix-like theory is the role of Dark Matter.
US theoretical cosmologist Michael Turner has called the hypothetical material “the most profound mystery in all of science”.
Dark Matter is one of many hypothetical materials used to explain a number of anomalies in the Standard Model – the all-encompassing theory science has used to explain the particles and forces of nature for the last 50 years.
The Standard Model of particle physics tells us that there are 17 fundamental particles which make up atomic matter.
The Higgs boson, which was first theorised by scientists during the 1960s, is amongst these 17 fundamental particles.
In summer 2012, scientists at CERN observed what is now believed to be the elusive “God particle”.
But the Standard Model is as-yet unable to explain a number of baffling properties of the universe – including the fact that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing speed.
Dark Matter is believed to be a web-like matter that binds visible matter together.
If it exists, it would explain why galaxies spin at the speed they do – something which remains unexplained based only on what we can currently observe.
The Standard Model does not yet hold an explanation for the force of gravity.
The as-yet unproven existence of Dark Matter could be explained by a virtual universe.
But not everybody is convinced about The Matrix explanation.
Professor Peter Millican, who teaches philosophy and computer science at Oxford University, thinks the virtual reality explanation is flawed.
“The theory seems to be based on the assumption that ‘superminds’ would do things in much the same way as we would do them,” he said.
“If they think this world is a simulation, then why do they think the superminds – who are outside the simulation – would be constrained by the same sorts of thoughts and methods that we are?
“They assume that the ultimate structure of a real world can’t be grid like, and also that the superminds would have to implement a virtual world using grids.
“We can’t conclude that a grid structure is evidence of a pretend reality just because our ways of implementing a pretend reality involve a grid.”
“It is an interesting idea, and it’s healthy to have some crazy ideas,” he told The Telegraph.
“You don’t want to censor ideas according to whether they seem sensible or not because sometimes important new advances will seem crazy to start with.
“You never know when good ideas may come from thinking outside the box.
“This Matrix thought-experiment is actually a bit like some ideas of Descartes and Berkeley, hundreds of years ago.
“Even if there turns out to be nothing in it, the fact that you have got into the habit of thinking crazy things could mean that at some point you are going to think of something that initially may seem rather way out, but turns out not to be crazy at all. - Universe A Matrix Computer Game Designed By Aliens, Say NASA
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Man sneezes out toy dart after 44 years
A man has sneezed out a toy dart that had been stuck up his nose for more than four decades.
51-year-old Steve Easton had been suffering from a blocked nose for as long as he could remember - an irritating ailment that often saw him waking up in the night with a dose of the sniffles and a headache that he had been attributing to hayfever.
To his surprise however he managed to clear the blockage with one almighty sneeze after the end of a toy dart, which had seemingly been lodged in his nasal cavity since he was a child, came shooting out of his nose like a cork from a bottle.
"I started a sneezing fit and it came out my left nostril," he said. "I thought, 'What's this? Where the hell has this come from?' and pulled out this rubber sucker. I was completely blown away."
It later emerged that Easton had been taken to hospital by his parents as a youngster after they noticed that one of the rubber tips from the toy darts he had been playing with was missing.
"Steve said he'd swallowed it and there was just one of these darts without a tip," said his mother.
"I took him to the hospital and they spent a lot of time looking for it but in the end they said perhaps it was a mistake. I knew it wasn't and it's always worried me and then now it has suddenly shot out." - Man sneezes out toy dart after 44 years
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Chinese baby 'buried for eight days' in graveyard survives
A newborn baby who was buried for eight days in a graveyard in southern China has been found alive, according to local media reports.
The baby boy was found after a woman picking herbs near a cemetery in China's Guangxi region heard an infant's cries coming from underground, the Nanguo Morning Post said.
Spooked, the woman rushed back to her village and returned with police.
Officers dug several centimetres into the ground and found a muddied cardboard box containing the wailing infant.
The parents reportedly abandoned the baby, who has a cleft lip, at the cemetery on April 24. Two days later, and believing him dead, some relatives returned to bury the child.
Eight days after that, he was found covered in mud and coughing up dirty water but alive. Authorities believe he survived because rainwater and oxygen seeped into his box. His condition is believed to be stable now.
In China, though it is illegal to abandon children, many parents give up ill or disabled babies because they fear they cannot afford the medical care needed. Read more at Chinese baby 'buried for eight days' in graveyard survives
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Photos: Bigfoot Climbing Trees?
BFRO Report:
NEAREST TOWN: Pollock Pines?
NEAREST ROAD: Hwy 50
OBSERVED: I live in the "Bay Area" of California. My visual sighting is at the bottom of this report. I have photos of that I want to send. I enjoy hiking and camping on a regular basis year round. I have been considering submitting a report for my encounter over the last few months and finally I am doing it. My encounter happened about 4 months ago in July. My girlfriend and I were "dispersed camping" (which is where campers can legally set up a tent in the national forest for free for up to 14 days) in El Dorado National Forest off of Hwy 50, about 6 miles east of Bridal Veil Falls. We have a secluded spot we always return to on the bank of a 10-15 foot wide, 4-5 feet deep (at the deepest) river.
Some time in the night, probably 1-4 AM, my girlfriend woke me up saying she heard someone jumping into the river about 50 feet away, and it sounded like the person's legs were sloshing against the water the way it would sound if you were walking fast through thigh-deep water. Sure enough, a few seconds after she whispered this to me, I heard the noise too. She was accurate in her description of the sound. I guess my protective instincts kicked in because without hesitation I unzipped the tent with my large mag-light in hand, (the type police officers use) and stood outside my tent, spotlighting the river bank and the forest around us. I saw nothing, so I called out that there were people and please go the other way, still heard nothing. After that we didn't hear any more unusual sounds. What struck me as odd was, why would anyone be walking in FREEZING cold (likely glacier run-off) water in the dark morning hours, not anywhere near any trails, and not anywhere near any roads...? (We had to hike to this spot and it's a mile from our car, down a very steep heavily forested hillside full of underbrush, which is why this spot was so hard to find and it was an accidental find, and why it stays secluded.)
It had me pondering for the last few months and even brought me to considering maybe it was a bigfoot because it sounded like two legs, not the way a bear would sound trudging through the water. Plus, there was nothing in the river I could see so whoever or whatever would've had to be farther than we thought and therefor very large to make sound seem so close...
The next morning we went for a long hike as it was our last day camping. We had just gotten back to the car when I looked back at the treeline we had just came out of a, sort of, for a last glance, I will miss you, type of look, and I saw what I first thought was a black bear in the very top (the literal tip) of a 60-70 foot pine tree, it was staying still but I could see it was wiggling a little, almost like it was positioning itself comfortably, and it looked like it was hugging the tree like a bear. But then I saw the second "bear" in the SAME spot as this one in a tree right next to it. At this point I'm about 500 feet from these things and the trees they were in. I was able to take many photos of these "bears" and I have them on my phone and will send them to anyone who wants to see. On closer inspection, these were not bears. I showed a few friends and family and they all see what I see, it appears there is a UNIFORM Jet Black sillouette of a large, lean human man. When you see these pictures you will get an off/odd feeling. I know they weren't bears and I know they weren't humans. I'm not sure what they were, but I know what they were not. After viewing them for about a minute my girlfriend began to get a bit worried they might come down, so we left. And we didn't talk about it much as she isn't interested in the subject. However I cannot forget this, or write it off.
ALSO NOTICED: Yes, I have had many strange occurrences in different parts of California.
I decided to call the us forest service and spoke to a woman answering phones for El Dorado national park, when I asked if anyone had reported anything in relation to bigfoot, she chuckled and said, "yes, but not at this low elevation."
I will never forgot the way she said that, and I can reply in my mind to this day.
OTHER WITNESSES: One, my girlfriend.
OTHER STORIES: Yes. From tv shows and movies, and my own experiences.
TIME AND CONDITIONS: First incident- calm clear and cold summer night.
Second, clear sunny day.
ENVIRONMENT: Mixed pine, white fir and cedar.
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