There's got to be some benefit though that is worth the probable immense resources required to run such a simulation.

I have talked about all this more in my other comment here in response to this. But I came to the conclusion that it would likely need to come from a higher spatial dimensional reality, so the resource cost would not then be extreme. In that case, I concluded, we could very well indeed be a byproduct or something, or a source of simulated data / intelligence.