[alexwebb2]

> correctly simulating the environment interactions, the sequence of progression, getting the all the details right, might take hundreds to thousands of years of compute

Who says we have to do that? Just because something was originally produced by natural process X, that doesn't mean that exhaustively retracing our way through process X is the only way to get there.

Lab grown diamonds are a thing.

[Chance-Device]

Who says that we don’t? The point is that the bounds on the question are completely unknown, and we operate on the assumption that the compute time is relatively short. Do we have any empirical basis for this? I think we do not.