Quintillionaires of the future may pay for elaborate escape rooms wherein the entire universe is simulated.
I still think if this is all just a simulation, it's some type of archeological study.
I still think if this is all just a simulation, it's some type of archeological study.
As a consequence, their government may have banned these types of simulations, to avoid the responsibility of keeping it alive until life is extinct. We are one of the few simulations that are still running
If they simply created us by mistake, we may be very different from what they are. Even the laws of physics could be different.
It would explain the Fermi paradox. They could be stopping advanced life to evolve on other planets, as they want to reduce the scope of the simulation. They created us by mistake and are waiting for advanced life on this planet to become extinct, so that they can finally shut down the expensive simulation.
This would actually address the inherent bounding problem of any such simulation setup.
(Meaning, any entity setting up and/or controlling such a simulation would have to guarantee resources with regard to multiple exponential runaways for any given time/simulation frame. How would you do that? Wouldn't this fundamental containment problem be impossible to solve? However, if your're dealing largely with "known unknowns", as in a reenactment, there are at least some heuristics for resource allocation.)
The accuracy of the simulation's predictive power of course depends on whether or not you are simulating the universe exactly. But I do wonder if there are some simplifications you can make. Say, you only simulate our solar system down to the quantum level, but simulate the light from outside our solar system based on past observation, at a macro scale.
Of course, the accuracy may also depend on whether or not "God plays dice with the universe"; if quantum effects are truly random, and can affect things that happen at a macro scale, then this future-viewing might not really work.