[transpy]

Simulation of ancestors.

1) This idea makes me think that the simulation hypothesis is wrong. If some advanced civilization has the power to create simulations, why would they create us, specifically? Why would they bother recreating a primitive world of the past? Wouldn't it be way more interesting to create cooler, crazier worlds? Do you really believe a post-human ultra-intelligent civilization would create something as present-day ISIS? Is someone having fun watching how we experience this world's horrors and pains?

2) Then I think the following: yes, the above scenario is possible, given that organized intelligence is able to realize more possibilities of the universal computational space. With enough computing power, organized intelligence would be able to spawn near-infinite world simulations, and ours is just one of those.

[mootothemax]

What would the world look like if the Nazis had won World War II? Or if Russia had nuked the world in the 1980s? Or Henry VIII had had a surviving male heir early in his reign? Or if Yeltsin hadn't have been an easily manipulated alcoholic?

I could go on - at length. And this only scratches the surface of alternative world history, which is just one of a crazy number of reasons to simulate something that involves a previous history's peoples.

Hah, I wonder what geologists would get up to?