The Earth Updates Twitter account has been around since September 2019, and since then it has shared over 1,400 updates on our planet. The page has also amassed an impressive 460k followers on Twitter and has an accompanying Instagram account with over 2,800 followers. And it’s no surprise that these updates have gained such a massive following, as they’re filled with humor and provide an interesting perspective on our planet. But if you’re not an avid gamer, these patch notes might seem a bit foreign, so I’ll break them down for my fellow pandas who aren’t familiar with the term. (Confession: I had no idea what patch notes were until today, so we’re in this together!)

According to SteamWorks, patch notes are the small updates that are made to games and happen more frequently than regular updates or major updates. “Patch Notes are important for letting your most engaged players know what has changed in your game, even if those changes are not something most players would care about,” SteamWorks explains. 

To help us gain a greater understanding of what patch notes are, we reached out to an expert on the topic: Baden Ronie, aka Wolf of Wolf’s Gaming Blog. Wolf shares lots of great gaming content, including reviews and ranking lists, so we asked the gaming pro if he could explain what kind of information is typically included in patch notes. “Patch notes usually contain information on key improvements or changes the developers have made, like how the ingame economy has been altered or how they tweaked how powerful a certain weapon is,” he told Bored Panda.

And when it comes to why these informative updates are important, Wolf told us, “Patches are incredibly useful for fixing parts of a game developers didn't know had an issue. But they can also be used to add awesome new features and content, or improve the balance of the game.”

Finally, we asked Wolf what kinds of patch notes he would like to receive about updates done to our planet. “I'd think it could be fun if the Earth got a patch note saying, ‘Gravity has been fixed so that it’s less powerful, as was originally intended’, so that we all have to bounce around and figure out how to live in a world where a bump,” he told Bored Panda. “We could send a car 10 feet into the air. And I wouldn't feel so fat for eating a chocolate cake by myself.” I think that would be an excellent update to receive.

If you’d like to check out Wolf’s gaming content and decide which games are worth purchasing based on his in-depth reviews, be sure to visit Wolf’s Gaming Blog right here!

While the patch notes on this list are fictionalized and created just for fun, I can’t help but wish that we actually received patch notes about Earth. Update: The planet is now 5% warmer than it was 100 years ago. Update: Players will now receive a reward of good karma for recycling and minimizing their waste production. Update: All of the food available will now be plant-based to cut down on carbon emissions. But if we could actually receive patch notes on Earth from some entity out there that’s in charge of us all, it would have to be true that we were living in some sort of simulation. So let’s entertain that idea for a few minutes, shall we?

According to Scientific American, this idea was popularized by philosopher Nick Bostrom in the Philosophical Quarterly. Since then, various celebrities and scientists, such as Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson, have come out publicly to give some credibility to the theory as well. Of course, we have no way of knowing that it’s actually true, but it hasn’t been ruled out! According to Fouad Khan at Scientific American, “The simplest explanation for the existence of consciousness is that it is an experience being created, by our bodies, but not for us. We are qualia-generating machines. Like characters in Grand Theft Auto, we exist to create integrated audiovisual outputs. Also, as with characters in Grand Theft Auto, our product most likely is for the benefit of someone experiencing our lives through us.” 

The Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom has also entertained this theory in his 2003 paper “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” Steven Poole wrote a piece for The Guardian exploring the same topic, where he broke down a bit of Bostrom’s ideas. “Assume, he says, that in the far future, civilisations hugely more technically advanced than ours will be interested in running ‘ancestor simulations' of the sentient beings in their distant galactic past,” Poole writes. “If so, there will one day be many more simulated minds than real minds. Therefore you should be very surprised if you are actually one of the few real minds in existence rather than one of the trillions of simulated minds.”

If you’re wondering how anyone could possibly believe that we may be living in a simulated world, I hear you. But according to Melvin M. Vopson, a Senior Lecturer in Physics at the University of Portsmouth, there is some empirical evidence to back up the theory. For example, he explains in an article for The Conversation that the laws of physics resemble computer code lines that a simulation would follow in order to execute the program. Our entire world also seems to be mathematical, with equations, numbers and geometric patterns appearing everywhere.

“Another curiosity in physics supporting the simulation hypothesis is the maximum speed limit in our universe, which is the speed of light,” Vopson goes on to note. “In a virtual reality, this limit would correspond to the speed limit of the processor, or the processing power limit. We know that an overloaded processor slows down computer processing in a simulation. Similarly, Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity shows that time slows in the vicinity of a black hole.”

Vopson goes on to explain that quantum mechanics might actually provide the most convincing evidence that we are living in a simulation. “This suggests nature isn’t ‘real’: particles in determined states, such as specific locations, don’t seem to exist unless you actually observe or measure them. Instead, they are in a mix of different states simultaneously. Similarly, virtual reality needs an observer or programmer for things to happen,” he explains. “Quantum ‘entanglement’ also allows two particles to be spookily connected so that if you manipulate one, you automatically and immediately also manipulate the other, no matter how far apart they are – with the effect being seemingly faster than the speed of light, which should be impossible.”

In 2022, philosopher David J. Chalmers published the book Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, in which he argues that we can’t know that we’re not in a simulation, so we shouldn’t rule the idea out. He explains that our lives are already quite virtual, with the prevalence of social media and the internet, so it’s not too hard to imagine our existence becoming even more virtual over time. He predicts that within the next hundred years, VR worlds will be indistinguishable from reality. He also uses the example of how trees may appear to be solid and sturdy, but a physicist will tell you that, on a subatomic level, they’re mostly just empty space. “Few people think that the mere fact that trees are grounded in quantum processes makes them less real,” Chalmers writes. “I think that being digital is just like being quantum mechanical here.”

Jason Kehe wrote a piece for Wired diving into the complex world of whether or not “reality” is real, and he noted that, regardless of what you believe, it can be fun to entertain the idea that we might be in some sort of crazy matrix. “Every so often, when I’m feeling frisky, I go outside and twist up my eyes, just to see if I can catch the quickest glimpse of the pixels making up this pure, planetary simulation we call Earth. Sometimes, and even when I’m completely sober, I feel like it’s working,” Kehe writes. “Tiny squares really do seem to be blipping in and out of existence! Other times, and especially when I’m completely sober, I feel like a complete dinkus.”

“But this is precisely the fun of it: the uncertainty,” he adds. “You might even say the Heisenbergian uncertainty, the quantum-mechanical indeterminacy underlying our reality. Is this thing before me evidence of a simulation? It is, it isn’t, it might be, it must be.”

And while we may never know exactly why on Earth we would be in a simulation (in theory!), Steven Poole at The Guardian says that it might just be better not to know everything. “Perhaps, for [the simulators], the game is not merely to observe us as an indefinite planet-sized soap opera, but simply to see how long the sim-people take to prove that they’re in a simulation,” he writes. “At which point, the game ends and the simulation is turned off. Perhaps we’re better off not finding out.”

Earth Update: Pandas are encouraged to upvote their favorite posts, so the article can feature the best ones right at the top. Check back later for more updates. We hope you’re enjoying this list, Earthlings. Regardless of whether you actually believe we’re in a simulation or not, feel free to keep up with all of the interesting updates our Earth goes through. Let us know in the comments below which updates you’d like to make to planet Earth, and then if you’re interested in checking out another Bored Panda article featuring photos that look suspiciously like they’re from video games instead of reality, you can find that piece right here!