Well, we don't have the tech to build such a simulator ourselves, so we'd have to be a leaf node of the simulation tree, that has yet to run long enough to disc

Well, we don't have the tech to build such a simulator ourselves, so we'd have to be a leaf node of the simulation tree, that has yet to run long enough to discover how to spawn the next levels. But I guess not all leaves are successful at spawning - some just self-destruct.