> [...] in addition to several respected thinkers who have explicitly shared their probability of believe with regards to living in a simulation (ex. Elon Musk >99.9999999%, Nick Bostrom 20-50%, Neil deGrasse Tyson 50%, Hans Moravec “almost certainly”, David Kipping These "respected thinkers" would do well to go back to the roots of philosophy, which is wonder and uncertainty. The sheer amount of arrogance necessary…
I'd suggest reading up on this a bit more before passing judgment. Certainly some of these people are full of hot air, but it is actually reasonable to put ballpark numbers on the probability. There's currently one big unknown around this: is it even possible to simulate reality to the fidelity that we seem to observe around ourselves? If the answer is yes, then the probability that our reality is simulated does actu…
Not if those "ballpark numbers" are just gut instinct dressed up in order to appear more credible than a simple "uhhm, maybe?".
> is it even possible to simulate reality to the fidelity that we seem to observe around ourselves?
Nobody knows the answer, and nobody knows a realistic path to finding the answer in the near or medium future. Any claims to the contrary are just extrapolations from the knowledge and technologies available to us, which are utterly insufficient to cope with problems anywhere near that magnitude.
> Would you say that it's also pointless to try to estimate the probability that there is intelligent life on other planets?
Yes. In fact, I would go so far as to say that concepts such as the Drake equation are bordering on pseudoscience. The "science" angle simply doesn't add anything of value here. The Drake equation says little more than "probabilities can be chained by multiplication", which again is just a complicated way of stating an intuitive fact. Without estimates for the key factors (such as the probability that life develops into intelligent life), the equation doesn't provide any actual insight, whereas once those probabilities are known, the equation becomes trivially obvious.
I believe that the simple statement "we have no idea whether intelligent life exists outside the solar system" is not only obviously correct, but shows a deeper understanding of the problem than the Drake equation does. Recognizing when no actual knowledge is available can be a profound insight – far more profound than believing you have made progress because you've split the question into smaller questions.