Is any of this real?
It seems to me that there are two responses to the vastness of the universe. One is, "everything is so big and vast. I can't believe They/He/She/It made it all for us." The other is, "Everything is so big and vast, and we are so tiny and short-lived. Our existence is so meaningless in the face of it."
The idea that what we're experiencing now is just a simulation strikes me as a variation of the first response. I reject it, generally, because if there was a simulation running, and we were the point of it, I wouldn't be able to look at things through a microscope and see such great detail, would I? How many wasted cycles calculating things like bacterial colonization of worm guts, and for what purpose? What would be the point of such a complex simulation?
However... "this is a simulation" does make an interesting solution to Fermi's Paradox. The reason nobody else is out there is that the runner of the sim didn't want anyone else out there. He's focusing on this planet. Everything we see beyond it is the equivalent of a slightly complicated painted backdrop?
No matter which way I come at the concept, I'm left a little depressed. I can't ever really escape the second response, no matter how much I wish I could.
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Well, if it is a simulation then it just needs to process your inputs and outputs. It must be very powerful but it would have limits. So at an atomic level the info runs out and we can't see anything more and think it's the bottom of the well and at the top of the range, 4000 light years away.
Then the upgrade came and we found out that their were quarks and other galaxies.