SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk says he believes in the controversial "simulation hypothesis" that argues the entire universe is an unimaginably sophisticated computer simulation written either by advanced aliens or by "posthumans," the creatures the human race will evolve into thousands of years from now.

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Musk re-stated the argument made by Dr. Nick Bostrom Ph.D, the creator of simulation hypothesis, that the odds are overwhelming all of us are, quite literally, characters in an advanced Sim or a video game, if you will. It sounds pretty frightening we're all figments in the mind of a precocious posthuman playing on a future version of the Xbox or PlayStation that might have the title, "Big Bang 2.0: How to confuse humans they're unreal."

Musk said there's a one in a billion chance we're not in some sort of simulation controlled by aliens or posthumans. He admitted he'd thought a lot about the idea we're all merely participants in one big simulation.

He noted that games used to be merely rectangles and dots. Now, we're irrevocably headed toward a reality that's being augmented.

"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," Musk philosophized.

"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."

Anyone familiar with the work of Dr. Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher who teaches at Oxford University, will immediately notice the echo of Bostrom's simulation hypothesis in Musk's statements. Dr. Bostrom is the author of over 200 publications having to do with a variety of arcane topics such as the "anthropic principle," existential risk, superintelligence risks and, of course, simulation hypothesis.

It is Dr. Bostrom's work on superintelligence -- chiefly the dangers humankind faces from super intelligent artificial intelligence or AI -- that seems to have first caught the attention of Musk and Bill Gates.

Dr. Bostrom revealed his simulation hypothesis in 2003. The hypothesis is a trilemma he called "the simulation argument."

Dr. Bostrom's trilemma argues that one of three unlikely-seeming propositions must be true:

* The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations) is very close to zero, or

* The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero, or

* The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

Whichever option you choose, the result will be to realize there's no way of proving we aren't simulated characters in the Sim of an advanced civilization's computer, be this alien or posthuman.

Therefore, one of the three options will be true:

The explanation for this outcome is the trilemma posits that a technologically mature posthuman civilization will have enormous computing power. If even a tiny percentage of these posthumans were to run "ancestor simulations" (or "high-fidelity" simulations of ancestral life such as ours indistinguishable from reality to the simulated ancestor), the total number of simulated ancestors, or "Sims", in the universe (or multiverse, if it exists) will greatly exceed the total number of actual ancestors.

"My view is that we don't have strong enough evidence to rule out any of these three possibilities," said Dr. Bostrom. Since "most philosophical academic journal papers languish on shelves in dusty libraries," Dr. Bostrom admitted it's flattering to hear his argument taken-up by Musk.

"It's important to understand that it wouldn't just be in a metaphorical sense that we're in a simulation, it would be in a very literal sense that we ourselves and all this world around us that we see and hear and smell exists inside a computer built by some advanced civilization," Dr. Bostrom pointed out.

TagsElon Musk, simulation hypothesis, Dr. Nick Bostrom, Oxford University, superintelligence, posthuman