First images from Euclid are in

We still have a long way to go to beat this draw distance, but we are on our way. The day will come when we have "sentient" beings, living in a massive world created by us. And they will ponder the same things as we do now.

And we will remain invisible and out of reach, but completely observant, and influential in their world. After all, we wrote the program.

And they will study the code and discover their own "natural laws" and invent their own things.

And they will progress until they create a completely simulated world of their own.

I wonder at which level are we. How many sims down from the original program...

What benefit do you get from this line of thought? You could also be a brain in a jar. What would you change about your life or behavior?

It's fun to think for the sake of thinking.

Exponential slowdowns at each level ruin this hypothesis.

But I'm not a brain in a jar. That is not my experience.

The benefit I get is knowing that this is not all one "big bang"

We are so quick to laud our own achievements, but fail to give credit where it is due.

We build nuclear power plants, waste water treatment plants and the beginnings of quantum computers. And we congratulate ourselves for a job well done, after spending an unspeakable amount of resources on them. We maintain them with a constant labour force, regular maintenance shutdowns and a ton of money.

Meanwhile the sun keeps shining, the clouds keep raining and your mind keeps minding.

And they do it on zero budget. No off days. No staff. Automatically.

And with all this engagement, the energy remains the same.

The documents I copied are not as sharp as the original, so the photocopier must not exist.

Photocopying has little to do with simulation of the physical world.

First of all, Bits != Q-bits. You can clone bits. You can't clone Q-bits: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem

Second, photocopies are static. The physical world is not static.

The more I learn about physics the more I am convinced this is a simulation.

In a way our universe is very lazy, at large scales where consciousness exists the universe is coherent, predictable. The smaller you get the lazier and fuzzier the universe gets to save computational work. The actual state of things is only computed on small scales when you measure them. The speed of light puts limits on how far humanity can travel to extend the bounds of the simulation. Maybe the expansion of the universe is yet another hedge at limiting how far human can travel. Also, as things are red shifted due to expansion you can run the simulation of far away places slower due to time dilation.

The speed of light and the plank length are both hard codes to bound computational work. The plank length to bound computation getting too complex in the micro scale and the speed of light to limit computation in the macro scale.

It is also very convenient that the closer we look at things the more we see that under the hood things are discrete which is very convenient for simulating.

Maybe every level of the sim increases the plank length and decreases the speed of light in order to deal with inefficiency of doing a sim within a sim? Maybe at the final level of the sim we end up with the truman show.

This is an interesting idea but personally I think the opposite - the universe is not lazy and all details matter at all levels.

Like imagine making a complete account of all world views of all people in all of history - all perspectives, and all the physical events of that history. There is almost infinite detail there. In a way, in the universe all the details of all the things matter, including at the physical level, otherwise you wouldn't get the diversity and complexity you get now.

Why would their be exponential slowdown? Time can be relative, but superbroadcasting can help explain the loss of fidelity as we scale down. So you can't "Clone" but you can superentangle multiple copies in a degraded state.

You would enjoy the short story "The Last Question" by Asimov: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html