True. Although I'm still a little skeptical that we'll be able to run lifelike sims in our lifetimes.

P.S. - I say "lifelike" in a literal sense - i.e. there's literally no difference between the fidelity of the sim and what we're experiencing right now. All physical laws (down to the unified theory of the reality that we might form in the future), all observable and interactable physical objects (down to their most fundamental particles), literally everything behaves and is present as it is in our reality.

Also, there's a good possibility that the simulators just turn off the "winner" sims as well, once they have arrived at the solutions, because it wouldn't make sense to spend all that compute power once the sims have served their purpose.

So we're screwed either way.

Ooh this is actually even more realistic scenario. But that's exactly what makes it even more terrifying, because it goes without saying that civilizations in most of those sims would not arrive at the intended solutions and hence either get destroyed or the simulators would just switch them off. So our chances being in one of those "loser" sims are actually far greater than the "winner" ones.

Fuck.

I haven't! Does it revolve around the same / similar plot?

Holy shit, what if we are in one of the ancestor sims future humans ran in order to solve some big civilization-threatening inevitable crisis in their time, which requires some small remediation in their past (our present or possible future)? They probably have figured out how to travel back in time, and just waiting to find the optimal solution of their crisis.

Once they find that solution, they can go back in their past and implement an ever so small correction in their timeline, so that they don't alter their own timeline by huge amount but avert the crisis completely.