the simulation argument

Nick Bostrom offers a simulation argument

the simulation argument doesnt get you out of the dooms day argument. given we are in a simulation we will be 'deleeted' in the next "X" years based on the standard doom's day argument.

Furthermore the indifference principle also then implies somthign about the civilization running these simulations - ie that the civilizations cannot be older than a certain age otherwise the chance of them devoting huge amounts of computing power to this part of the simulation and not more of it becomes diminishingly small.

So you would get a limit for REAL human civilization (the one that is simulting us) that isn't all that much further out than the one for this simulation.

So the question then starts to become interested in what sort of computing power we can accumulate in the next few thousand years. we don't have to worry about the fraction of that resource likely to be devoted to ancestor civilizations because thats taken into account by the indifference principle already - although it might be that we take less programming space than a future human - it is debatable if that helps either (cf my analysis http://geniusnz.blogspot.com/2007/07/doomsday-argument.html)