(Photo: The Film League)

A NASA scientist would like to legitimize that highdea you had one time in college: What if we all live inside a computer, man? How fucking trippy would that be?

Vice found the one NASA scientist who isn't afraid to sound like a stoned kook, and we kind of want to be his best friend. Rich Terrile, director at the Center for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, argues that there's a distinct possibility that our world could actually be a computer game generated by a programmer from the future, Matrix-style.

Writes Vice:

The essence of Rich’s theory is that a “programmer” from the future designed our reality to simulate the course of what the programmer considers to be ancient history—for whatever reason, maybe because he’s bored.

According to Moore’s Law, which states that computing power doubles roughly every two years, all of this will be theoretically possible in the future. Sooner or later, we’ll get to a place where simulating a few billion people—and making them believe they are sentient beings with the ability to control their own destinies—will be as easy as sending a stranger a picture of your genitals on your phone.

What if we're all pawns in a game being played by a bored Mountain Dew-chugging neckbeard? Mind. Blown.

(Photo: Imgur)