iStockphoto
Scientist Melvin Vopson believes we may be living 54 million lifetimes because our world is nothing more than a virtual simulation. Vopson, who is a professor at the University of Portsmouth in England, has explained his theories in a book and in the journal AIP Advances.
The professor, who started the Information Physics Institute, an international research organization, discussed his ideas in his 2023 book Reality Reloaded: The Scientific Case for a Simulated Universe.
He also recently spoke to MailOnline.com about some of the clues he says suggest we are living in an advanced AI world.
During the interview, Vopson shared three theories that even he admits are not backed by scientific research, but are just theoretical.
“All these scenarios operate under the control of a master AI, created of course by a future iteration of our civilization,” Vopson told MailOnline. “It is possible that no one is awake anymore and we are trapped in the simulated reality, controlled by the AI.”
The first theory is that we opted to enter the simulation at birth purely as a form of entertainment – to keep our minds amused and occupied.
The real world that we’ve chosen to leave behind is not very interesting, the theory goes, so humans created a much more interesting, albeit fabricated, approximation of life – the ultimate VR game.
And with its plethora of celebrity gossip, sports events, political scandal and more, the ongoing soap opera of modern existence is anything but boring.
“We created the simulation as a place of entertainment where we can choose to enter (at birth) and experience a whole new life with all the components of it,” said Vopson.
His second theory is that we all may be in a simulation involuntarily.
“Imagine that our society has a complex issue to solve – environmental, economic, energy crisis, wars,’ Vopson told MailOnline. “If we had the ability, the best way to solve it would be to run a simulation (or multiple parallel simulations) and see what solutions the simulated version of us come up with. If any of the simulations crack the problem, then we can adopt it in the base reality as a viable solution.”
In his third theory, one minute in the real world could last as much as 100 years in the simulation.
“A hundred life experiences could be just 100 minutes in the real life in the base reality,” said Vopson. “This is exactly how the time dilation works when we dream. In the dream, the events that we experience can appear to last minutes, hours or days, but in the real conscious state the dream lasted in fact fractions of seconds.”
As for the clues he says lends credence to his theory that we are all living in a virtual simulation, one example he has given is that limits to the speed of light and sound suggest they may be governed by the speed of a computer processor.
He also believes the abundance of symmetry in our world is another clue.
“Just imagine building a house from bricks that are not the standard shape of a brick,” he said. “If the bricks were in a totally irregular shape, the construction would be almost impossible or much more complicated.
The same is when we design computer programs or virtual realities – and this maximizes efficiency and minimizes energy consumption or computational power.”
Quantum entanglement is another clue, he believes, that we are living in a simulation.
“Quantum entanglement allows two particles to be spookily connected so that if you manipulate one, you automatically and immediately also manipulate the other, no matter how far apart they are – with the effect being seemingly faster than the speed of light, which should be impossible,” he said. “This could, however, be explained by the fact that within a virtual reality code, all “locations” (points) should be roughly equally far from a central processor.”
Melvin Vopson is far from alone in his theory that we are living in a simulation.
In 2020, a group of scientists announced that they believe there is a 1-in-3 chance that we are actually living in a simulation. Later that year, another study came out that put that number at 50 percent.