History is full of plagues and other global threats of similar or worse scale. For example, I thought it could be argued that bubonic plague or smallpox were much bigger threats to humanity and individual humans than COVID 19. Yes from the inside COVID 19 feels particularly threatening, but I think that has more to do with the context in which it is happening, i.e. a world where it felt to many people like something like this couldn’t really happen. Smallpox, on the other hand, just kept killing people all the time for hundreds of years and everyone just accepted it as part of life. So on that measure COVID 19 doesn’t seem special to simulate vs. other similar types of threats humanity has faced.
Further, it’s hard to see why COVID 19 would be of interest to simulators. Presumably they would be technologically advanced enough that something like COVID 19 would not likely be interesting to learn from for some specific situation they are likely to deal with, so it would only be for historical purposes, hence I think the only relevant question is if COVID 19 is interesting enough that it would be more likely to be simulated than other past events, and I think no, so I think it offer no update to the likelihood that we are in a simulation.
I think no.
History is full of plagues and other global threats of similar or worse scale. For example, I thought it could be argued that bubonic plague or smallpox were much bigger threats to humanity and individual humans than COVID 19. Yes from the inside COVID 19 feels particularly threatening, but I think that has more to do with the context in which it is happening, i.e. a world where it felt to many people like something like this couldn’t really happen. Smallpox, on the other hand, just kept killing people all the time for hundreds of years and everyone just accepted it as part of life. So on that measure COVID 19 doesn’t seem special to simulate vs. other similar types of threats humanity has faced.
Further, it’s hard to see why COVID 19 would be of interest to simulators. Presumably they would be technologically advanced enough that something like COVID 19 would not likely be interesting to learn from for some specific situation they are likely to deal with, so it would only be for historical purposes, hence I think the only relevant question is if COVID 19 is interesting enough that it would be more likely to be simulated than other past events, and I think no, so I think it offer no update to the likelihood that we are in a simulation.