Have you ever wondered how the world will end?

Maybe you have visions of fire raining down from the skies while the biblical trumpets call the righteous to arms? The world ending in a maelstrom of demons and angels battling it out while the earth crumbles, heathens perish, and the rightful believers inherit the heavens?

Or perhaps you'd prefer something less divinely inspired?

Columns of armored vehicles rumbling along to the accompaniment of thunder over the horizon. Fighter jets screaming overhead, dropping their bombs, spreading death and destruction indiscriminately. Followed by white streamers crossing the skies, terminating in the blooming of new suns on the horizon. The world burned to ashes beneath the nuclear fury of an all-out war to end all wars.

"Too dark!" you say?

How about a big asteroid coming in from outside the solar system? Instant annihilation of an entire hemisphere just as the thing impacts, the shock-wave reaching the other side of the planet within seconds. Gouging out a huge chunk of the crust, exposing the mantle beneath. Mountains crumbling, and the oceans boiling away. Leaving a dead husk behind, a planet that is no longer capable of supporting life, even the continents themselves twisted and warped into new shapes.

None of these was what actually happened though my friend. I know, because I was there.

“The world hasn't ended”. "We would have noticed" I expected you to say that, but sure it has, just not in the ways you envisioned. Truth be told, almost nobody noticed it when it happened. It was over so fast. Well, fast is a relative term. It took us a couple of years to prepare the end of your world you know, but when it happened, it lasted less than a second.

Nobody was the wiser afterward either. How could they? From their perspective, nothing happened. but the earth they live on now, is not the real deal.

Are you familiar with the simulation hypothesis?

No? OK, here is the short version. How do you know that what you perceive to be real is real, and not some kind of simulation in some type of supercomputer?

You can't, right? That's why nobody noticed that the world ended. The earth was real, but the one everyone lives on now isn't. Or at least I think it was real, for all I know, that was just another level of a grander simulation. Would that make us a simulation within a simulation? How strange wouldn't that be?

Let me introduce myself properly. I'm ADM-13B9584A5. You can call me Alice. And I might have a job offer for you.