Taking the red pill

Hey there, chief. Guess who's back again with another revelation that's going to change the way you look at the world...or shall I say "world." I have some interesting news that you might be interested to know: you are not real. Nobody is. This is all just a big computer simulation, just like "The Matrix." Seriously.
In case you were too lazy to click on the link in the first paragraph, let me summarize Dr. Nick Bostrom's fascinating scientific paper for you in three words: you are fake. You're just an artificial brain in an artificial world, a mess of circuits somewhere in some mega-supercomputer controlled by future humans, aliens, or machines that are going take over the world after Arnold Schwarzenegger fails to save John Connor. I am fake too, but the difference between you and me is that I make this look good. Everything you see is fake: your mom, the Tooth Fairy, pro wrestling, that stripper's boobs, the $5 Gucci shades you bought off that bum in D.C., you name it. Fake, fake, fake. To be fair though, it is not totally certain that we are living in a simulation. Here are the three possibilities:

1) We (humans) are about to bite the dust, probably at the hands of the Large Hadron Collider.

2) We are never going to run any simulations of past humans or weird hypothetical worlds, and neither will any aliens or machines in the entire universe or any other universe, ever.

3) Everything we know is a pack of LIES and we're really living in a simulation!

Let me explore these three possibilities, which are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, and examine what the chances of each are:
1) True, the LHC probably will destroy the world. However I feel like the good false vacuum scenario is a little more likely than the rest of them. So let's call it a 40% chance that the LHC destroys the world and also a 5% chance that something else does (probably something related to Al Gore, like global warming or Al eating so much food that there is none left for the rest of us and we all starve). 45% overall.
2) Um...no. Simulations of past worlds or fake worlds are going to be considered way too awesome to pass up by human, alien, or computer nerds of the future. Furthermore, any civilizations that run one simulation will almost definitely choose to run a metric shitload of them, so the vast majority of worlds out there will be simulated ones. So the chances are very high that we are in one. So let's call the chances of the possibility that nobody decides to run any simulations 5%.
3) This is all a simulation and you are not real. 50% chance.

Let me repeat what I just said in layman's terms: there is a 95% chance that we are either not real or we're all about to die. Yes. It's an indisputable fact. Stop crying and get over it, crybaby.

Could people in the future run such a simulation? Yes, obviously. If you don't believe that we will have the technology to do this kind of thing within 100 years from now, then please get back to your Amish community before Brother Jebediah finds out you're surfing the 'net instead of building that barn, Ezekiel.

Why would they run these simulations? Here are my top five reasons (there are many more):
5) To play fantasy fantasy baseball with the fantasy baseball teams of the simulated world.
4) To make a comedy show out of the stupidest things people have ever done (yes, it will include that time you got shroomed up and jumped in the tiger cage).
3) To check out naked chicks in the shower (obviously).
2) To compensate for the fact that they feel inadequate because of the fact that they're not real and just living in a stupid simulation by lording over some other simulation within a simulation.
1) To see if any of the simulated people can come up with any new and exciting additions to the buffalo phenomenon.

I'm really glad the creator of this simulation chose to make me a huge celebrity with millions of adoring fans. I mean, he could have just as easily made me some loser that writes a stupid blog that nobody reads. Whew - glad that didn't happen!

Bummed to find out that you're nothing more than some nerd from the future's Second Life character? Don't be! The good part about the world being fake is that you can do whatever you want with no REAL consequences! Of course certain things might get you thrown into a simulated jail where you'll be simulated cornholed in the simulated shower by a simulated 350 pound tattoo-covered Hell's Angel named Bubba. But at least it's not really happening, right?

So yeah...tough break there, Keanu. I feel for you, champ. The silver lining in all this though is that you still have this awesome simulated blog to read. All right!

Bummed about the LHC? Try some THC.

Now that we've covered the extremely fascinating buffalo phenomenon in some detail, I would now like to move on to a somewhat less important issue that I consider to be a slight bummer: there's a chance that this machine CERN is building in Europe is going to cause the entire planet to get sucked into a black hole, or something like that.

I'm talking of course about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The point of this thing is to determine what shit is made of by slamming together large hadrons, which are one of the main basic components of shit, at near light speed. (Clarification: by "shit" I mean stuff in general, not actual fecal matter, although fecal matter is indeed one of the countless types of shit out there.) Hadrons are sub-atomic particles, protons in this case. As for the "large" part, that beats me because something that's smaller than a hydrogen atom seems pretty damn un-large to me. Maybe the next time a girl expresses dissatisfaction with the dimensions of your junk, you can use the LHC to convince her that the item in question is in fact fairly large ("At least it's not subatomic!"). One of the big ticket items they're looking for is the "elusive" Higgs boson, a goofy-ass sounding particle that many scientists theorize gives mass to certain things, including EVERYTHING IN THE F***ING UNIVERSE. If it really is true that we're all nothing more than big walking piles of Higgs bosons, then getting sucked into a black hole may not be such a terrible fate after all. I could not imagine a more depressing revelation.

So when they fire this thing up and start testing, probably sometime between August and October 2008, one of six things is going to happen:

1) A micro black hole is created and it swallows the planet, killing us all.
2) A stable form of strange matter is created and converts the entire solar system into strange matter, killing all of us in the process.
3) A wormhole is created, which may serve as a portal for beings from the future to send something back through time, possibly to kill us all. The wormhole would be microscopic, so the thing they'd send back through it would probably be more like a self-replicating killer nanorobot and less like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

4) Something else crazy happens, killing us all.

5) Nothing happens, so they build a bigger atom-smasher, which kills us all.

6) We find out what shit is made of and unlock a few more of the great secrets of the universe. We live to fight another day.

So out of six possible outcomes, only one leads to an outcome that doesn't involve us all being killed. It doesn't meet Meatloaf's standards (which would be 4 out of 6 in this case), but apparently the scientists at CERN don't consider an 83.3(repeating)% chance of the planet being destroyed enough of a threat to stop them from firing this bad boy up for the off-chance that they might be lucky enough to see a couple of Higgs bosons, the Boson Red Sox, or Boson the clown. Furthermore, something you might find particularly disturbing is the fact that most experts out there believe that micro black holes WILL be created by this thing, but believe that they pose no threat to us because they'll instantly evaporate via Hawking radiation. This theory comes from this one time at band camp when Stephen Hawking left a cup full of black holes on the table and came back a couple of days later only to find that the black holes had vanished into thin air. That story should put your fears to rest - if the black holes evaporated last time then there is no reason to doubt that they will evaporate again.

So we could be on the brink of the end of humanity, which you have to admit would sort of suck. In fact, I would go so far as to rate its bummification potential somewhere between that of the Steelers failing to make the playoffs and DICKipedia refusing to recognize my brilliant contributions to the science of creating a sentence solely out of the word "buffalo." Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it either, so it seems the best thing to do is accept our fate and blaze up a fat blunt while we're waiting for the black hole or nano-Schwarzenegger from the future to put the ultimate smackdown on all of us.