Anyone who’s seen The Matrix has wondered if its premise is more plausible than we initially thought.

Any number of scientific papers from reputable journals have not only taken the theory seriously but concluded there’s a 50-50 chance that the universe we call home and everything in it (including us) is little more than computer code. The stranger things get — and pretty much everyone would agree that the last several years have been nothing if not strange — the more people seem to agree. Skeptics would argue that the world is too beautiful and complex to be anything but real, whereas proponents would say that’s just what the simulation wants us to think. We may not know for sure anytime soon, but it’s certainly food for thought.