Look: you don’t know me and I don’t know you. I’m sure you’re a joy at parties, a mental powerhouse, and a real killer in the sack. This really isn’t personal. I swear. But… I’m pretty sure that you don’t exist.

“Hey! You’re wrong! I can feel my skin right now. I buy things and eat food and sing songs and kiss my mother with this mouth!”

Okay, buddy. Calm down. It’s not just you. The odds are pretty good that you, everyone you love, and everything you hold dear is just an illusion. Take it home, technological titan Elon Musk!

“There’s a billion to one chance we’re living in base reality,” said Musk during a conference. Even Neil deGrasse Tyson, the working man’s Bill Nye, agrees that it’s overwhelmingly likely that our reality is nothing more than a simulation. Nick Bostrom, a leading thinker in artificial intelligence, was one of the first to posit the idea: “We’re almost certainly living in a computer simulation.” The theory, now popularized by our celebrity scientists, originated from Bostrum’s paper Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

Here's the gist, filtered through the mind of someone who took computer science one time - stay with me for a second. Although the first computer is introduced in the 1930s, it isn't for decades after that our idea of the modern computer begins to develop. The history of computing is long and interesting but we're going to focus on the fun stuff: games.

The forefather of home gaming -Pong - is released in 1972. Enjoy endless hours fun by bouncing a ball between two walls! Although revolutionary at the time, Pong pales in comparison to modern gaming. Instead of controlling little white pixels, gamers today run across fantasy lands murdering elves and jacking Mercedes. Graphics, gameplay, and creativity have all exploded in the half-century since the inception of gaming. More importantly, so has the processing power.

We have Moore's Law to thank for our ability to pop in a disk and be transported to an immersive world in seconds. The law suggests that the number of transistors per square inch of integrated circuits has doubled every year since their creation, and will continue to do so.

What?

The idea is that what our computers are capable of doing is increasing, increasingly quickly.

Uh, what?

Okay. Year after year, computers are able to do more and more. It's easy to see when only 50 years ago the limits of gaming technology were little more than a Windows screensaver. Soon, we're going to be treated to virtual reality worlds that we can roam at our leisure. Today, that means we can play excellent games whenever we choose. What does it mean for tomorrow?

Bostrom's argument is that as computational power continues to increase there must come a time that games are indistinguishable from reality. "If you assume any rate of improvement at all then games will become indistinguishable from reality," explains Musk.

Try to extrapolate the growth we've seen in 50 years across a 10,000-year timeline. Computers will certainly be capable of running complex simulations that can exactly mirror Earth itself, along with all its inhabitants.

In this future, and inevitable, reality games can run complete histories of human existence. Everyone from curious scientists running complete simulations of our universe to the casual gamer playing god from his couch will be able to create a world totally indistinguishable from base reality.

And it gets worse. Within these simulations, it stands to reason that computers will be invented and will progress to the point that they, too, are capable of running these perfection simulations of reality. We're looking at simulations within simulations!

"Okay, man. There will be plenty of fakes worlds. Got it. But I can feel my skin. Unfortunately, I can smell the piles of trash outside my apartment. Hell, I was born! I know that I am real. "

No, you don't. These simulations would be perfectly capable of creating a world populated by sentient beings. Granted, they'd be lines of code, but they would act and feel just like humans in base reality. You might just be one of them.

Let's take a quick look at the math. There must be 1 base reality. Check. If casual gamers, scientists, and anyone who can get their hands on a console are capable of making simulations then we're looking at millions of alternate realities. And most of those are capable of producing alternate realities within themselves.

Aaaaaand, those in turn are capable of making more. The odds of being in base reality? You're looking at just about 1 / infinity. For all you mathematicians out there, you know where I'm going. That number is equal to exactly zero. Zero percent chance you're living in base reality.

It's not a comforting thought - it's overwhelmingly unlikely that you're nothing more than a small part of an enormous simulation being run in the future. As long as computers progress, it's a logical inevitability. Sorry about that.

Pretty cool that you're a bunch of code that just learned it doesn't exist, huh? Call it a silver lining.