Space exploration pioneer and tech wizard Elon Musk has dropped some serious philosophical knowledge on the world and its inner workings after Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky launched this week.
The latest PlayStation 4 and PC game — which lets players explore over 18-quintillion planets — was the subject of Musk’s latest tweet, taking inspiration from the game’s procedurally-generated universe.
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“Will try out @NoMansSky this weekend,” he tweets. “Maybe reality is just a series of nested simulations all the way down.”
Will try out @NoMansSky this weekend. Maybe reality is just a series of nested simulations all the way down … https://t.co/DCMr1TVOdL
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2016
He also dropped a Wikipedia link to the “Turtles all the way down” theory, which suggests that the world can be viewed as the back of a turtle, which itself is on a back of another turtle, ad infinitum.
Deep, bro.
Of course, a tweet that packed with ponder didn’t go unnoticed, and has since been liked over 6000 times and garnered over 2000 retweets. And a tweeter who happened to reply to Musk was Hello Games’ head Sean Murray himself.
.@elonmusk I’ll hook you up with a free code 😉
— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) August 9, 2016
It wasn’t the first time that No Man’s Sky was the subject of Musk’s attention though, as the SpaceX founder quizzed Murray before.
“Elon Musk questioned me about this. He asked, ‘What are the chances that we’re living in a simulation?’'” Murray said in an interview with The Atlantic.
“Even if it is a simulation, it’s a good simulation, so we shouldn’t question it. I’m working on my dream game, for instance. I’m more happy than I am sad. Whoever is running the simulation must be smarter than I am, and since they’ve created a nice one, then presumably they are benevolent and want good things for me.”
The game itself is currently available on PlayStation 4, and Gearburn’s stacking up the coverage if you’re indeed interested in colourful pixels.
But beyond that, do you really think we’re living inside a simulated and infinite series of nesting dolls or turtle shells? I guess we’ll never really know.