There is the chance we Already are in there.
Brain moves at light speed so It makes way more sense to upload into a simulation and essentially live forever as a lifetime might be 1 real world second vs try and fly to another planet.
The odds are we create the matrix in here well before we truly live on another planet. We have VR, heads up displays, wearable haptics, neurallink vs Elon not able to land on the moon yet.
Haha! It’s an interesting idea, and arguably one of the more realistic ways interstellar expansion could ever happen. Instead of moving physical bodies across vast distances, future civilizations might transmit minds as information. Consciousness could exist in a digital substrate, be sent at the speed of light, and instantiated into robotic or biological bodies prepared at the destination. Redundancy and backups would be trivial, much like cloud data today.
The major constraint, however, is infrastructure. You can’t transmit a mind into empty space — you first need receivers, energy sources, and bodies waiting on the other end. If relay stations or destination systems are spaced 100 light‑years apart, each expansion step still takes at least 100 years. Scaling that process across the roughly 100,000‑light‑year diameter of the Milky Way would take hundreds of thousands to millions of years if limited to light speed. Even with Star Trek–style warp travel, you’re still talking about expansion times measured in thousands of years.
That’s why wormholes, as depicted in Interstellar, are fundamentally different. They aren’t just faster travel; they’re shortcuts through spacetime itself. By connecting distant regions directly, they bypass both propulsion limits and light‑speed constraints entirely. If traversable wormholes were possible, they would dominate every other method of travel or communication.
Given these constraints, it’s plausible that advanced civilizations will explore simulated universes long before they meaningfully explore the physical galaxy. A simulation wouldn’t need to model reality in full microscopic detail everywhere at all times. It would only need to generate a consistent, convincing world from the observer’s point of view — rendering detail on demand, much like foveated rendering or level‑of‑detail systems already do.
I’ve worked in 3D modeling and rendering for decades, and even today we’re nowhere near reproducing the full fidelity of real life. In the real world, every grain of sand responds to gravity, organisms exist at every scale, and deeper inspection always reveals more structure. Real‑time graphics engines are still orders of magnitude away from reproducing that level of detail and physical richness universally. It’s been over 30 years since Wolfenstein 3D, and despite massive progress, we’re still far from true physical realism.
That said, full physical realism may not be necessary. A convincing subjective experience is a much lower bar than a perfect simulation of objective reality. We likely won’t see anything indistinguishable from base reality in our lifetimes — but long before that, we may see virtual worlds that are convincing enough for minds to inhabit, explore, and perhaps even prefer over the slow and hostile physical universe.
