Exorcet
Space travel would be a risk for us, but probably less so for a more advanced civilization. It might even be the norm. We're actually heading in that direction, though it's not clear where we will end up or when we'll get there.
..... in search of another planet full of raw materials. Once reaching the material planet, it would replicate and then dispatch a massive wave of probes to a bunch of preprogrammed targets. These second generation probes would do the same, and so on. The AI on each probe might be able to engineer a better design for each new generation, or it might remain in contact with the home planet over short distances.
Either of these methods could cover a lot of ground quickly, even if "quickly" means millions of years in the scale of the universe.
You'd probably tend to mine asteroid belts, I would think, since you don't have the huge gravity well problem, and if you are relying on AI (assuming that's not us/them at that stage), less risk of messing up the planets you're seeking; but I tend to agree. Unless you happen to be searching for planets to seed/colonize/terraform (not necessary if the probes also are the sentient explorers, in all probability), the impetus to embark on such a program (the surplus of ability and energy available allows for it) would also mean intelligent beings would be quite painstaking about designing the program. Unless they/we aren't curious, and just want the planets (or entire solar systems). Ruh Roh.
Dotini
I'm willing to consider that we live in an alien created simulacrum - if we provide that the program is rendered corrupt and defective by decay, bugs and viruses. This would be so because the putative behavior of alien entities - UFOs - is always absurd or foolish, showing little real intelligence beyond the feral and tricksterish.
How fast is the speed of thought? With thought alone I might easily transfer my consciousness from one end of the universe to another in a nanosecond. There are too many cases on record where UFOs have been able to read the intentions of percipients at a distance and react preemptively.
The aliens, whoever or whatever they are - presumably immortal, evolved inorganic electromagnetic plasma energies - are already here, and simultaneously everywhere else in the universe, too.
We might do better by ignoring these "caretakers" than we do by deliberately interacting with them. It can be debated if such dissimilar lifeforms have anything positive to offer each other.
It may be speculated that upon death, that fraction of human consciousness that is non-material (i.e., pure energy or the "soul") rejoins the realm of inorganic life.
Respectfully submitted,
Steve
It seems to me that the key difference between the Simulation Argument and related previous concepts (possibly including religion, as well as obvious things like the Matrix) is the situation in which it becomes mathematically very, very likely if certain assumptions are met. Unavoidable even for atheists, perhaps.
In any case, the motivation behind an individual simulation will obviously greatly affect the perception of residents. Study and entertainment are the obvious ones, but reproduction or education would be fascinating. Motivation is a difficult issue, because there's no guarantee we could actually comprehend it - what you say about dissimilar life forms echoes what I said about interacting with other comprehensible (similar time/space scale, not vastly extremeophilic or massively further ahead developmentally). Look what the monkeys are doing near the monolith...
There's no need to have omnipresence or omniscience when you can pause for a few millennia, study the logs, and rerun from snapshots..... but the phenomena you describe don't even require something as deep as that, or as fast as spooky action at a distance, because the scales just aren't big enough to need it. Heck, even human cognitive biases (the same ones that underly animistic world views, and ascribe agency to every unexplained "action" as a simple survival bet) could be to blame, letting alone physical or technological explanations.
The speed of thought would seem to be entirely dependent on the substrate; ours is pretty slow, being made of meat. If you're positing that the real substrate is in fact composed of consciousness, I think you're making Nick's argument sound pretty convincing. And remember, sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology!
