[danenania]

If that's the case, why go to the trouble of simulating such a massive universe--trillions of galaxies, 100 billion stars per galaxy, countless planets and other objects, etc.?

While the speed of light may prevent us from going to most of the universe physically (given our current understanding of physics), that's still a vast amount of compute just to give us the high fidelity impression that all this exists. What's the point? The sky could have just been simulated as dark and empty, or the universe could have contained a single galaxy.

[scrollaway]

The idea that the universe and these numbers are "massive" is very human-scale.

Imagine how massive a "universe" the size of just the Earth would be, from the perspective of a proton.

[danenania]

Sure, I'm just pointing out that if the premise is that this hypothetical civilization is compute-constrained in some way and so everything beyond our local area is a facade, they have seemingly wasted resources on making the facade unnecessarily large and detailed. Perhaps the amount is insignificant to them, but it's still pointless waste.

[soco]

Not waste if they're simulating the path of our civilization to reach those billions of stars.

[olddustytrail]

About a million times smaller than the visible universe to a human?