If we are living in a simulation

If we are living within a simulated reality, it seems very likely that the entire span of our reality is happening in only a very brief period of time in the real world’s time scale. Any civilization with the ability to simulate reality likely has the ability to simulate it using any arbitrary value for the rate of the passing of time. Simulating it at a 1:1 time scale would be pretty useless for whatever purpose they may have. If we’re entertainment, or an experiment, or a machine of some kind designed to yield an answer to a question - in any case, you want it to happen right away, not over the course of billions of years. So probably our whole universe is “happening” in the blink of an eye. Which means that right now, if we could see what is happening in the real world within which our simulation is running, it would actually not appear to us to be moving forward in time at all. It would look like a paused DVD. Billions and billions of our simulated years would be zooming by inside of a real-world microprocessor in perhaps a millisecond of real-world time, so each year of our “time” would span only an infinitesimally small fraction of an infinitesimally small fraction of real-world time.

It seems difficult or impossible to come up with a means of determining anything whatsoever about the theoretical world in which our simulation would be running, since even if you could devise a method of sampling the real world, every sample would yield the same static data set, which might be indistinguishable from any randomly generated data set. You can’t monitor something that has doesn’t exhibit dynamics. How can we see what is “happening” in the real world when it is happening so slowly that to us it is not even happening at all?