Also, simulating one's ancestors would be something that you'd only need to do once, or (more likely) enough times to accommodate different theories. Simulating one's ancestors in what-if scenarios would probably be more common, unless the simulators just don't care about that sort of fun.
Jonathan Birch recently published an interesting critique of Bostrom's simulation argument. Here's the abstract:
The paper is behind a paywall, but I have uploaded it to my shared Dropbox folder, here.
EDIT: I emailed the author and am glad to see that he's decided to participate in the discussion below.