Life's Biggest Mysteries

Consciousness, it's our awareness, our understanding, our ignorance, our daily. Consciousness leaves out more than it takes in, and due to this, it leaves out important things; things that would help relieve us if we knew them. If we had a higher awareness, a better Consciousness, we would feel better; we would be more at peace with things. The deep-down truth of things is screened by our Consciousness. Our sensory organs will pick things out; our eyes can only see certain things, our ears can only hear certain things. We have to create instruments and other tools to see things we, as humans, cannot to expand our understanding and thus our ego or Consciousness.

Humans evolved and became the dominant species on Earth by a long shot. It's due to our innate ability to network with each other. If humanity was wiped out and restarted, like loading an old save file, communities would still form. Structures within society are inevitable due to the variety of brains; some are good at critical thinking and are more artistic. However, we are all wired with some innate features. Just as humans form societies that evolve, other creatures do as well, but we're different. We are customizable characters, basically. We can kind of mold ourselves into whatever kind of person we want to be.

We can't know for certain that animals or any other life on Earth is conscious or can even function in the same way that we do. Let's put it this way: I know that I have my own thoughts and feelings and emotions, but how can I know for certain that you or anyone else does? There's no way I can go to your head and see things 100% from your perspective. I can't know what you're thinking or if you can even think in the first place.

To truly understand the universe, to understand and actually experience life, you have to give yourself up. There's no point in sustaining bliss and being permanently at an all-time high. The life you're living is what you have put yourself into, what ego you've formed. Only you don't want to admit it; you want to believe it happened to you. Day-to-day, you play non-bliss in order to be able to experience bliss. You put yourself into bad situations; you let in the negative experiences in life just to feel some kind of satisfaction when it goes the other way.

Self implies other; white implies black; death implies life. You can feel your existence as fundamental, not as an accident. At the basic level, at the lowest level imaginable, you are the fundamentals of existence. The same thing that makes you is the same thing that makes up everything else. If you can step back from what you believe, if you can step back from what your sensory organs have turned you into, you start to see things for what they actually are. Do you define yourself as a victim of the world or as the world?

Love is only possible due to the lack of self. You give up all your secrets; the walls you've built to keep people at arm's distance slowly lower one by one until you're a completely open book. Until all your pages have been read and the rest of the pages are blank, waiting to be filled with this newfound love. In basketball or soccer or football, you're constantly giving the ball to someone else. The point of the game is to have the ball in your hand for the least amount of time—to constantly be passing it to someone else, to shoot it, to get it out of your hands. It keeps the game going, and life is the same way.

If you define yourself as only being what your ego is, as the things you do voluntarily, then you're the victim. It's because of some higher power that you were put here when you didn't ask for it. But what about the things you do involuntarily? Do you beat your heart, or does it just happen to you? You do those things even though you don't know how. Words don't work here. As Alan Watts said, everyone is fundamentally the alternate reality—not God in a traditional sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is, and you're all that, only you're pretending you're not.

A mind that can ask: "Who am I? Why am I here? What is the purpose of all of this?" tends to forget. As I said, your Consciousness tends to leave out critical information at times. A Consciousness that can view the world and take in sensory information tends to forget what's behind those eyes—a mind that hasn't gone deep enough to find where those questions come from. Because the same place those questions come from is the same place those answers lie.

The brain controls everything. In order to go to the extremes of the universe, to places we can only dream of going, we must first dive deep into something that is all inside of us. Take the Big Bang, for example. Now there's hundreds, thousands of theories as to how we came into existence, but let's go with this one: you believe that you are strictly you. Your human body is all that you are and all that you have ever been. You're simply a small speck of dust in a vast sea of galaxies, stars, planets. You're irrelevant.

But rolling back the clock, things get smaller. The universe was more compact. The atoms that make you up are building blocks of the universe, of the hot gas clouds that formed stars, that allowed solar systems to form, that allowed planets like Earth to form. If you keep rolling back this clock, you were around at the very instant everything came into existence. That is you too. When everything was infinitely small, you were there. But we define ourselves as being only us, mere humans walking on a planet that we didn't ask to get put on. But frankly, every one of us somehow made this happen; we just go on and pretend we didn't.

It's because of how we define ourselves. Are you the victim, or are you the world? As cringey as it may sound, everyone you meet is just a small packet of the universe, a present—whether they're a pleasant one or not—that was packaged together from billions of years of engineering and architecture on a universal scale. But instead, we define ourselves as something completely separate from it, something not connected whatsoever, which is a foolish view.

We tend to search for how the universe came into being, but we're just the universe trying to understand itself. In order to get to that conclusion, we have to reframe our mindset. We're not as different as we all think. Your name is given to you at birth; your ideas and personality are collected from the world, scraps, bits, and pieces here and there cling to you like a magnet. So what part of you is you?

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Back to our story. We are all different manifestations of Consciousness, but we are all fundamentally the same thing. We all may have different egos, different personalities, but when you step back, drop the ego, we are all connected. View the universe as a forest. Every one of us is a twig, a leaf, a branch. But together we form life.

Our origin, our roots are connected together, just as the roots of trees form a vast network which brings these massive forests to life. Humanity's roots all come from the same place. Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transferred from one form of energy to another. But many of us have this fear that it's all going to come to an end. And while yes, your life will end, your energy will not; it will continue onward forever.

But our Consciousness has convinced us otherwise. We form this thought process almost like we've been hypnotized to think that we are all there is, and all there ever will be, and that it's all going to come to an end. This leaves us unsatisfied and unhappy, but the universe is continuous, and you are technically the universe, so you will continue on as well. Your death is not the end of you; it's the death of your ego.

Many people experience the same exact thing while living ego death. It tends to be induced through psychedelic drugs: LSD, shrooms, the list goes on. While working on this video, I actually experienced it myself. And although not intentional, it provided clarity in a way I've never before experienced. It's not the ego in the vernacular sense as describing a person's self-worth; it's the philosophical ego.

It's the complete loss of subjective self-identity. Everything that you believe you are will disappear. You're void of emotion, of connection to anything around you, of connection to what makes you you. The idea of being a person doesn't make any sense. The words "I," "me," and "myself" have zero meaning whatsoever. The world can normally be put into two categories: myself and not myself.

While experiencing ego death, this line is blurred. I am completely gone. There's only the awareness of existence. The lifetime accumulation of your thoughts and emotions is put on pause. It's as if you're on a cliff, approaching an infinite void beneath you. Your life is continuous and exists all the way up the mountain until you reach the edge. Beneath you, though, is the unknown.

Ego death is jumping into that void, leaving behind everything you've ever known. It's as if you've stepped out of your body into a separate entity. You start to see things for what they actually are. But things don't actually exist. "Things" is just a noun; it's a fragment of speech, and speech is just another instrument we've created to try and understand the world around us.

Our senses allow us to go about our daily lives and traverse the world, but they don't really offer any explanations, so we have to make them up ourselves. While experiencing ego death, you disconnect from all of that. You have a heightened awareness. It's truly as if you're experiencing a higher level of Consciousness that no person can understand. You reach this level that words can't explain.

The instruments we made to try and understand our place in the universe shatter completely. Explaining it in terms of "I saw" or "I felt" doesn't seem reasonable. Our languages are instruments created to explain things that someone experiences. But while undergoing ego death, there is no someone; there is no "me." So how do you describe it?

It's as if your slate was wiped clean, your character save file was corrupted. But you're still in the game. Because of this, ego death can be scary, but it can also be a very enlightening experience. It's both constricting and freeing; it's white and black. It's like you're defining what life is like through experiencing death.

We cannot be more sensitive and welcoming to the pleasure without being more sensitive and accepting to the pain. You're flying and sinking at the same time, being pulled from below and above in every direction at once. While going through it, I ended up reaching a moment of acceptance. Ego death, while often extremely anxiety-inducing, offers a glimpse into a reality free of that—a life free of your personal flaws, your daily thoughts, your responsibilities.

It personally feels as if time is frozen, and wherever your mind wanders is free to judge things as they truly are. You are the observer and the observable. Surprisingly, the conclusion I came to is the same conclusion I came to while making a previous video of mine, and it's that nothing in life really matters. Fear, in general, tends to come from us not being able to make peace with the chaos that is the universe, not being able to cope with the idea of entropy— that everything is tending towards disorder.

Forming an ego is disorderly in the same way you go further and further down your own tunnel and stray further from everyone else. Experiencing ego death is breaking out of that tunnel, pulling back and understanding that the network of these tunnels that encompass every human on Earth all eventually return back to the same place.

When I die, when my ego is completely gone forever, when my physical body breaks down and no longer resembles the "it's" in today, I'll still somehow be here. Right now, I'm an hourglass; the sand is slowly leaking its way to the bottom, and eventually, it'll all be there. It's the end of the line for me, but when that day comes, the universe will stop by, take the hourglass, flip it over, and whatever made me me will then become something entirely different.

We're all just a temporary collection of atoms, and whatever you and I subjectively believe we are won't last forever. But objectively, we will. For now, just enjoy the ride.

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Thanks for watching. Life is hard. I bought a new pair of shoes the other day, walked outside into the rain, and ended up stepping into some mud. Now they're ruined, and I'm bitter. But then I took a step back—not literally, of course—but I really thought about it, and I came to the conclusion that nothing in life really matters.

Here's why: the Earth has been around for 4 and 1/2 billion years. One day, humans became a thing, and we became conscious. This world seemed perfect for us. It wasn't scorching hot; it wasn't deathly cold. We fit right in the middle. The gravity on Earth was perfect. It allowed us to move and run and catch animals that conveniently existed for us humans to eat. There was water to drink; there was oxygen to breathe. It's as if we were put here for a reason.

We began creating things, we began working together as a species, building empires, covering the planet, and fighting each other for whatever reason. Fast forward a couple million years, and here we are today: computers, rockets, Elon Musk—they're all here. Somewhere along the line, we also, in a way, created something out of nothing. It's called time.

We've laid out definitions of time: seconds, minutes, hours, years. But it doesn't really matter. We made those for our own use. Time is nothing more than a way to measure the passing of events, but we've only really set up these units of time based off of ourselves. A day is how long it takes the Earth to spin around once; a month is about how long it takes the moon to orbit the Earth and also spin around once; a year is how long it takes the Earth to orbit the sun.

Once you get about 78 Earth revolutions around the sun in this journey called life, as poetic as that sounds, there's not much scale to these things. Once we pass a human lifetime, sure, we can judge how long a thousand or maybe even 10,000 years are, but after that, the time scales of things are just too much for our brains to handle. As much as you think you understand the 13.8 billion year lifespan of the universe, you really can't put that into an imaginable scale.

On the scale of a human life, the universe is unbelievably old, but in terms of the universe's lifespan, pretty much nothing has happened yet. It's barely even started. We can make predictions about the next hundreds of trillions of years of the universe's life; we can figure out how and when our sun is going to blow up. We can figure out when our galaxy is going to collide with another. We can come up with theories that describe why the universe we've been put into is expanding faster than anything else physically possible.

But yet, we have zero idea what happened in the fraction of a second between when there was nothing and when there was something. For some reason, as far as we can tell, we're the only conscious beings to have ever existed, but we don't even know what being conscious is. We developed Consciousness only to be aware of the fact that nothing else is.

We've grown so aware of our surroundings that the smarter we get, the smaller we become, as this thing we call time goes on. We begin to realize things, things that prove that the universe probably wasn't made just for us. You were most likely born in a hospital; if not, props to you for making it this far! Back then, you were your parents' entire world for a small time, which is cute, but you aren't everything.

360,000 people are born each day; of all of those people with the same birthday, some are going to do big things and change the world; others are just going to die. That just happens. But Earth is just one planet in our solar system. There's eight or nine of those for now. For life as we know it to exist, it's kind of hard to believe that there might be other life out there. It takes so much to happen for us to be able to exist.

We've discovered over 4,000 exoplanets to date—planets that don't revolve around our sun—and we found multiple examples of Earth-like planets, roughly the same shape, size, and temperature. But yet, there's nothing there from what we can tell. So if there are so many planets that could have life, why haven't we seen it yet? Why are there no signs?

Well, we're just one solar system in an entire galaxy; there's over 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone. But that's just one galaxy. We're part of the Local Group, which is a collection of 30 galaxies near our own. Andromeda is one of them; that's the one that's going to collide with our galaxy in about 4 and 1/2 billion years. By then, you'll be long gone, and soon after that, so will the Earth.

The sun, at this point, will be reaching the end of its life. It's going to expand in size, and by the end, it will completely consume the Earth, shining over 3,000 times brighter than it does today. But even though our home planet will be gone, the rest of the galaxy wouldn't even notice. Billions of years on a multi-trillion year timescale is truly nothing.

But even so, there are some things that we're observing in the universe's infancy today that will drastically influence the far future. To keep it short: the universe is expanding. This is nothing new; a lot of people know this. But what many people don't know is that this expansion is speeding up. Now, we don't know why, but we have an idea of what's causing it—dark energy.

I made an entire video about this, so go watch that after this. Dark energy is stretching the fabric of space-time. We don't know what it's made from; we know it's there; we observe its results, but we don't know exactly what it is or what it's going to do. Dark energy, at least according to our current calculations, will eventually stretch the space-time between galaxies faster than the speed of light. The light emitting from our neighboring galaxies will travel towards us at the fastest speed possible, but even this won't be enough.

The light will never reach us because the space between it is stretching faster than the light that is traveling through it. It will spread the universe so thin with galaxies that when we look out to observe what's around us, we won't see anything. We're going to end up all alone, confined to whatever galaxy we end up in. But in the end, even our galaxy will start to go dark. The fate of the sun is the same as it is for all stars in the universe. Eventually, trillions of years down the road, these lights in the sky are going to begin turning off one by one, without any new stars to keep things running.

The universe is going to get a bit colder. Depending on their size, these dying stars begin to turn into white dwarfs or neutron stars, providing the last glimmers of light in a cold and dark universe. This is the very last hope for any surviving life forms in the universe. But eventually, trillions of more years after the last stars, like our sun, die, even these white dwarfs will begin to dim out. Some of these neutron stars roaming throughout the universe may collide by chance, resulting in the brightest known events in the entire universe—supernova.

But once these supernovae conclude, the universe is again plunged into darkness. All matter that used to make up the galaxies we see today will begin to fall into the black holes that kept things held together for so long. The Big Bang that created the highest temperatures ever known to physics ultimately results in the most dormant, dark, and cold configuration possible. From a universe teeming with light and beauty to a cold, barren wasteland—a universe dominated by black holes.

But even now, the universe has just begun. These black holes are going to be around for a while, and the things we used to call galaxies, with stars and planets and life, are now just going to be full of black holes—black holes and more black holes. This is how the universe is going to spend most of its time: cold, dark, and alone.

We're no longer talking about millions of years here; the time scales are now on quadrillions of years. But even these black holes won't last forever. Through Hawking radiation, these black holes will slowly, very slowly, begin to evaporate away, one subatomic particle at a time, until eventually, after all the black holes fade out of existence, there is nothing left in the universe.

A universe where nothing changes, where time becomes pointless. There's nothing—the nothingness of space, though, will continue to expand because of dark energy—a force that accounts for 70% of our universe that we don't even completely understand yet. Matter, as we know it today—the things that make up everything you see—only accounts for barely 4% of the stuff in the universe.

So maybe, just maybe, or fluke—we were never supposed to make it to the end. But we still have a role to play out today. We are one species on one planet in one galaxy in an almost indistinguishable part of the universe. Whether or not we came to exist, not much would be different.

Every day, we matter a little less and a little less until eventually, we realize that in the grand scheme of things, we don't matter at all. Our galaxy could just disappear; it wouldn't really change much. We came to exist in such a weird time, but it's also pretty unique. We know we're just the beginning, a blip in the universe's potential. But the only way to fulfill that potential is to start making progress today.

It's not a stretch to say that there won't be others like us—random spurts of intelligent life spread throughout trillions of trillions of years. But now we're at one of those stages where life is possible and probably the easiest it's ever going to be. You get one life to do whatever you want. There are some things you can avoid, like school or taxes, but other than that, you're free to do mostly whatever you'd like.

If we can't figure out our purpose for coming to exist on this planet, if we can't figure out why or how the universe came into being, then our purpose is whatever we want it to be. If you want to sit around and play games all day, there are people doing that. If you want to build a multi-billion dollar company that's going to help propel humanity to other worlds, there are people doing that as well. Anything you want to be or do can be done and should be done.

Like I said, our own purpose is whatever we want, right now. If good things are happening to you, if bad things are happening to you, it's actually not going to last forever. You have zero idea what the future holds for you, and the most random of experiences can reroute your future in an instant. Everyone was built a hand in life that we honestly just didn't ask for. Some people's hands are better than others, but we all have to play with the cards we've been given in the best way we can.

There's a chance that we humans may never figure out why everything in the universe acts the way it does. Is there life anywhere else, or are we the exception? For every answer, a hundred new questions pop up. There's infinite possibilities as to how we came to exist, but there's infinitely just as many things to do while we're figuring that out. There's dogs to feed, there's people to meet, there's science to be done.

So whatever you do while we figure out our spot in the universe, this universe, at least, just try to enjoy it. Because no matter what happens to you, no matter how many times you mess up, no matter how far humanity ventures out into the unknown, in the end, it doesn't even matter.

This is green, this is red, and this is blue. But how can you tell what you're seeing? As blue is the exact same thing as what I see as blue. We've named the colors to give us a way to communicate and refer to them, but in reality, there's no way of knowing what you see is the same as what another person sees.

Even with the small steps and the giant leaps we've made as a species, there's still a lot to learn about Earth, life, and the human condition. There's still everything we don't know. On the 26th of February 2015, one picture of a dress divided the internet. You are seeing white and gold; where are you looking at? I—oh, just changed! White! No way! No, you're kidding!

While some saw it as gold and white, others solid as blue and black. Ever since then, there's been a number of repetitions of the same experiment, either using the same sense—in this case, sight—or even other senses, like hearing in the famous "Yanny or Laurel" debate. These experiments remind us that there's no way for us to tell that you and I sense the same things.

What I call red might just be what you call blue, and there might be someone out there who sees human beings with purple teeth but just refers to it as white. 71% of the entire Earth is covered by water. Humans are made up of about 60% water, potatoes 80%, watermelons 93%, and cucumbers 95%. It's very clear that water is essential for life on Earth, but we really don't know that much about water—not even about the very oceans we came from.

In fact, we've only explored 5 to 10% of the Earth's oceans. The rest, well—who knows what's down there? It's even scarier when you realize that fish like the blobfish and the barreleye fish belong to the slim percent of things that we've already discovered. The deeper you go, the crazier things seem to get.

What's at the bottom of the ocean? For the most part, we just don't know. But back on the surface, countries that are bordered by water use something called coastlines to mark their territory. The coast is the land along the sea, and the boundary between the coast and the sea is known as a coastline.

So how long is the U.S. coastline or any other coastline in the world? The answer is, well, again, we don't really know. Coastlines constantly curve and cut in and out. Even the smallest deviations from a straight line can add distance, and over time, these small distances add up. Some of these features are massive, like bays, while others are minuscule.

Now measuring each and every little crevice isn't really efficient, so surveyors cut corners and straighten rough edges into easily manageable lines. If you do a quick Google search of the measurement of any coastline, you'll find a lot of different answers. They all cut corners just differently.

Humanity, as a species, though, well, we've done really well for ourselves. When in a pinch, we invent something to push us through. We made clothes when the weather was harsh, shelter so we could be safe from wildlife to rest and recuperate, weapons to hunt for food, money to replace pure bartering. But what about fire? Was fire a discovery or an invention?

And music! Music has been described by scientists as a relatively recent invention by humans. It's believed that music helped our ancestors to bring together a close-knit community. But did humans really invent music, or did we just discover that certain sounds sound nice with other sounds? Birds sing, whales sing, even tree frogs have a nice, rich baritone.

Sometimes, so can we really say man invented music? If we did, then what is the true definition of music? I guess we'll never know. On the list of man's greatest inventions has to be tools. In fact, for a really long time, scientists were pretty sure that this is exactly what made us human. We were the only animals who, through the use of such a variety of tools, were able to expand and grow so quickly.

Except we aren't the only ones who use tools. A lot of animals, mainly primates, use tools for all kinds of reasons. A study by Jane Goodall on African chimpanzees would change the definition of man forever. In the research, it was discovered that these chimpanzees use tools to gather food, brush their teeth, and even more.

So would this mean we must now redefine "man" or redefine "tool"? They use tools for the exact same things we would do. Do we accept chimpanzees as human? Well, of course not. This begs the question: If using tools doesn't, then what makes us human?

In the same research, it was also discovered that chimps had individual personalities and were capable of rational thoughts, like emotions and sorrow. They gave pats on the back, hugs, kisses, and even just messed around with each other just for fun. They developed affectionate bonds with family members and with other members of the community, and some of these bonds lasted for over 50 years.

If emotions, rational thought, and affectionate actions do not, then what makes us human? In the past, it was thought that humans were the only animals who were self-aware. However, in the past 30 years, extensive research has proven that many other animals are too. In fact, in 2012, a group of neuroscientists created the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which states that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate Consciousness.

Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures also possess these neuro substrates. If Consciousness, sentience, wakefulness, and the ability to feel and experience do not, then what makes us human? We really just don't know. All we know is that one day we weren't; today we are, and one day we will be no more.

We don't know what happened before we existed, and neither do we know what will happen after we die. If a person dies and comes back to life, it's referred to as a near-death experience because we see death as a finality. But what if it isn't? What if one of the beliefs of humanity's many religions is true?

Even the Earth itself can be very weird, and sometimes you just see formations that make no sense. Like who built Stonehenge and why? The same goes for the pyramids. Some people think the gods of Egypt made the pyramids; others are convinced it was made by human effort. But in reality, we just don't know.

The human mind is everything. All of man's greatest inventions, theories, and discoveries have all come from a human mind. We first conceive of an idea in our mind before we can ever create it in the real world. But perhaps we don't yet know or understand exactly how powerful the mind can be. The placebo effect gives us a glimpse.

I made an entire video about the placebo effect, but basically, doctors appear to give a patient treatment, but in actuality, they don't. However, this fake treatment registers in the brain, perceives it as real, and kickstarts the healing process. Basically, the mind heals the body because it thinks the body is getting treatment, even if it isn't.

In research on social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience, it was discovered that self-affirmation helps to maintain a positive self-view and helps to restore your self-confidence and self-worth simply by telling yourself nice things. It is indeed possible for your mind to convince your brain and body that you are those things. And these are just the things we know.

The mind is capable of great things. Think about everything we don't know. There are a lot of things we know about animals: dogs are sweet and loving, cats can have an attitude, and the lion is apparently the king of the jungle, even if it lives in a savannah. Not everything makes sense, and we really don't know as much as we think we do.

Going to space is one of man's greatest achievements. However, what space exploration has clearly shown us is just how small we are in the grand scheme of things. There are at least 2,500 other solar systems that have been discovered, but that number could go up to the tens of billions; we just can't know for sure. That's just in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies that are out there.

It's so incredibly massive that you just can't help but think, are we alone in the universe? And if we aren't, why hasn't anyone said hi? We have ideas, but as always, we don't know, and we really can't prove most things. A very fundamental question for nature is: What exactly is the universe made of, and why is there stuff in it to begin with?

We know that almost all matter is made up from indivisible atoms, but why? Why do atoms exist, and where do they come from? When we die, what exactly do those atoms become? Everything else. At this point, you've listened to me talk for about seven, even eight minutes. Time is persistent for everything with mass. Time never stops.

We all know that yesterday is in the past, today is the present, and tomorrow is the future. But what exactly is time, and where does it come from? Even more confusing is: Did humans discover or invent time? There are so many things about the world that we just don't know. While some are deep questions, like we've talked about, others are more trivial.

While watching the video of this person yawning, you probably also yawned. So even more importantly, why is yawning contagious? When we're happy, we laugh; when we're sad, we cry. But why? For a long time, it was believed that laughter was a social tool to show one another that we're enjoying what's currently happening. It was an evolutionary tool used to help enhance connectivity in societies.

But if that was the case, then laughter should be unique to us humans, or at least primates. But it's not! Other social animals, like dolphins and even rats, laugh. So why do we laugh? Also, why do we cry? It's as if crying has emotional healing powers. Crying activates our parasympathetic nervous system and helps return our bodies to a normal, fully functional state.

It's a good thing for your body, so why do we associate it with such sad things? We often cry after something bad has happened, not really while it's happening. Is it a process that evolves solely for our brains to process emotionally painful things? Then again, we cry for happy reasons as well, so scratch everything I just said.

Why are some people right-handed and others are left-handed? Why isn't everyone ambidextrous? Wouldn't that have made a lot more sense? We can have theories for many, many things, but they remain just that— theories. And actually, proving theories as a fact of nature is a lot harder than you'd think. Many scientific theories are superseded with time, considered obsolete, or simply wrong.

We used to think that Earth was the center of the universe. Then one day, we realized it wasn't. Then again, not everyone could accept the fact that their view of the universe was so wrong. I mean, there's a theory that, as recently as World War II, the Germans attempted some advances under the impression that the Earth was hollow, so it is very possible that mostly everything we do know about the world right now is wrong.

Honestly, it probably is. We simply don't know everything about everything, and that's okay. All we can do is keep asking questions and keep learning about the world around us, trying to uncover each of its mysteries one stone at a time, hopefully answering the most important question of them all: What does existence truly mean?

In 1970, a British mathematician named John Conway created a project known as the Game of Life. Even though it's a game, it isn't one that you necessarily play. The Game of Life is a zero-player game, which doesn't make much sense when you hear it that way. The way it works is you put in a set of initial conditions and then observe. That's it. Once you put the initial conditions in, the game runs itself.

Other than the small set of rules that the simulation follows, it runs on almost nothing. Some patterns only run for a few generations before they die out, while others seemingly go on forever. This got me thinking: If a simulation as small as this, with very little variables, can result in something huge, what if we scale this up to say, the size of a universe? A simulation that's more than just dots on a screen, but a simulation with galaxies, planets, and life.

More importantly, if that is possible, how do we know that we aren't living in one of those simulations right now? Now, at first, the argument for our universe being a simulation just sounds like complete nonsense. But when you actually take a look into it, it seems to become more and more plausible. How do you observe things? Well, you see them, or smell them, or observe them with any of your senses. This is your subjective reality—a reality based on a subject: you.

You are alone in your own head. Everything that you observe or interact with ends its journey with neurons firing in your brain in a certain way to create your view of the world. With this being said, can you prove that there is an objective reality, that is, a reality that exists independently of our knowledge of it? A sort of overarching reality that encompasses all of our subjective realities? It exists without our observation of it.

That sounds kind of confusing, though. You can't know that an objective reality exists without someone or something to observe it. For example, if I went outside and stated that it was freezing, and you went outside and stated that it was scorching hot, that is where our subjective realities come into play. From this, it seems that two different minds, two different people, can observe a single object in multiple ways.

In an objective reality, it would just be either freezing or just scorching, regardless of either one of our observations. In an objective reality, in order to prove something exists, you would have to observe it without observing it, which is an obvious contradiction. This kind of begs the question: can you prove that anything outside of your own mind is actually real?

Babies aren't exactly the smartest things in the world, but they do give us a good insight into how we learn, how our minds develop, and how we become aware of the world around us. If you look outside your window, you might see a tree, or another house, or maybe your car in the driveway. But you don't need to physically look out there to know that those things exist. This is known as object permanence. It is the knowledge that objects exist even when we aren't perceiving them in any way.

However, we aren't born with that skill; it's something that is developed over time. I'm sure you've seen or even played peekaboo with a baby before. When you cover your face, babies less than about a year old will believe that you disappeared into thin air. But when you take your hands away, you're back—back into their reality. The knowledge that things exist even when you can't observe them isn't learned until about one and a half to two years into life.

But is that actually true? This goes back to your subjective reality. Sure, after a while, you might learn that some things seem to exist when we aren't observing them. But how can you be certain? At the end of the day, it is just your subjective reality. It's due to your Consciousness that you can even observe anything.

Take this for example: when you look at your computer or phone or television or whatever device you're watching this on, you know that all of those things are composed of atoms. But you can't really see them, can you? It's not until we take a device, such as a microscope, to observe them that we can actually see these atoms that make up everything. We can't see them until they're observed closely.

So if this is true, this can make simulating a universe a million times easier. Simulating an entire universe with billions of galaxies over billions of light-years would take up a lot of computing power and would really just be a waste. All the post-human species would have to do is just simulate the consciousness of its subjects—or maybe even subjugate. Is there any way to prove that anyone you talk to on a daily basis isn't just another function of code in the simulation?

All the simulation has to do is just trick you into believing the world around you is real. When you play video games, you'll notice that things don't render in completely when you aren't looking at them. It's a waste of power and energy. Since video games are basically simulations of our own, why wouldn't the simulated universe follow a similar strategy?

It's a very arrogant statement coming from a human, but hear me out: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? It's a pretty popular psychological question, and it fits really well here. In a simulated universe, if no one is around or conscious of that even taking place, there's no reason for it to make a sound or for the tree even to fall in the first place. If we stumbled upon that tree later on, it would just be lying on the ground to give the illusion that it fell.

If we aren't observing galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field, what's the point of them existing in the simulation at all? It could be possible that just bits and pieces of what we call the universe exist and are observed at a single time. If we look back at where technology was 100 years ago and compare it to now, you can see an obvious difference. If technology continues to advance at any rate that's greater than zero, then it is possible that in the future—whether it be 100 years or 1 million years—that we will eventually have technology with near-unlimited computing power.

But all I keep talking about is power and energy. How would a civilization even get this kind of power? Remember those creepy Russian dolls that when you open them up, there's another doll inside, and then another and another? There's a concept that's basically that, but on a stellar scale. Take our sun, for example.

It's really big and really hot, and it radiates a ton of energy. If we could somehow harness all of that energy, we could use it to simulate millions of universes simultaneously. But how are we supposed to gather all that energy? Using a little something called Matrioska brains. If an advanced civilization was able to build a mega-structure encompassing the sun in multiple layers, just like the dolls, they would have all of the sun's energy at their disposal.

A civilization capable of this could most likely do this with multiple stars, and thus, will be able to simulate as many universes as they like. We can run simulations on our own computers that project our universe on a large scale.

The Illustrious Project does this very well. Just like the Game of Life, the project is much like a zero-player game. Scientists who created the project gave it certain properties that match our universe near the beginning, and then they just let it run. It's able to project our universe on a large scale very accurately, actually, and that's just with the computing power we have today.

In the future, simulations like these will get more and more accurate, until eventually, it may even be realistic. However, it cannot be perfect. When we observe atoms and attempt to view electrons or other particles, we cannot know both the position and momentum of these particles with 100% certainty. This is called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

There's a limit to what we can know about the mass, energy, position, and time of a particle. Meaning that in any simulation, there is no way to accurately represent everything exactly as it was. You can never truly have a perfect simulation of reality. It will always be slightly slower than the actual reality itself, even with an infinite amount of computational power at your disposal.

In order to combat this, limits have to be put in place—tricks and sleight of hand have to be used. A good example is this: if you have an old computer and try to run the newest games on it, with 20 Google Chrome tabs open while also listening to music, you'll see an obvious decline in your computer's performance. The old computer doesn't have the computing power necessary to handle all of that strain, so it slows down.

Now think of black holes. When you're around that much matter in one place, that much information in one spot, time literally slows down. It's as if whoever created the simulation slowed down parts of the simulation to keep the energy required low. Could this be an explanation for the speed of light? Could this be the speed of computation of whatever simulation we may be in? There’s no way to tell, and all of this is theoretical and, to be honest, insane.

But it doesn't mean we shouldn't think about it. It could actually help answer some of the most sought-out questions we ask. For example, the Fermi Paradox: when we look out into the universe, we don't see any other signs of life. Are we really alone? Are we just a glitch in the simulation, or are we just not looking hard enough?

Take the creatures that exist at the bottom of our oceans. Are they aware that we humans even exist? Are they aware of anything outside of their immediate vicinity? Do they know that they're living on a big rock floating around a hot ball of gas orbiting some big black hole of death in the center of the galaxy that sucks anything and everything in? Probably not.

What if we're just like those creatures, but the furthest that we can observe or are aware of is what we call the observable universe? Perhaps the universe cannot exist without conscious minds to observe it. The idea of simulated universes could also explain the multiverse theory.

The idea of a multiverse is just that—multiple universes, or perhaps infinite universes. In many situations, when there's a high chance of someone getting killed or someone has a near-death experience, they are reported to have said that their life flashed before their eyes. Their most special moments and memories from their life all come rushing back to them in an instant.

Researchers from Hadassah University in Jerusalem analyzed multiple cases of people who experienced these near-death experiences. In almost all of these cases, those being interviewed stated that they had lost all sense of time. One of them wrote, "There is not a linear progression; there is a lack of time limits. It was like being there for centuries. It happened all at once," or "Some experiences within my near-death experience were going on at the same time as others, though my human mind separates them into different events."

Another respondent stated, "I could individually go into each person and feel the pain that they had in their life. I was allowed to see that part of them and feel for myself what they felt." When people experienced these things, it was as if they were living another life. They experienced things they never felt before.

It was as if they stepped foot into an alternate reality. The idea of time didn't exist for a short while, and they were able to analyze things that no other living person could do. When you're talking with a friend and have that weird Deja Vu feeling that you've had the same conversation before, or that you've experienced exactly what they're feeling without actually having been through it, perhaps you in another universe or another simulation actually had that same thing happen to you.

The illusion of free will allows us to live our lives in any way we see fit, but what if every single decision that you've ever made has been pre-programmed into the simulation that we could exist in? Every decision you make branches you off into a parallel universe—a parallel simulation where every choice that you have ever made has led you to this exact very moment, at home on your phone watching this very video.

Current technology already greatly surpasses human performance and speed. That's why many big companies, like Tesla, use robots and other machines to do jobs that humans can't do as effectively. Biological neurons—those are the neurons that fire in your brain every second of the day—operate at a peak speed of about 200 Hz, whereas modern microprocessors operate at at least 2 GHz— a whole seven orders of magnitude faster.

Even with modern technology, a super-intelligent AI, for example, a human mind that runs on hardware faster than the brain, could make decisions millions of times faster than current humans. It would be able to think of every outcome and pick from the best ones. However, we are not super-intelligent AI. There is a limit to what the human brain can do, can observe.

We have, though, made some very important discoveries that keep us asking questions, most importantly, math. Math seems universal. There are numbers and patterns in things, from the size of atoms to things the size of galaxies. Discoveries that we humans have made in only the past couple thousand years have allowed us to ask crazy questions like: are we living in a simulation?

If we were to put every single one of the possible billions of simulations into a hat, jumble them around, and picked one out, what are the chances that we will grab the original one, the one that made all the simulations in the first place? What are the chances that the Earth we are living on even exists? Perhaps an advanced alien species came upon our dead planet after billions of years and found traces of our DNA, traces of our existence, and then made a simulation out of that to learn about the history of the barren wasteland of a planet they had just stumbled upon.

If that's the case, then hello! We can never know for sure. All we can do is observe and hope that our game of life is one that we can win.