Interesting argument! It makes sense - without some unexpected breakthrough in computer science, it takes a proportionate amount of energy and materials to run

Interesting argument! It makes sense - without some unexpected breakthrough in computer science, it takes a proportionate amount of energy and materials to run a simulation. Even if computing power, speed, and storage improve in the next million years to densities approaching the Planck length, power requirements approaching Landauer's limit [1], and cycle rates approaching the Planck time[2], the requirement that it can't be bigger on the inside still holds (at least in our universe, under our physics). Thinking about it for a few minutes, we would have to do at least one thing to make it work: 1. Make it more granular, so our sub-subatomic storage could record the states of atoms without being as large or larger than the stored data. 2. Make it slower, so our faster-than-light computer could have time to simulate all interactions. 3. Make it simpler, so our complicated computer mechanism operating on some exotic principle wouldn't have to simulate the same principle. 4. Make it smaller than our computer. It's easy even now to simulate a few atoms with a computer consisting of several kilos of matter, but I can hardly imagine any universe devoting a significant fraction of its mass to ancestor simulations. These restrictions would eventually limit the ability of child universes to simulate grandchildren, but I am not convinced that it significantly reduces the number of sentient beings (simulated and non-simulated) which is the key to our estimate of whether or not we are in a simulation. If in the parent simulation, room-temperature superconductors are common, cold fusion is easy, there is no speed of light in the parent universe, Landauer's Limit does not hold, and computers are built on a scale far below quantum mechanics, our (apparently) large universe could easily be one of trillions of ancestor simulations. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time