Do you live in a simulation?

So the theory is that perhaps in the future, there'll be enough computing power to create fully simulated realities. Our ancestors or anyone really, say they decide to run a realistic computer simulation on their ancestors. By that time the computing power would be...umm...very powerful and the virtual reality could have detail down to the particle or even an atom and AI can create virtual consciousness. So if they ran historical simulations be it for entertainment, research...what have you. Well, if that's that case, wouldn't there be more simulated beings then biological beings? And um would be more likely to be IN the simulation then not?

A simulation only has to be good enough to fool the beings in the simulation and it doesn't have to extend to include the whole universe, just enough that it feels real to the simulated beings (us). So yeah maybe we're all AI...and nothing is real in the physical, biological sense. That being said if we are in a simulation the whole god/afterlife thing can kind of make sense.

Since time traveling may not be feasible they could just use a simulated history and visit...(and then wipe our minds out so we don't know anything about that I guess?).

Yeah...kind of creepy. Maybe humans have already died out for that matter and we're just a simulation. Maybe you already lived and died a long time ago...the real, biological you...or maybe you never existed in the real sense.

So apparently either

(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;
(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);
(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

Mind blowing? I personally find the whole thing creepy. But it seems to be raise valid points....

On the other hand it does seem to be possibly a rehashing of "intelligent design" (creationism).

But I guess we'll never know...

Original paper (it actually isn't long for an academic-ish article)
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

There's also this creepy paper that basically says that when we get to the point where we have the power to run our own historical simulators (apparently around 2050) they will....well, just turn our simulation off....
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=929327 (click download to get the paper)

Many articles
http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality

A portion of a BBC program - it was actually about time travel but this is the ending part.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0zB6dZf07s

For fun...what if the Matrix ran on windows? Ha ha.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX8yrOAjfKM