Have you ever had a moment where reality felt… glitchy? A sense of déjà vu, a coincidence that was too perfect, or a feeling that the world around you wasn’t quite solid?

For decades, science fiction movies like The Matrix have explored the idea that our world is fake. But in 2026, this is no longer just a plot for a blockbuster movie. It is a serious hypothesis debated by physicists, philosophers, and tech billionaires.

The Simulation Theory proposes a terrifying yet fascinating possibility: that everything we know—our history, our planet, and even our own consciousness—is nothing more than lines of code running on a supercomputer built by an advanced civilization. And the scariest part? The math actually supports it.

The Mathematical Argument

The modern version of this theory comes from Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. In his famous paper, he proposed a “Trilemma.” He argued that one of the following three statements must be true:

1. Civilizations go extinct before they become technologically advanced enough to run simulations.
2. Advanced civilizations have no interest in running simulations of their ancestors.
3. We are almost certainly living in a simulation.

Bostrom argues that if a civilization can reach a point where they have infinite computing power (like Quantum Computing), they would likely run millions of “ancestor simulations” to study history. If there are millions of simulated realities and only one “base reality,” the statistical odds that we are in the one real base reality are one in a billion.

This is why tech mogul Elon Musk famously stated that there is a “one in billions chance that this is base reality.”

The Evidence in Physics

It sounds crazy until you look at physics. The more we study the universe, the more it looks like data processing.

One of the strongest arguments comes from the “Planck Length.” In our universe, there is a minimum unit of measurement. You cannot divide space infinitely. Eventually, you hit a limit—a pixel size. This suggests that our universe has a “resolution,” just like a video game screen.

Furthermore, the laws of physics are surprisingly rigid. The speed of light, for example, is a hard limit. In a video game, there is a maximum speed at which the engine can render information. Is the speed of light simply the processing speed limit of our universal processor?

Quantum Mechanics and Optimization

Video games use a trick called “foveal rendering.” To save processing power, the computer only renders the graphics that the player is currently looking at. The world behind your back doesn’t exist until you turn around.

Quantum mechanics behaves suspiciously like this.

In the famous “Double Slit Experiment,” particles like electrons behave like waves of potential until they are observed. They don’t seem to have a definite position until a conscious observer looks at them. This implies that the universe might be optimizing its resources, only “rendering” reality when absolutely necessary.

Who Is Running the Code?

If we are in a simulation, who is the programmer?

This brings Science dangerously close to religion. In this scenario, the “Programmer” is essentially God—a being outside of our time and space who created our world and can intervene at will (miracles/hacks).

Some theorists suggest it is our own descendants. In the year 3000 or 5000, humanity might use powerful Artificial Intelligence to simulate the year 2026 to understand how they survived the climate crisis or the AI revolution. We might be nothing more than historical research data.

The Skeptics Push Back

Not everyone is convinced. Physicist Frank Wilczek argues that the universe is too complex to be a simulation. The amount of energy required to simulate every single atom in the human brain, let alone the entire galaxy, would be astronomical.

However, proponents argue that a simulation wouldn’t need to simulate every atom. It would only need to simulate the surface of things, or only simulate the minds of the observers. If you play a video game, the computer doesn’t simulate the internal engine of every car on the street; it just simulates the outer shell.

Living in the Game

Does it matter?

If you find out tomorrow that you are a Sim, would you stop going to work? Probably not. The pain feels real, the love feels real, and the consequences feel real.

Whether our reality is made of atoms or bits, it is the only reality we have. Simulation Theory might not change how you live your daily life, but it certainly changes how you look at the stars. It forces us to be humble, admitting that our understanding of the universe is still in its infancy. We are just characters trying to figure out the rules of the game we are playing.