I enjoyed reading your article but, I think you focus too much on creating life as a reason for creating a simulated universe. In your Problems section you state, "Highly advanced civilizations may find it morally abhorrent to create a universe and populate it with living beings." It’s wrong to equate creating a universe with populating a universe. I can think of a number of reasons why an advanced culture would want to create a simulated universe, none of which stems from any desire to actually create life. The foremost reason in my mind (humanly biased as it is) would be to try to understand the universe by creating an accurate model. This would mean growing it from the beginning with as much fidelity as possible and watching it develop. Nowhere in this reasoning are there aspirations to create life. If the simulation were powerful enough to SUPPORT the creation of life it could possibly be an unintended side effect. This would alleviate the moral hazard. The fact of the matter is that low fidelity simulations of the universe already exist as tools for understanding the big bang, predicting the stock market, video games, etc., and because they are useful, powerful tools they will continue to evolve and be improved upon so that its only a matter of time before a high fidelity simulation of the universe is actually created. The irony of it all is that once a virtual universe is created by us, we will have all but proven that we are most likely living in a virtual universe.