What If Space Was Fake? | Unveiled

What if Space was Fake?

There are so many amazing aspects of outer space that it can be hard to wrap your head around them at times. From vast nebulae in a whole spectrum of colours, to distant galaxies that are somehow visible to the naked eye, to black holes that even our greatest scientific minds can’t yet fully explain… there are plenty of unsolved mysteries. 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?

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 up time 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. 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 these conspiracies, 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 entire reality 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.

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 it is 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 fact the “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 hazardous as possible - to dissuade us from going there and discerning the truth. And if you go along with this line of thinking, then our fledgling history of space travel in some ways matches up… As soon as we discovered Venus had such a toxic atmosphere, for example, we stopped sending probes there. And, say our efforts to get to Mars turn out to be fruitless as well, then it could ultimately discourage us from investigating space altogether - and, lo and behold, the illusion of space is upheld!

Just so we’re clear, though, we’re not really saying that space actually is fake. Space, despite all its strangeness, does exist. But in an alternate reality when the whole thing is made up, haven’t we already proven - in real life - how willingly we’d believe in it? Take the infamous Mars One mission, for example. For years, lots of backers were duped into believing that it might someday be a reality. The crowdfunded scheme claimed it intended to send humans to the Red Planet, and lots of people literally bought into the plan despite countless scientists pointing out that it was deeply flawed. With no real outline of how they were going to build the equipment or train their crew, it wasn’t a huge surprise when the entire project fell apart. One whistle-blower even revealed that the company’s so-called “astronauts” were primarily selected based on the size of their donations, without other criteria (like, say, astronaut experience) taken into account. The Mars One fiasco showed that it’s possible to fake plans for a space mission, at least… but also how quickly and enthusiastically people would buy into the idea.

Of course, in a world where space really was found to be fake, then it’d mean all of our genuine space missions would’ve been faked, too. Every. Single. One of them. Which would beg so many more questions. Most importantly; who faked all those missions, and why did they do it? What did they seek to gain? Because you know that someone has to have benefited from making humanity believe that there’s an entire, near-infinite universe in the sky above them!

Perhaps the most obvious motivator would be money. NASA and other space agencies get a lot of public funding to carry out their missions. So, if those missions were a hoax - something that some Flat Earthers today plainly refer to as “the Conspiracy” - then it’s all a ruse so that higher-ups can pocket a lot of extra cash. We don't time to list all of the reasons why, in real life, the idea that it’s all a lie just doesn’t cut it… But probably the first major follow-up question would be; how would we explain the thousands of years of human history before space agencies, when we also knew all about and studied the stars and planets? How had the illusion of space been maintained so meticulously over centuries in the past? Well, the space fakers would have to be supremely powerful people, with enough connections and resources at their disposal to fake whole eras of human history as well. Inevitably, were it to be revealed that anyone on Earth wielded such incredible influence, then the rest of the planet would descend into chaos - with everyone else plagued by existential uncertainty and suspicion.

As for who the space fakers might be… well, there are already some ideas on that, too. On the one hand, the idea of space could have been fed into our consciousness by a higher power; on the other, that higher power can’t be alien (as in not of this world) because there couldn’t be aliens if there weren’t any alien planets for them to be working from. No, for space not to be real, it’s “fake-ness” would have to have originated on Earth itself. Perhaps answers lie with another extreme conspiracy, that the world is really run by a secret race of lizard people. I mean, at this point, in an alternate life where space wasn’t even space anymore, it probably wouldn’t be too hard to stretch the imagination just a little further! Even back in the real world, a 2013 study by Public Policy Polling found that four percent of Americans believed in lizard people - around twelve million people at the time! So, it may be they, the lizards - having evolved just like us - who double up as the perpetrators of the space lie.

Or, perhaps the reason behind the grand illusion needn’t be quite so malevolent. Maybe space turns out to be some kind of divine construct after all, and those who say that “science exists only as a way to distract people from God” are ultimately proven right - a 2015 survey carried out in the US found that twenty-nine percent of evangelists do already believe this. In this alternate reality, science in general is uncovered as a sham and anyone who’s ever followed it really has been guided down some kind of “wrong path”.

We do stress, though, that this is very much an “alternate” reality. As far as we know, we can still rely on science and space is still there. If we really did prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that none of it was real… well... we’d be back to square one as far as our understanding of the universe goes. As far as our understanding of anything goes! Unless, of course, we were to simply shrug it off as “just another conspiracy theory” and continue going about our business… And that’s what would happen if space was fake.