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  But consider the significance of these speculations. They suggest that, if the Big Bang did happen, the cosmos as a whole must be a very strange, unfamiliar place – both vastly larger than our universe and profoundly different in character from it as well. By contrast, if the Big Bang never happened, as the steady-state theory envisioned, then the universe as we see it is pretty much the way the entire cosmos actually is, everywhere and always.

  Seen from this perspective, the steady state is revealed to have been a deeply conservative theory. It accepted a small bit of weirdness (continuous creation occurring within our universe) in order to achieve the pay-off of a greater overall normalcy, preserving our universe as the entirety of the cosmos. The Big Bang, on the other hand, rejected the weirdness of continuous creation, but as a result its proponents ended up exporting creation outside of our universe. They reimagined our universe as a tiny part of a far greater whole – a kind of bubble universe, floating in an infinite alien landscape, surrounded by other bubble-verses.

  This is the irony of the steady-state model. With its notion of matter promiscuously popping into existence everywhere, it’s come to be considered an unorthodox, weird theory, but its model of the cosmos is arguably far less radical than the ones dreamed up by proponents of the current Big Bang theory. So, which is really the weirder theory? Perhaps the reality is that there is no non-weird way of addressing the question of creation. All efforts to solve this mystery lead to some very odd implications.

  Weird became true: radio astronomy

  During the second half of the twentieth century, radio telescopes revolutionized astronomy by opening an entirely new window onto the universe. They allowed researchers to discover objects in the cosmos, the existence of which had never previously been suspected, such as highly energetic galaxies called quasars and fast-spinning neutron stars called pulsars. So, surely astronomers greeted the introduction of radio astronomy with open arms? Not quite. In fact, the initial reaction was more along the lines of a collective shrug of their shoulders.

  The first hint that such a thing was possible didn’t come from the astronomical community at all. It came from Bell Telephone Laboratories, the research division of AT&T, which in the early 1930s had become interested in the possibility of using radio for transatlantic phone calls. During test calls, however, the connection kept getting interrupted by static coming from an unknown origin. The company assigned a young engineer, twenty-six-year-old Karl Jansky, to track down the source of the interference.

  To do this, Jansky built a hundred-foot rotating radio antenna in a field on an abandoned potato farm near the headquarters of Bell Labs, in Holmdel, New Jersey. His colleagues nicknamed the device ‘Jansky’s merry-go-round’. After two years of investigation, he determined that local and distant thunderstorms were one cause of interference, but there was another source he just couldn’t identify. It was a static-filled radio signal that peaked in intensity approximately every twenty-four hours.

  By rotating his antenna, Jansky could pinpoint where the signal was coming from, and, to his surprise, this initially indicated it was coming from the sun. That alone was significant, because no one before had considered the possibility of radio waves coming from space, but as Jansky continued to track the signal, he realized it wasn’t actually coming from the sun. Over the course of a year, the signal slowly travelled across the sky: it began in alignment with the sun; after six months, it was on the opposite side of the sky; and at the end of the year it had returned to solar alignment.

  Jansky had no background in astronomy, but he knew enough to realize that this curious movement meant that the signal occupied a fixed position in the sky. It was the annual passage of the Earth around the sun that was making it appear as if the signal was moving. This, in turn, meant that the signal had to be coming from a source outside the solar system, such as a star, because no object inside the solar system maintains a fixed celestial position. After consulting star maps, he figured out that the signal seemed to be coming from the centre of the Milky Way, the galaxy that contains our solar system.

  Jansky’s discovery generated excited headlines in the press, as reporters were eager to know if he had picked up a broadcast from an alien civilization. He assured them it appeared to be caused by a natural phenomenon, because the signal was absolutely continuous and pure static. It sounded ‘like bacon frying in a pan’. Nevertheless, the press found a way to sensationalize the news, further speculating that the radio beam might be a source of unlimited electrical power streaming from the centre of the galaxy. (No such luck, unfortunately.)

  Professional astronomers, on the other hand, seemed unmoved by Jansky’s find. They treated it as little more than a random curiosity. The problem was that your typical astronomer in the 1930s knew almost nothing about radio engineering. They peered through optical telescopes. They didn’t tinker around with radios. Jansky’s anomalous find lay outside their area of expertise. Plus, the conventional wisdom was that stars produced light and nothing else. Some suggested that the true source of the signal might be stellar radiation striking the Earth’s atmosphere, but most simply filed his report away and ignored it.

  And that was the anticlimactic birth of radio astronomy. Jansky tried to convince Bell Labs to fund more research into the mysterious ‘star noise’ he had found, but the company saw no profit potential in that. Jansky’s boss told him to move on to other projects, which he did.

  Luckily for astronomy, while the professionals may not have been particularly excited about Jansky’s discovery, there was one young man who was. This was twenty-one-year-old Grote Reber, an amateur radio enthusiast with a degree in electrical engineering, who lived in the Chicago area. Like Jansky, he had no background in astronomy, but he thought the star noise was the most amazing thing he had ever heard of and he decided to get to the bottom of the mystery.

  At first, Reber tried to satisfy his curiosity by contacting the experts. He wrote to Jansky, seeking a job as his assistant, but Jansky informed him that Bell Labs had cut funding for the project. Then Reber checked to see if any astronomers were working on the problem. Harvard Observatory politely responded that Jansky’s find was interesting, but they had more pressing research priorities to pursue. Gerard Kuiper, professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago, was more dismissive. He assured Reber that Jansky’s discoveries were ‘at best a mistake, and at worst a hoax.’

  However, Reber had a contrarian streak that would stay with him his entire life. One of his biographers later wrote, ‘Reber paid no attention to establishment science, except to express his disdain.’ If the experts weren’t going to pursue the puzzle of the ‘star noise’, Reber decided he would do it on his own.

  In 1937, he began building the world’s first radio telescope in an empty lot next to his mother’s house, in Wheaton, Illinois, where he was living. Unlike Jansky’s antenna, this was a proper radio telescope, featuring a 32-foot parabolic dish to focus the radio waves. The telescope rested on a large scaffold structure, which his mother proceeded to use to hang out her laundry, and the neighbourhood kids played on as a jungle gym.

  Reber completed the telescope in 1938, and then set about producing the first ever map of the radio sky. He had to do this late at night, in part because he was working a day job at an electronics company in Chicago, but also because there were fewer cars on the road then; the static produced by their engines interfered with his sensitive receiver.

  The following year, he sent details of his work to astronomical journals, but, like Jansky before him, he encountered a lack of interest, if not outright scepticism. He was, after all, mostly self-taught and lacked any academic affiliation. Editors at the journals weren’t sure if he was for real or a random nutcase. Eventually, the editor of the Astrophysical Journal decided that he should give this young man a closer look, in case there was something to his claims. So he sent a team of astronomers out to Wheaton to examine the radio telescope.

  They walked around the device i
n astonishment, poked and prodded it a bit, and finally reported back that it ‘looked genuine’. The journal published a short piece by Reber in 1940 – the first publication about radio astronomy to appear in an astronomical journal. In this way, thanks to Reber’s persistence, astronomers finally became aware of how radio waves could help them in their exploration of the universe.

  Even so, it wasn’t until after World War II that radio astronomy became fully established as a discipline, aided significantly by military interest in the development of radar technology. Old attitudes of indifference, however, continued to linger among astronomers for a number of years. According to one story, during an academic conference in the early 1950s, a highly regarded astrophysicist introduced the presentation of a young radio astronomer with the remark, ‘Well, next one is a paper on radio astronomy, whatever that may be.’

  Nowadays, of course, no astronomer would make a comment like that, as radio telescopes have become one of the most important tools at their disposal. The largest array of them ever, the Square Kilometre Array, is set to be built in Australia and South Africa and will come online in 2024. Budgeted at an initial cost of over $700 million, it’s anticipated that it will be able to conduct the most accurate tests to date of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, make fundamental discoveries about the nature of the cosmos and possibly even detect the presence of extraterrestrial life, if any is out there.

  What if our universe is actually a computer simulation?

  Scientists spend countless hours trying to understand how nature really works, but what if all their research is just wasted effort because everything in the universe is no more than a grand illusion? What if we’re not actually flesh-and-blood creatures living on planet Earth, but instead we’re bits of electronic data shuttling around inside a processor on a silicon chip? What if our consciousness and everything we sense and experience has been generated inside a computer that may be sitting on someone’s desk in the ‘real’ world?

  In 2003, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published an article in which he made the case that this unsettling notion isn’t just pie-in-the-sky speculation. He insisted that there are logical reasons to believe it may be true. All of us, and the entire observable universe, may be computer simulations.

  The idea that the world around us is a mere fabrication has been rattling around in philosophical circles for a long time. You can find references to it in ancient writings. Plato wrote that we’re all like prisoners in a cave, staring at shadows on the wall and believing those shadows to be the real world, ignorant of the richer reality outside. Similar sentiments appeared in the earliest texts of Hinduism and Buddhism. But throughout this lengthy tradition of suspecting that our senses may be deceiving us, exactly how this deception occurs has always remained hazy. Perhaps a divine being had designed the world to be that way.

  The invention of the computer in the twentieth century added a new twist to these doubts, because suddenly it became possible to imagine a physical means by which a fake reality could be created. The rapid advancement of technology made it seem increasingly plausible that researchers would one day be able to build an artificial, non-biological intelligence that possessed a consciousness equivalent to that of a human. Essentially, a brain living on a silicon chip. And if they could create such a being, then presumably they would also be able to control its sensory input. They could fashion a virtual computer-generated environment inside of which it would live. The consciousness would inhabit a simulated world, but it would have no way of knowing this.

  This possibility posed a paradox: if it’s technologically feasible for a conscious being to live in a simulated world without being aware of it, how can we know that this isn’t our own situation? How can we be sure we’re not one of those artificial brains inside a computer processor?

  A few researchers have tried to answer this puzzle by figuring out ways of detecting the difference, presuming that we can science our way out of this paradox. They believe a simulated universe would inevitably contain telltale flaws if examined closely enough. It might appear blurry on the smallest scales, in the same way that digital images become pixelated if you zoom in too far. Or perhaps it would contain incriminating glitches and bugs in the programming that would give away the deception.

  But is this line of thinking really foolproof? For a start, these researchers have assumed we know what a real world should look like. If we’ve actually been living inside a simulation for our entire lives, we wouldn’t know this. We’d have no ‘real’ standard to judge our fake world against.

  Their argument also assumes it’s possible to outsmart the programmers of the simulation. But surely they would hold all the cards in this game, possessing many ways of hiding the truth from us, if they wanted to. If we ever did stumble upon indisputable evidence of fakery, they could simply rewind the program and edit out our discovery. Not to mention, there’s no way to know if we’ve even been given free will to examine our world. For all we know, we might be performing scripted actions, naively believing that the decisions we make are our own. Are you sure you really wanted that second cup of coffee this morning, or were you just following commands?

  In other words, the simulation paradox seems to be inescapable. If it’s possible for an artificial intelligence to exist inside a computer-generated environment, then we can never escape the lingering uncertainty that our world might be a simulation.

  Here’s where Bostrom’s argument enters the picture. He took it for granted that there was indeed no scientific method of determining the reality of our universe. Instead, he decided we could use probability analysis to figure out which scenario was more likely: whether we’re living in a simulation or in the real world.

  The bad news, he believed, was that, if we view the problem like this, treating it as a matter of statistics and odds, then we’re naturally led to the conclusion that there’s a decent chance we’re in a simulation.

  His reasoning was that, if you were to conduct a census of all the sentient beings that have ever existed or will ever exist in the history of the universe, then it’s plausible you’d discover that the vast majority of them are sim-beings, possibly by a factor of ninety-nine to one or even greater. So it makes sense to conclude that we’re most likely among the larger group: the sims.

  The reason simulated intelligences probably vastly outnumber non-simulated ones is because there’s only one real world, but there can potentially be many artificial ones. An advanced civilization with enormous amounts of computing power at its disposal could conceivably create thousands or even millions of fake ‘worlds’ filled with sim-beings.

  In fact, we’re already busy building ever more elaborate virtual worlds with existing technology. Computer games that involve simulated environments, such as World of Warcraft, Second Life and SimCity are hugely popular.

  As technology continues to advance, it seems safe to assume that such games will continue to grow more sophisticated, becoming increasingly lifelike, until finally our descendants might populate them with full-fledged artificial intelligences. Bostrom believed that advanced civilizations might create artificial worlds not only for entertainment, but also for scientific research, as a way to study their ancestors and their own evolution.

  Add to this the possibility of simulations being created within simulations, leading to even more artificial beings, and there might exist countless layers, nested within each other like Russian dolls, multiplying the number of simulations exponentially. But there will always remain just one real world, so the sim-beings would have a distinct numerical advantage over flesh-and-blood creatures.

  So, surely that’s it. We really are living in a computer simulation. But Bostrom cautioned that this line of argument has its limits. It rests on the assumption that advanced civilizations will both be able to develop simulations and will actually want to. After all, it’s possible to imagine future scenarios in which simulations never get built. For all we know, advanced civilizations might de
stroy themselves or be wiped out before being able to reach the stage of development at which they could build truly convincing artificial worlds. Or perhaps we’re underestimating the technological challenge and it may be impossible, anyway. Or they may be deemed totally unethical and banned as illegal.

  All these possibilities are plausible, and they lower the probability that sim-beings outnumber real ones. Bostrom figures that, when all these different factors are considered, there’s about a 20 per cent chance we’re living in a simulation. That number is a lot better than a 99 per cent probability, though it still seems uncomfortably high!

  For the sake of argument, though, let’s consider the scenario in which we really are living in a simulation, because it offers some truly bizarre implications. For instance, we would have no way of knowing when the simulation began. Perhaps the Big Bang represented the moment when the program was initially turned on, or perhaps it all began with sim-cavemen 50,000 years ago and the programmers have been tracking the progress of humanity ever since, as some kind of experiment in evolution. It may have only begun yesterday, or an hour ago. All our memories of earlier times would be false, implanted into our minds. We could even be living in a perpetual five-minute loop of time, like a repeating history reel on display in a museum.

  It’s also possible that you’re the only real person in the simulation. Everyone else could be a shadow being, lacking true consciousness. However, Bostrom notes that if we’re weighing probabilities here, there would need to be a whole lot of single-person sim-worlds created before it became statistically more likely that you were in one of them rather than in the real world. So you shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that your neighbours are artificial beings just yet.

  Then there’s the fun part: in a simulated world, all the rules of physics can be thrown out the window. Anything becomes possible: magic, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, superpowers, miracles. You name it. In fact, if we’re in a simulation, then the programmers who created us are, to all intents and purposes, ‘God’. Their powers are unlimited. They can raise us from the dead or grant us eternal life. Bostrom notes that the afterlife becomes a serious possibility.