Ancestor simulations
So, I had one of those extremely out there thoughts that I just had to share with my future self and/or my 5 fans.
It’s generally accepted that the universe we’re in is *not* deterministic – in fact that it’s not deterministic down to it’s extremely random quantum underpinnings. But – if it *were* – and it could be, and still show all the same complexity – emergent effects are interesting things – it’s possible that someone found just the media / recordings / whatever from a civilization and was/is able to regenerate what we’re currently experiencing from them – or even that the media we publish could act as a checksum for whether the simulaion is going right i.e. even the slightest drift from the expected simulation could produce different output.