If you don’t exercise while in space, you literally start to lose some of your bones. They just waste away. That’s bad news for your skeletal system, kids. We need bones.
Space is scary and weird, isn’t it? The void beyond is designed to kill anything that enters it, except for tardigrades – micro-animals that can basically turn themselves off for a bit by entering a state called cryptobiosis. The vastness of space is also a bit of a barrier since travelling a worthwhile distance would take generations of breeding in transit to ensure a living human reaches their destination. If you enter a black hole, you literally get despawned.
Related: Dead Space 4 Reportedly In Development And Inspired By Resident Evil
That terrifying nothing reminds me of the edges of a video game map. What might seem like passable terrain stretches on for ages and eventually falls into emptiness. The only thing space is missing is a message that tells you that you’re leaving the mission area, please turn back.
I don’t believe in God. Personally, I think we’re some sort of cosmic accident. If I’m wrong and there is some omnipotent force behind all of this chaos, I don’t ever want to meet the being responsible for the worst episode of EastEnders ever. It’s more likely that our reality isn’t how we perceive it at all. We’re simply cursed with forbidden knowledge and existential dread.
Just like how our entire perspective changed when we realised we lived on a sphere, I think there’s some other reality-shattering truth behind all of this – maybe we’re a microorganism living inside some other living creature, like a flea on a cat’s back. Or maybe Elon Musk was right for once in his life and this is all a simulation. It would certainly explain that impassable barrier beyond the open world that is Earth. I guess billionaires got premium accounts for this cursed MMO.
When scientists talk about the chances we live in a simulation, the statistic 50/50 pops up. That sounds impressive – it’s a coin flip – but that’s just basically saying “we are or we aren’t living in a simulation”, which is about as useful as a Tory health minister talking about face masks. It’s interesting to think about though. I mean, look at dreams and hallucinations – our brains are certainly capable of conjuring up a believable reality from nothing.
Then there’s quantum physics, which is basically our very own version of frustum culling – a video game memory-saving technique that stops the engine from rendering objects that aren’t in view of the player. In the double-slit experiment, electrons are fired at a photosensitive screen through slits in a copper plate. Usually, this results in an interference pattern that suggests wavelike behaviour. But if the experiment is being observed, the electrons suddenly behave like particles, producing no interference pattern. It changes when it’s in view of the player.
If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? I guess it depends if the animals are AI or not. The Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is another classic, but I know for a fact that a cat can exist in two states simultaneously – I’ve seen my cat eat food in its sleep loads of times. Checkmate, Schrödinger.
I promise I haven’t woken up and taken a huge hit off a bong this morning, but what about UFOs? They’re confirmed to be a thing. Fighter pilots have chased them and they mostly just look like Tic Tacs. What if that’s just someone playing in spectator mode? I doubt it’s aliens because if they had figured out how to travel faster than the speed of light, it would really wreck the frame rate.
Video game creators are still a long way off creating a truly believable world. The full spectrum of human emotions and behaviours isn’t possible to replicate just yet, but developers are getting better at creating convincing illusions. And in such a short time, too. I was alive when the first open-world game was made, and the advancements since then are nothing short of mindblowing. Still, it’s not quite as much of a headfuck as the biggest question: if this is all a fabrication, who made it? (I’m just messing, it’s probably Rockstar Games).
Next: Biology Teacher Publishes A Paper Claiming Red Dead Redemption 2 Teaches Players Natural History
