It is not the same, though. In knowing that life exists, and therefore extraterrestrial life could also exist, we are not making a claim that it does exist. It’s just a thought, of something that could be. Now, compare that to computer simulations. We know those exist, we made them. We have not yet found any evidence, however, of self aware software yet. We have not created it ourselves, yet, surely. We think it might be possible, but it might not be. Imagining that we might be in a simulation is fun, and saying something as meaningless as “our computational capabilities keep expanding.” sounds really clever, but actually is absent of any meaning at all. Nothing about our advancements makes self-aware software or living simulations an eventuality. It’s very shaky to take all that and say is any sort of solid evidence that reality being a simulation should be seriously considered.

Extraterrestrial life, however - and I am not saying life like us that is intelligent, or anything like extraterrestrial civilization - has a high probability of existing. Intelligent life? We have a pretty narrow sample size so far on evolving brains like ours.