You are making extremely strong assumptions about their motivations. Yes, though I believe my assumptions to be well-founded. Simulations are cool, but it's n

You are making extremely strong assumptions about their motivations. Yes, though I believe my assumptions to be well-founded. Simulations are cool, but it's not the same as observing the real thing. No, they're not of course. But they can achieve a sufficient level of accuracy for entertainment purposes. Again, what do we have that would possibly be useful? Science, art? Hah. With the time and resources needed to launch interplanetary probes, they could run a whole bunch of sims with all kinds of interesting starting conditions. That's a lot more convenient. The other factor in this just how fast / hot sufficiently advanced civilizations will run at. Your meat brain operates at essentially the 10's of Hz range. You can get anything done at all because it is massively parallel. A fully optimized brain of similar architecture could instead be running in the 10 GHz range. So it would be experience reality about a billion times faster than you. So now you want to send out probes to nearby star systems to look for something fun. Let's say you get lucky, and something interesting has developed 50 light-years away, so you send a tiny probe at nearly light-speed there. You've got to wait about 100 years for the first results to come back. But that is our meat-brain time scale. In your optimized-brain time scale, you're waiting longer than the universe has existed so far for the results to come back. That, my friends is boring! Will you really care about the results 100 billion years from now? Eh, probably not. Sure, you could put yourself to sleep to await the results, but then you'd miss out on everything that is happening locally. Who wants to do that?