david_ar

Thanks. Perhaps, feel free to send me some more details about it

Heh, I'm not sure how to answer that question. As much of a god as in a god game, I suppose, SimEarth was a big source of inspiration for me. I occasionally get a vague urge to create new life and worlds, which led to this project at a time when that urge was particularly strong. I have a lot of respect for people who are able to do worldbuilding with just their minds, I tend to require a computer to do it for me.

Yeah, I took a bit of artistic license with the timescales, in reality the systems evolve at such different rates that's it difficult to visualise them all simultaneously. Towards the end of the video some of the geological simulations switch off to signal a change in timescale as human populations spread, but it's still not entirely physically accurate.

Author here. This was definitely something I struggled with when creating this simulation. Reasonably fast simulations of tectonics and erosion have already been done before: some parts were tricky to translate to the constraints of a shader, but the parallelism pays off in being able to run the simulation at interactive speeds. The difficult part was the global climate model. I spent a while researching existing methods, but as you say, many of these are computationally expensive scientific simulations.

In the end I just downloaded some data for the Earth and went about seeing how well I could replicate climate maps with some simple curve fitting in a Jupyter notebook. After some trial and error, I was surprised to find that you could actually approximate things quite well with sine curves and some blurring, as described in the article.

Overall I learnt a lot about Earth systems from this project, it was a fun hobby for a few months. I have some ideas for taking it further, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, or want to discuss any ideas you have about it.

My point is that people have been making the same complaint for a very long time, even back when people paid for news printed on sheets of paper.

"This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. [...] I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable."

--- George Orwell, 1942

I'm curious as to when this mythical age of widespread access to "real news" existed. George Orwell dated it to at least 80 years ago ("History stopped in 1936")...

They kind of did do that with Offline Gmail, though.

> Do normal humans publish "waking hours"? Not typically.

It would kind of be great if they did though, it's not necessarily the same for everyone in the same geographic location.