There are so many amazing aspects of outerspace that it can be hard to wrap your head around them at times. From vast nebulas in a whole spectrum of colours, to distant galaxies that are some how visible to the naked eye, to black holes that evenour greatest scientific minds can’t yet fully explain… there are plenty of unsolvedmysteries. But what would happen if, actually, none of it was true? This is unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if space was fake.

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A quite startling number of people are suspicious about outer space and, more specifically, humanity’s relation to it. For decades, conspiracy theories about the 1969 moon landing, all other moon landings, and various space missions have cropped uptime and time again. A 2019 survey by satellite Internet found that 10% of Americans still believe that the moon landing was a hoax, despite there being heaps of evidence to the contrary. In the same vein as moon landing deniers are flat earthers, who hold a range of different beliefs about the rest of the universe. While some say that the other planets definitely are spheres and it’s just the earth that’s not, others think that other worlds might instead be cleverly angled disks, or even just an elaborate mirage. 

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While most people accept the truth – that the earth is definitely round and that it orbits the sun, just like all the other planets– what kind of a world would we be living in if there really was credibility to the seconspiracies, because space itself wasn’t real? We’d first have to think about precisely how space could be faked in this alternate world. Simulation theory suggests that our entirereality is an elaborate simulation… which provides one of the simplest foundations for faking something like outer space. Here, space is “rendered” with just the same amount of care and detail as the rest of our immediate surroundings. The stars, moons, planets and asteroids are all artificial creations. It might even explain why we’re the only planet confirmed as hosting life, because it just takes the sim designer (whoever that is) too much time and effort to come up with different alien species, to account for life outside of this digital biome we call the earth. 

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For Nick Bostrom, the Oxford University professor who first detailed the simulation hypothesis, it’s extremely likely that one day, humanity will develop the necessary computing power to build elaborate sims. He then asks us to consider how likely itis that we are the ones in the “real world” who will eventually be conducting the simulation…? Or is it more feasible that we are in factthe “others”, populating a sim built by someone else? For Bostrom, in the grand scheme of time and space, logic says we’re the second one! But, if we really were living in a digital world, would this actually mean that space wasn’t real? In a sense, space would still be as “real”as everything else we perceive, but in another, something has to exist outside of the simulation. Someone had to have built it, after all, and they had to have based their work on something. So, an alternate reading of simulation theory might be that even if our reality isn’t actually real, it’s still extremely likely that space - the true space - does exist “out there” in the wider universe in some form. It isn’t quite the “fake space” concept we’re looking for, but this strange idea might explain some of the major mysteries of space (as we understand it). Everything “out there” is very far away from us and almost impossibly difficult to get to. We’ve only been to the moon a handful of times, finding not much of note, while Mars and Venus (our closest planetary neighbours)are similarly distant and hostile. If space is just an illusion or at the very least some kind of construct (or even if these objects do physically exist) it would perhaps make sense that whoever designed them would want to keep them as hard-to-reach and hazardousas possible - to dissuade us from going there and discerning the truth.