Elon Musk, you know that multimillionaire who founded Paypal, Telsa Motors and XSpace certainly think so. I mean is the world just a super advanced type of virtual reality? OK first of some facts that are at the centre of all this...
1. Computing power in 1956 was 10,000 FLOPS
2. Computing power in 2015 is 4,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPS
That is an increase of 4,000,000,000 x over, that over 69 years - 1956 to 2015...
http://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-trillion-fold-increase-computing-power/Anyways the processor of Apollo guidance computer had twice the amount of processing power than Super Nintendo entertainment system -this is the processor that we used on the first spacecraft to go to the moon (ohhh btw we haven't gone to the moon since) - the gap between the two was about 40 to 50 years max... Personally this is proof that given 1 million years we should be able run a virtual world, that is if our future ancestors decide to do so and haven't gone extinct like the dinosaurs... the chance they decide not to, for what ever reasons or have gone extinct are very, very small. So yes, we will definitely have the computer's with the processing power needed to run the real world virtual reality simulation, yeah I know the world is really really really really big huge but processing power of computers of computers nearly 70 years ago increased at a rate of 58,000,000 million times per year.. so given that sort of rapid improvement year in, year out - yes given a 100,000 years and you're looking at incredible powerful computers with the capacity and ability to do just about anything.
And if so, who is to say we're not in a simulation right now?
Elon Musk has said this:
https://www.youtube.com/v/2KK_kzrJPS8So if you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let’s imagine it’s 10,000 years in the future, which 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.
Think of the Matrix but instead of uses human as the source of power, we harness the energy needed to run it. Personally I can't wait to meet the woman in the red dress. But in all seriousness what do you think? Or does it sound like a crazy theory from somebody who has taken too many drugs?