What if they ran the simulation for too long, and accidentally created advanced life? Ethically they would be forced to continue to run it, otherwise they would be committing murder.
As a consequence, their government may have banned these types of simulations, to avoid the responsibility of keeping it alive until life is extinct. We are one of the few simulations that are still running
If they simply created us by mistake, we may be very different from what they are. Even the laws of physics could be different.
It would explain the Fermi paradox. They could be stopping advanced life to evolve on other planets, as they want to reduce the scope of the simulation. They created us by mistake and are waiting for advanced life on this planet to become extinct, so that they can finally shut down the expensive simulation.
> I still think if this is all just a simulation, it's some type of archeological study
This would actually address the inherent bounding problem of any such simulation setup.
(Meaning, any entity setting up and/or controlling such a simulation would have to guarantee resources with regard to multiple exponential runaways for any given time/simulation frame. How would you do that? Wouldn't this fundamental containment problem be impossible to solve? However, if your're dealing largely with "known unknowns", as in a reenactment, there are at least some heuristics for resource allocation.)
Seems the most obvious reason for a simulation would be to check the outcome from a series of different conditions. Eg what would have happened if humanity had done X? Was that pivot important? So we could just be someone’s history homework.
If that's possible, then presumably it would be possible to "see the future", too. Simulate our current universe, and fast forward to the present day, where you have to make an important decision. Modify variables in the simulation so that you make different decisions in the simulation, and then watch the results. Then you can decide in real life based on the outcome you want, that you observed in the simulation.
The accuracy of the simulation's predictive power of course depends on whether or not you are simulating the universe exactly. But I do wonder if there are some simplifications you can make. Say, you only simulate our solar system down to the quantum level, but simulate the light from outside our solar system based on past observation, at a macro scale.
Of course, the accuracy may also depend on whether or not "God plays dice with the universe"; if quantum effects are truly random, and can affect things that happen at a macro scale, then this future-viewing might not really work.
I still think if this is all just a simulation, it's some type of archeological study.