The Twilight Zone

The CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, Elon Musk, believes that it is highly likely that we all are but bit players in a simulated virtual-reality game that exist inside some gigantic computer of some far advanced civilization ... see: Vox Article and Video ... for his discussion of this and other either prescience or loopy Ideas ,,, I haven't decided which yet. Watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions. Clearly this idea of our being part of a computer game is Twilight Zone stuff and, if Musk hadn't created a beautifully engineered electric car and sent rockets into orbit and back, he would have been laughed off the stage. But he has and so he wasn't.

His most interesting thought has to do with extrapolating the pace of our current computer technology out a few thousand years and concluding that we easily could develop this form of cyber god ... and he worries that the controlling levers of this cognitive almighty could easily be so concentrated as to threaten civilization. (According to my speculations in The Cultural Entropy of the Liberal Mind, this form of centralization phobia suggests that Musk might be a conservative and not yet know it.)

Now comes the paradox ... if we all are but bit players in some futuristic computer game, then the controlling force or forces of this game must be benign ... otherwise we wouldn't be allowed to continue our current passion play. In a very real sense Musk's notions parallel many constructs of a Christian God ... an abstract and all-knowing controller who lives in a reality one dimension above ours ... and whose motivations and existence can only be imagined. So science and religion come full circle.

Enter Rod Serling ...