NEW: More Evidence You're an NPC in a Video Game (Part 2)

In 1961, a radio astronomer named Frank Drake wrote an equation predicting how many alien civilizations we should see in deep space. For those interested in aliens, this equation would become world-famous because what it predicts is insane and may prove something far more interesting [music] than whether or not aliens exist. There are seven variables to Drake's equation: the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars with planets, the fraction of planets that can host life, the fraction where life actually develops, the fraction where life becomes intelligent, the fraction where intelligence builds detectable technology, >> [music] >> and how long that technology stays on the air. Multiplied together, the result is a single number, the number of detectable civilizations that should exist in our galaxy right now. [music] Given how vast space is, even the most conservative calculations deliver a number that is staggeringly large. Many physicists say we should see millions of civilizations just in our galaxy, but we don't. Our galaxy and the universe at large is silent. Our galaxy should be teeming with life according to this equation, but instead, with the exception of us, it seems to be completely empty. That contradiction is known as the Fermi paradox. Many people have put forward explanations as to why it exists, but I'm going to make the case that the answer that fits the data the best is that the universe behaves exactly like a simulation. The reason the cosmos is silent, the reason we can be relatively certain aliens don't exist, or they only exist when we're interacting with them, is because the simulation does not process anything it doesn't have to. Now, I know that is a wild claim, so I'm going to walk you through the evidence and build my argument brick by brick so you can decide for yourself. Tell me in the comments what you think. Across four signatures from four different branches of physics, all pointing in the same direction, I'm going to make the case that we're almost certainly living inside of a simulation, each signature being weird on its own, but taken together, they're a clear pattern. So, do not bail before the end because that's where all four signatures come together to make my case. All right, without further ado, let's start where Drake started. Welcome to part one, the silence of the universe demands an explanation. In the 1940s, mathematician John von Neumann, one of the architects of modern computing, proved that self-replicating machines, machines that build copies of themselves using local materials without human intervention, are in fact possible. In 1975, an astrophysicist named Michael Hart took that realization and asked the obvious Fermi paradox follow-up question, "If that's true, why isn't the galaxy full of self-replicating machines?" Any civilization with even modest technology could launch one of these self-replicating machines towards a distant star, it would land, mine local materials, and build copies of itself. Those copies would then project out towards the next star, and so on and so forth. Each generation would double the total population of self-replicating machines, creating an exponential growth curve that would be capable of populating entire galaxies on cosmic timelines. Hart ran some math, and even at 1/10 the speed of light, a single civilization could fill the entire galaxy in just one or two million years. That may sound like a lot, but the Milky Way galaxy is 13 billion years old. Even if the probes went much, much slower than what Hart was projecting, physicist Frank Tipler noted that the galaxy should still be colonized. even if it took 300 million years to do it. That's a long ass time to be sure, but still less than 3% of the age of our galaxy. One objection to Hart and Tipler's logic was to ask, why would any civilization bother to send out these probes? But Tipler shut that down pretty quickly with the Copernican principle. This is the idea that humans are not special and our impulses are not unique to us. [music] If there are other civilizations, they're likely to be similar to us in myriad ways. Given that we are already building rovers for Mars and probes for the outer solar system, demonstrating that we have the urge to explore and spread out, we can safely assume other civilizations would do the same. But even if that's incorrect and our behavior is rare, you still only need one civilization across the millions of civilizations Drake's equation predicts to act like us and the galaxy should be teeming with these probes, even if not outright life. Whether they did it as survival insurance against the death of their home star or for resource acquisition or just out of pure curiosity or anything else for that matter, it only takes one civilization with one von Neumann machine sent out just one time ever in the vastness of time and space and we should see signs of life everywhere. But we don't. We don't see it anywhere. Over the years, the people who spend their careers thinking about this kind of thing have come up with several explanations as to why we don't see life. Each one seems plausible at first, but crumble under scrutiny. The first explanation for the silence is called the Great Filter. This is the idea that somewhere along the path from lifeless rock to civilization sending signals into space and colonizing the galaxy with von Neumann probes, there is a step that's nearly impossible to clear, making life in the universe almost impossibly rare. Now, if the filter is behind us, multicellular life capable of developing intelligence would be itself the rare part, and Earth just got lucky. The problem with this argument is that life on Earth appeared almost as soon as the conditions would allow for it. Now, if it really was a super rare phenomenon, you'd expect it to take much longer than it actually did. Okay, well, maybe life is abundant, but the Great Filter is ahead of us. Maybe early civilizations pop up all over the place, but they destroy themselves before they can spread out into the cosmos. Nuclear war, biotech turns lethal, AI goes rogue, whatever. Something gets every single advanced civilization before they can become space travelers. It has logic, but if life is common, is it really statistically likely for every single one to die out without exception across 13 billion years and an untold number of civilizations? It seems mathematically improbable that the odds would be that against life coming into existence, but failing to spread out to the stars, especially considering how close humanity, we, are actually right now to pulling this off. Next, you have the Rare Earth Hypothesis. It says life is easy enough once conditions are met, but the specific configuration that's needed for life to take hold is what is exceptionally rare. Your planet needs to be the right distance from the right type of star, it needs an atmosphere, a stabilizing moon, a magnetic field, and even plate tectonics to manage the carbon cycle and stabilize the temperature. That would seem like an impossibly tall order if it weren't for the fact that we are constantly discovering new Earth-like planets in the Goldilocks zone. As it turns out, Earth-like planets are actually abundant. Okay, but what if aliens are intentionally hiding from us? The zoo hypothesis says they're trying to avoid disrupting our development. The dark forest hypothesis says all civilizations are at risk of being conquered, so announcing yourself to the rest of the universe is potentially suicidal. Both require coordinated silence across every civilization that has ever existed for 13 billion years. If you're playing the odds, this is just highly unlikely. But what if the silence isn't a problem we need to explain? What if it's a clue to how things actually work? What if the universe is structured like a simulation? What if it's bound by computational resources? If we take that assumption, suddenly the Fermi paradox and the need for a fine-tuned universe resolve instantly. A system rendering only what is required by observation or interactivity would not generate distant civilizations unless it absolutely needed to. [music] Instead, it would generate a cosmos that looks vast and full of potential, but stays computationally dormant unless an interaction needs to be rendered on screen for some reason. If that were the case, a silent galaxy wouldn't be a paradox at all. It would be the expected design. I don't need you to believe that the universe actually is [music] a simulation. No one knows what the universe is yet. Every generation uses the language of their current technology to make sense of the cosmos, and the metaphor of the simulation, I believe, does a much better job of explaining what we see than any other argument that has been put forward. Don't believe me? Welcome to part two. The universe appears to be custom-built just for us. Imagine someone hands you a control panel with two dozen dials on it. Each dial sets the laws of physics, the strength of gravity, the mass of an electron, the energy of empty space, and on. Each dial has to be set within a window so narrow, you'd need a microscope to see it. Turn the dial on the strong nuclear force down even half a percent, for instance, and atoms heavier than hydrogen never form. Turn the dial on gravity up even a hair, and the universe collapses back into itself before stars can light. Turn the dial on the fine structure constant a few percent in either direction, and all of chemistry breaks. No molecules form, biology doesn't exist, no life forms whatsoever. Richard Feynman called the precision of the fine structure constant, and I quote, "One of the greatest damn mysteries of physics, a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man." Physicists have been trying to derive it from deeper [music] principles for a century and have failed. Now, with all of that extreme precision in mind, imagine someone walks up to that control panel, and they're blindfolded, but somehow they're still able to set every single dial within that microscopic window of precision on the first try. It's never going to happen. But unless you believe in God, the multiverse, or a simulation-like computational universe, that's exactly what you'd have to accept. The universe just somehow formed perfectly on its [music] own. Because the universe runs on roughly two dozen physical constraints. That's real. The strength of gravity, the charge of an electron, the speed of light, the masses of fundamental particles, none of them are derivable from theory, but every single one is dialed so exquisitely, it seems impossible without intelligent design. Cue the god music. Take the cosmological constant. The energy found in empty space, it's what physicists call dark energy, the mysterious force somehow pushing the universe to expand faster and faster. Our best theory of physics, quantum field theory, says empty space should be packed with energy. But when you do the actual calculations, you get a number that's about 10 followed by 120 zeros times larger than what we actually observe. If the energy of empty space were anywhere close to what the math says it should be, the universe would have ripped itself apart in its first fraction of a second. No atoms would have formed. There would be no galaxies. There would be nothing at all, quite frankly. But once again, this freakishly weird level of precision shows up. And wouldn't you know it, the actual amount of energy is exactly what you'd need to sustain atoms and chemistry and life. But nobody knows why the prediction and the reality are off by a factor of 120 zeros. But they are. And that's just one of the dials. There are roughly two dozen of them, all absurdly precise. Maybe God is real. Maybe he did it. But that doesn't explain the mechanism. God is a great metaphor for a different age, but doesn't get nearly granular enough in explaining what we actually see. Or maybe there is no God. But there are an infinite number of universes, each with different constraints, and life only forms in the ones with the variables that we have. This is the infinite monkeys at a keyboard answer, the multiverse. If you have infinite monkeys banging away on infinite keyboards for infinite time, one of them will eventually accidentally write the entire Harry Potter series. As a thought experiment, sure this is possible, but it's also entirely unsatisfying because it can't be falsified. Now, consider the simulation hypothesis. If reality is a system designed to produce conscious actors via simulated evolution, Of course, the dials must be set with precision. Nobody surprised when a video game has gravity calibrated for playable physics, and so we shouldn't be surprised when the universe has constraints calibrated for galaxy formation, chemistry, and biological life. It's the point of the simulation. I put forward that's the second signature of the simulation. The first is the Fermi paradox that the cosmos is silent. The second is that the cosmos is precisely tuned to allow for the rise of conscious beings. But the strangest part isn't out at the edge of the universe. It's what happens when you try to zoom all the way in. We will get right back to the show in a second, but first I want to talk about the work nobody sees. Every business has it, a ton of it, hours buried in reconciling spreadsheets, chasing down reports, re-entering the same data across systems that don't talk to one another. Nobody puts it on the P&L, but it is costing you in time, in speed, and decisions that just come too late. The solution is NetSuite by Oracle. It's the number one AI cloud ERP trusted by over 43,000 businesses. It brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR, and CRM into one source of truth. No more stitching together data from five different places. Now, with NetSuite AI connector, use the AI of your choice to tap into your actual business data. Ask every question you've ever had. If your revenues are in the seven-figures or higher, get NetSuite's free business guide demystifying AI at netsuite.com/theory. We'll get back to the show in a moment, but first, let's talk about the thing your business just can't survive without. I go live three days a week at 7:00 a.m. And every morning you guys, you incredible people out there, show up. You're there, you're ready. And if my connection drops in the middle of that live stream, that moment is gone forever. You do not get a second take when it comes to live content. And I know a lot of you are in the same position, whether you're running live events, processing transactions, or managing a remote team. Your business depends on staying connected, not sometimes, every time. That's why I trust AT&T business. They're built for business owners who can't afford downtime. AT&T business is a reliable provider for small business owners. For small business month, we celebrate small businesses by helping them run better. This means reliable uptime, easy switching, smart communications. Impact Theory is powered by AT&T business, built to work. Get AT&T business at business.att.com. And now, let's get back to the show. Welcome to part three. Reality has a floor that we can't get beneath. Zoom in on something, a leaf, your fingertip, anything, doesn't matter. Zoom in further and you'd hit cells. Further and you'd hit molecules. Further still and you'd hit atoms. Keep going and you'd hit protons and neutrons. Go even further and you hit quarks. Just keep going and going. According to classical physics, the way Newton and basically every physicist before the 20th century thought about reality, you should be able to keep doing this forever. Space is supposed to be smooth, continuous, infinitely divisible. There's no smallest unit. You can always zoom in further, except you can't. In reality, you eventually hit bedrock. It's a length known as the Planck length. It's about 10 to the negative 35th of a meter. Below that scale, our equations stop working. Quantum mechanics and general relativity, our two best theories of how reality operates, gives answers that contradict each other. Space stops behaving like a smooth, continuous thing and starts behaving like something else entirely. Time has the same problem. There's something called the Planck time. It's about 10 to the negative 44th of a second. Below that, the concept of duration stops being meaningful. Now, ask yourself a simple question. Why does reality have this limit? A truly continuous universe wouldn't need one. You could just keep zooming in forever and find more structure all the way down. That's what classical physics expected. That's what we used to think we would find, but we didn't. We found something akin to the final block in Minecraft. There are physics interpretations that try to make sense of this. Some hypothesize that space-time is genuinely discrete at small scales, like it's actually made of tiny blocks. Others say the math just breaks down because we don't have a complete theory yet, and reality is still continuous underneath. We just don't know how to measure it. The honest answer is we just don't know which is true. But, here's what we do know. Information systems have minimum resolutions. Pixels have a minimum size. Frame rates have a minimum interval. Voxel worlds like Minecraft are made of discrete blocks. Even as the resolution goes up, if you zoom in enough, you still find discrete blocks. Digital simulations are necessarily granular. They have necessary limits because you can't store infinite detail in a finite system. You set a resolution. You render at that resolution. You can't zoom in past it because there's nothing there to render. A continuous universe, though, wouldn't need a smallest unit, but a computational one does. So, now we have our third signature of the simulation. The cosmos is silent, the cosmos is finely tuned, and the cosmos has a floor that looks suspiciously like the resolution limit of a system processing finite information. Each of these on its own is a curiosity. You put them together and it starts looking like we live inside something that at least behaves like a high-fidelity Minecraft. And if you think that's nuts, just wait because there is a force signature of the simulation. So, welcome to part four. The universe is made of math so the simulation can run. If math is just something that humans made up to approximate what they see in the language of numbers, then this section is going to be little more than interesting trivia. But if math is something humans are discovering, a computational structure that is already there, woven into reality itself, available for any sufficiently intelligent species to recognize and document, then this section is the strongest evidence in the whole video for my hypothesis. Because a universe made of math that turns inputs into outputs has another name. We call it a simulation. Let's speed run some highlights from the history of mathematical breakthroughs to see which is true. In the 1660s, Isaac Newton was sitting in his mother's farmhouse hiding from the bubonic plague working at a new kind of mathematics that could describe how things change over time. The motion of planets, the fall of an apple, the arc of a cannonball. He worked on it in private for years and barely told anyone. He called it the method of fluxions. Around the same time, a German named Gottfried Leibniz was working on related geometry problems in continental Europe. He'd never met Newton. He'd never even seen Newton's notes. He didn't even know Newton was working on something similar. Leibniz nonetheless described the exact same mathematics. Different notations and vocabulary, sure, but the underlying system was identical. Today, we call it calculus. And the fact that two men in two different countries working in isolation both discovered the same structure at roughly the same time is revelatory. If math were a human invention, we'd expect different people working in isolation to come up with different types of mathematics that vary as much as isolated languages. That's not [music] what happens. In the early 1800s, three different mathematicians independently discovered non-Euclidean geometry. None of them knew the others were working on it, and despite that, they all documented the same thing. The history of mathematics is full of these stories, and they all point to the same conclusion. In the 1850s, a German mathematician named Bernhard Riemann developed a strange new geometry. Not geometry like what you learned in high school, flat planes, parallel lines that never meet. Riemann was working on curved space, [music] surfaces that bend. He had no application in mind, it was just pure abstraction. He died in 1866, and his geometry just sat on a shelf. But 60 years later, Albert Einstein went looking for the math he needed to describe gravity. He had the physical insight gravity wasn't a force, it was a curvature in space-time caused by mass. But he didn't have the language to express it. He found Riemann's geometry just waiting for him. Exactly the mathematical language he needed to communicate gravity. Riemann didn't invent that geometry, Riemann discovered it. The geometry was already there because the universe was already running on it. Same sequence with imaginary numbers. In the 1500s, Italian mathematicians were trying to solve cubic equations, and they kept running into a problem. The math required them to take the square root of negative numbers, and there's no real number that, when multiplied by itself, gives you a negative number. So, they invented one. They named these numbers imaginary because they thought they weren't real. They were, in their minds, just a work-around, a bookkeeping trick. 300 years later, when physicists tried to write the equations of quantum mechanics, the theory that governs reality at the smallest scales, they couldn't do it without the imaginary numbers. The universe at its most fundamental level runs on math that mathematicians literally named imaginary because they thought it was made up. But it wasn't made up. Group theory is another example. In the 1960s, physicist Murray Gell-Mann was working on a branch of abstract algebra that had been developed in the 1830s for purely mathematical reasons. He noticed the symmetry in the equations and from that predicted that there had to be a particle that no one had ever seen that had very specific properties. He called it the Omega minus. In 1964, an experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory found it existed exactly where he said it would be, acting exactly the way he said the math said it would act. Same idea with the Higgs boson. The math required it to exist. They built the Large Hadron Collider, ran it for years, and in 2012 confirmed the particle was in fact real. When trying to explain how the physical world operates, you need a computational language, namely mathematics, because ultimately the simulation has to run. Inputs must become outputs. Said another way, mathematics is literally the source code of the universe that tells it how to operate. Math sitting on a page is just a description, a static set of relationships. That's not what the universe is doing. The universe is moving. Planets orbit, particles collide, time advances, cause produces effect. Something has to tell it how to operate. Whatever the universe is at its base layer, it's not just math sitting there. It's computational. That's the point. Equations get applied, rules are actually run, the game is played, the simulation is run. In 1960, a Nobel laureate named Eugene Wigner wrote a paper about all of this. He called it the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. His point was that there is no reason any of this should work. Math is something that humans do in their heads, right? It develops by its own internal logic, right? It has no obligation to describe physical reality, right? But it does. It describes it every single time with unreasonable accuracy. Wigner called it a miracle. A gift in his words that we neither understand nor deserve. But there's another way to see it. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus because calculus was there to be discovered. Imaginary numbers are there to discover because they are the computational track on which quantum mechanics runs. The entire universe runs on these tracks of math. They tell everything what to do and how to interact. >> [music] >> The reason math describes the universe is because math is the universe. Humans are merely a part of the universe that is capable of looking back at itself and seeing the computation that gives birth to all of this. The reason we keep discovering math instead of inventing it is that we're inside of a system that's made from math from the start. That's the force signature of the simulation. The cosmos is silent. The cosmos is finely tuned. The cosmos has a floor that looks a lot like a resolution limit. And the cosmos is built out of mathematical structures capable of turning inputs into outputs and thus making it possible to run the simulation. Four independent strange features of physics, all different branches, all pointing in the same direction. Either this is a simulation or a simulation is a perfect metaphor for whatever is actually happening. Now, to be clear, I'm not claiming I have a theory of everything. I'm not claiming I know what or who is running the simulation or if it's even a literal simulation at all or just the best metaphor for something far more complex. What I am saying is that the Fermi paradox says the galaxy should be teeming with civilizations. But it isn't. Fine-tuning shows us that the universe is tuned so precisely it's comical to think the universe just blinked into existence as it is without any other attempts. The Planck floor says reality has a resolution limit. And the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics shows that the world is computational. Four bizarre truths that demand an explanation. And lo and behold, metaphor or not, they can all be explained by a single framework. We're NPCs in a simulation. And for my next trick, I'll move on to the fact that we don't have free will in the next video. As you would expect, by the way, from a deterministic computational universe running on predetermined mathematics. And yes, as I'll show in the next video, I'm aware that many of the computations are quantum probabilities. But the probabilities are still describable using the language of mathematics. I look forward to all of your comments. I always consider my ideas temporary works in progress. The ideas and challenges you all put into my last video comments on this topic were incredibly insightful, and I appreciate all of you trying to help me sharpen my thinking. I hope you guys enjoy exploring these ideas as much as I do. And if you want to join me live while I explore topics just like this, be sure to hit the subscribe button and join me Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7:00 a.m. Pacific time when I go live. I'll see you there. Till next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. The odds that you're living in a simulation border on 100% meaning this, all of this is almost certainly not real. In October of 2022, the Nobel Prize