The General Evacuation

The last decade has shown the vast potential of the computer along with reality. Obsolete are the days where the best people could expect are arcade quality images; it is rapidly becoming clear that the sky will soon be the limit. Hyperreality might not be far off: it might very well be real right now.
The philosopher Nick Bostrom of Oxford University has suggested that the world and everything we know might be nothing more than an elaborate computer simulation. It seems plausible, given that every sight, texture, and scent that we have ever known are just the dance of electric signals in our brains. It might be that during the general evacuation that it was decided to lock our minds into a computer system to preserve our dying civilization. It is entirely possible since the machine need not be a multi yottaflop device, a much smaller device would do. When you have the ages of the universe to deal with, it is irrelevant if a computation cycle requires one second or a million years. Time as we would know it would be subjective to the whims of the machine.
Existences as we know it with its priests and weak interactions would be incredibly boring were everything righteous and peaceful. The persistence of war and disease with this period and all of history would indicate that the architect knows humans all to well. Just as Agent Smith of The Matrix suggested, humans define themselves by their suffering. A perfect happy world is something that our primitive minds will never accept.
In the last reflection, none of this philosophy may ever be proven. One of the virtues of philosophy is that it is beyond science, for the time being.