Is it possible that our universe is a computer simulation?
But there are limits to what that means. The main argument in favor of simulated cosmology is that if advanced civilizations are interested in their past or how backward civilizations developed and have the ability to build simulated worlds, they are likely to build simulated worlds to study simulated civilizations, This step can be repeated (an advanced civilization can simulate many backward civilizations) and multiple nesting (the simulated civilization can also establish its own simulation when it reaches a certain stage of development), so the number of virtual civilization in the multiverse should be far more than the physical civilization, and the probability of us being virtual civilization is very high. From 2001 to 2003, Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at The University of Oxford in the UK, proposed a similar idea: a very advanced supercomputer with the mass of a planet, capable of performing 10^42 operations per second, could run human-scale simulations, including all human memories, thoughts and feelings. Bostrom presents a trilemma, arguing that one of the following statements must be true: