I hope we are living in a simulation.

It is my belief that humans are going to destroy themselves, likely within the next few generations. This may be through environmental disaster, war, a biological pandemic, like we’re seeing right now with Coronavirus x1000, or something totally different. That means that we as individuals, currently, will only be able to leave a legacy on a relatively short term basis. Once we’re gone, the deer, cats, and especially Carole Baskin’s tigers (if they make it) will likely be better off without us, especially after some years of adaptation, and won’t know or care what happened to us. So unless aliens land on earth within a few thousand years of our extinction, basically anything we do today serves no purpose to the universe beyond the extinction.

This kind of bums me out, to be honest. I want to feel like what what we are doing has a purpose. I want it to be talked about and studied and used as a starting point for future generations thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands, of years from now, much like how we look at Ancient Egyptians today. I feel like we are in the middle of one of the most drastic moments in human evolution with the advent of the Internet and technological advances in general, and I want future beings to be able to use our successes and mistakes as learning tools to better understand us and how they got to where they are.

So the only way for that dream to become a reality in a world where I think we are destined to destroy ourselves, is that this world we are going to destroy is simply a simulation of a world, being used by a future or alien civilization to prove or disprove some sort of hypothesis. At least that way, our lives and impending destruction of our lives will serve some sort of purpose. Whether that purpose is to save all of human civilization or to help a future eighth grade alien write a paper on why humans are stupid, I don’t really care. Because at least we are serving a purpose as a society, instead of just destroying ourselves and everything that was here before us.

I find the idea that we are in base reality much less rewarding than the idea that we are in a simulation because, even if we don’t destroy ourselves and the rest of the world, I don’t know what our purpose is, other than to simply exist. Even the idea of an afterlife confuses me because what is the purpose of that? BUT, and this is a big but, we will likely never know if we are in a simulation or not, so we have to just live as though we aren’t and try to not destroy ourselves and the planet, especially, so that we can serve a purpose to future societies.