[dustyleary]

That's a big assumption.

What purpose does Goat Simulator http://www.goat-simulator.com/ serve to solve/understand issues in our universe?

How do you know our universe is not a child's toy for a race of deity-like beings? Or an art project?

Maybe the outer universe is populated by immortal godlike entities and has the equivalent of the guys who made Dwarf Fortress saying, "hmm, I wonder what would happen if there were a race of pseudo-intelligent creatures that just arbitrarily died after just a few million seconds?" Or, "I wonder what would happen if the fundamental building blocks of the universe did not behave predictably, but instead made a random choice to determine the outcome of every interaction?"

And maybe that programmer is just about to come back from his coffee break, look at what happened, and say, "hmm, that was boring", kill the process, and move on to other things.

When you're talking about something that could be powerful enough to simulate our entire universe, assuming that our sense of scale matters at all to it is pretty much the definition of hubris.

[maushu]

Also, time may not be relative to "outside". For all we know we might be in worldgen (historygen?) phase for a "Humans vs Aliens in the Year 50k" game.

[padobson]

There's a question as to whether ethics/morals/compassion scale with power. I think there's a solid argument to be made that human power has scaled near exponentially over the last 200 years while human ethics seem to be coupled to it (slavery and genocide are almost universally reviled where they were common place before, per capita violence is way way down, international and intercultural cooperation via trade, communication, etc have never been higher).

Are the two things tightly coupled? Seems difficult to prove, but if they are, they folks running our simulation are probably going to treat us a lot better than we treat each other.

[short_sells_poo]

Maybe, maybe not. The problem is (as parent posits) that a hyper intelligence with the means of simulating an entire universe could just be so utterly alien to us that we can't make any predictions about it's reasoning. Perhaps they would turn off our world/simulation with no more of a thought than what a human would give about autoclaving a petri dish with some bacterial growth.

It's only human to try to ascribe human feelings and morals to such beings - but the difference in scale is just too big. Comprehending why such a being does or doesn't do something would be almost certainly beyond us.

[kbutler]

Seems trivial to disprove.

Dictators have lots of power and don't follow ethical rules you assert.

People destroy colonies of termites.

Nobody worries about millions of yeast destroyed when baking a batch of bread. Sorry, hundreds of billions. My bad.