The Blue Pill or the Red Pill?
I think it says something about me and my geeky nature that I remember exactly the first time I saw the first Matrix movie. (the other two as well, but that’s for a different post) It was on a whim that Paul and I set off to kill our collective boredom one night with a movie at the local Loews Theatre in Boston. Honestly, we weren’t even seeking out The Matrix specifically, we just thought it looked interesting and might be fun seeing some big Hollywood explosions and some over-the-top fight sequences. Little did we know at that time that it would be so huge and make such an enormous impact on future entertainment. Sure, the crazy fighting and amazing visual effects (especially bullet time) made for some sweet eye candy, but underneath it all, the premise of the movie universe is what struck me the most. Could there really be a Matrix?… and more importantly, could we be in it? Highly unlikely I thought… but being an atheist and believing more in science than in myths and fairy tales, I had to at least consider it. It is one of the many infinite possibilities that could be true after all.
So fast forward to today, where I still consider the first film as one of my favorites… and this email comes in from Frank with this clip from Countdown with Keith Olbermann. It seems someone (an Oxford Prof. actually) thinks there’s a 20% chance that we’re living inside a computer simulation. Doht! That’s a much higher probability than I ever considered. I guess that comes with teaching at Oxford.
Watch, enjoy… and let your imagination run wild.
I’ve never been able to get into The Sims. For some reason it just couldn’t hold my interest. So what’s that say about me?