Ghostbusters.
Hear me out, while I get the guy representing the EPA in that movie was an asshole bureaucrat on a power trip, they literally had plutonium powered particle accelerators strapped to their backs in the middle of one of the most densely populated urban areas in the world behind only places like the Kowloon walled city. The villain of that story was basing his decisions that the ghostbusters were dangerous frauds using the established knowledge and science of the era that ghosts and supernaturally powered entities were woo-woo wacky nonsense.
The movie plot is consistent with whole self-made-man pro-business pro-libertarian theming that was popular back in the 1980s. If the guy down the street who claimed to be a psychic medium and exorcist started stockpiling nuclear material to fight ghosts, you’d be concerned too. The plot only works because the guys who believe in pure superstition and myth were right. And then, out of sheer narrative spite, the only guy trying to limit the amount of collateral damage those guys could cause gets boiling hot molten marshmallow dumped on him and probably ended up in the hospital with third degree burns over 90% of his body.
There’s a reason the second movie starts with them financially underwater because of all the destruction the first movie caused.
I think the “what if we’re all in a video game” take is a thought terminating cliche based solely on our own culture and experience.
I’m less certain that we’re not a brane stretched across the cosmological horizon projected backwards in time by the collapse of a universe-sized supermassive black hole, and that the answer of who runs the simulation or who’s making the hologram is no one. But mostly I think that because I cleave hard to the idea that any natural process that we hypothesize about should have a basis in an existing model. Black holes are something that we largely exist outside and can study and have a number of comparable features that make them ideal to test these thought experiments. There’s obvious uncertainties, like whether our universe is spinning, whether it even needs to be spinning, and the inconclusiveness of whether galaxies have inherited spin from that or not, but I also don’t buy for a second that the big bang doesn’t have an origin or natural cause or that it could possibly be “just is.”