As all Simpsons fans know, the adult cartoon series has a mysterious tendency to predict the future.
Past episodes have foretold everything from Donald Trump's presidency to coronavirus - and even 9/11.
Now, people are claiming that the show has done it again and predicted the Metaverse.
Billed as the future of social media, the Metaverse was announced by Mark Zuckerberg last year as an endless, interconnected world where people can meet, work and play using VR headsets, AR glasses, apps or other devices.
The futuristic platform is ahead of the game even by today's standards. Yet an episode of The Simpsons back in 2011 seems to have already predicted it.
In season 23's episode Holidays of Future Passed, a grown-up Lisa Simpson follows her teenage daughter into the 'ultra net' to try and figure out what she's doing on there.
What she finds is an immersive online world where you can see friend requests, enter people's 'rooms' and physically interact with all sorts of internet sites.
While it isn't an exact replica of the proposed Metaverse, the episode's vision of a physical online experience certainly has a lot in common with that teased by Zuckerberg.
People online seem pretty convinced that the show has once again predicted the future.
"The Simpsons predicting the Metaverse in 2011," one person tweeted.
"Did simpsons predict Metaverse or did mark zuckerberg steal that idea from simpsons?" asked another.
"If there is a reliable name when it comes to predicting the future, it's none other than The Simpsons," added a third.
This isn't the first time The Simpsons has foretold events to come.
The show - which has been running since 1989 and is currently on its 33rd season - is believed by fans to have prophesized the Capitol Riots in 2021, Richard Branson going into space, Donald Trump's presidency, Farmville, smartwatches, and the Coronavirus pandemic.
In an episode aired in 1997, it even appeared to predict 9/11, in a scene which even executive producer Bill Oakley admitted was "eerie".
"I will grant that it’s eerie, given that it’s on the only episode of any series ever that had an entire act of World Trade Centre jokes," he admitted to The New York Observer in 2010.
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