Why It Is Taken Seriously

This is not just a thought experiment. Our own technology trajectory makes it plausible. Video games went from Pong to photorealistic open worlds in fifty years. Neural interfaces are advancing rapidly. If this trend continues for another century or two, creating convincing simulated experiences becomes engineering, not fantasy.

Physicists point to structural features of our universe that resemble computational properties. The Planck length and Planck time mark the scale at which our current physical theories are expected to break down -- sometimes loosely compared to a screen's pixel resolution -- though whether space and time are actually quantized at that scale remains an open question rather than established fact.