If you're prone to the odd existential crisis, you might want to skip this one. For those who weren't already convinced we were living in a simulation thanks to the likes of The Matrix, a new video apparently 'proves' that our entire lives are just some carefully-crafted simulation. Also, we apparently have Minecraft to thank for it.
Mojang's blocky builder has been everywhere recently, and not just because Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time. Jared Hess' A Minecraft Movie has been breaking records, defying critics, and going viral, as some cinemas are even banning people from attending.
But how does Minecraft prove that our lives are little more than some dystopian simulation pulled from an episode of Black Mirror? A new video from The Infographics Show explains the theory, pointing out how the universe lives in a state of chaos thanks to entropy and the second law of thermodynamics.
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Comparing the world to a toddler with a box of LEGO, the video suggests that the universe hates order and says this is why our hot drinks go cold, buildings deteriorate, and nothing stays tidy for long. The only way to combat this is to constantly pump energy into our lives to try and keep order.
Dr. Melvin Vopson has dropped the theory that instead of getting messier over time, data actually gets more ordered. When you boot up Minecraft, it's not a glitchy mess because you organize this world as the user. If you leave your Minecraft world, it doesn't decay like like an Animal Crossing island does.
While we might not think of the universe like that, it's true that it's continued to evolve and advance. Like how Mojang makes Minecraft better with new features and expansions through updates, the universe is expanding in a similar way. The video questions, like Mojang has a team of devs, who is the dev of our universe? Sending a shiver down our spines, it asks, "If we really are in the simulation, do we even have free will, or are we just NPCs with really good dialogue trees?"
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Returning to Vopson, there's also the question of what happens when a simulation runs out of storage and we get faced with a real-life blue screen of death.
These ideas are nothing new, and as far back as 1641, René Descartes was hypothesizing that we were living in a simulation. This has since been modernized to the idea we're living in some giant supercomputer, and in 2003, Nick Bostrom's simulation argument suggested that either civilizations never become advanced enough to create simulations because they wipe themselves out, they reach that level of tech but choose not to run simulations, or advanced civilizations do create them and we're currently living in one.
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Even Elon Musk has jumped in on this idea, pointing out how advanced video games have become in such a short space of time and the emergence of technologies like VR.
Vopson's theory would even explain why the laws of physics are so perfect here on Earth - it's all organized non-chaos.
Responding to the video, viewers were left with a headache. One person said: "Bro, it’s too early in the day to be putting me through an existential crisis. Quit it."
Another joked: "Dear devs, please simulate something cooler than reality."
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Someone else concluded: "It doesn't matter if the universe is real or a simulation, we still have to interact with the world we live in as if it is real."