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DanielLC comments on The Aliens have Landed! - Less Wrong
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What do you mean by "the real world"? Why does it matter if it's "real"?
The real world generally doesn't get turned off. Simulations generally do. That's why it matters.
If there were a simulation that one might reasonably expect to run forever, it might make sense to debate the issue.
Imagine that, instead of simulations, the spheres contained actual people. They are much smaller, don't have bodies the same shape, and can only seem to move and sense individual electrons, but they nonetheless exist in this universe.
It's still exactly the same sphere.
In any case, you only answered the first question. Why must something exist forever for it to matter morally? It's pretty integral to any debate about what exactly counts as "real" for this purpose.
Fundamentally this is a discussion about preferences. My point is that having preferences unconnected to your own everyday life doesn't promote survival or other outcomes you may want that are connected to your everyday life. In the long term the people we interact with will be the ones that win their everyday life, and in the shorter term the people who have power to do things will be the ones that win their everyday life. To the extent you get to choose your preferences, you get to choose whether you'll be relevant to the game or not.
To answer your question, if something stops existing, it stops pertaining to anybody's everyday life.
But fundamentally this conversation is broken. I really don't care much about whether you like my preferences or whether you like me. Human preferences generally do not have guiding principles behind them, so asking me needling questions trying to find contradictions in my guiding principles is pointless. If, on the other hand, you proposed a different set of preferences, I might like them and consider adopting them. As you can tell, I don't much like preferences that can be gamed to motivate people to exterminate their own species.
I thought this post was an attempt to argue for your set of preferences. If not, what is it?
It was an attempt to answer the question you asked and to indicate a potentially useful thing to talk about instead.