"If there are long-lived technological civilizations in the universe, and if they run computer simulations ..." This argument strikes me as similar in form to

"If there are long-lived technological civilizations in the universe, and if they run computer simulations ..." This argument strikes me as similar in form to Fermi's Paradox -- and I don't buy that one, either. They both have the form: "If <unproven hypothesis 1> and <unproven hypothesis 2> and ... and <unproven hypothesis N>, then <surprising consequence>!" In Fermi's case, the consequence is observably false, so people assume that (only?) one of the clauses must be false. In the Simulation case, the consequence is not easily observable, but the premises seem not-completely-outrageous, so people start picking away at it. The hunch that "the universe is really really big, therefore occurrence X (which I just made up) ought to be happening an awful lot (but we have no way to even make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many times)" just doesn't hold water for me. There's plenty of cases where my planet seems really big, but things just don't happen as often as I might predict by looking at one corner of it. If something were happening all the time, it would have been happening all along, and you wouldn't need to come up with the idea just now -- obviously the only ideas left to invent today must not be happening much! Apply the Fermi Paradox to the Simulation Hypothesis. The universe is only 14B years old, and AFAICT so far, completely void of intelligent life except for us (a very recent development). Isn't "life is exceptionally new and rare" a completely plausible (if boring) solution to both of these questions?