That’s fair, the term is usually abused out of context. Let me give a bit more context: the amount of effort required would probably be up to a trillion dollars

That’s fair, the term is usually abused out of context. Let me give a bit more context: the amount of effort required would probably be up to a trillion dollars, just to be generous. You’re talking about making a generalized physics solver at-scale after all, a lot of domains we don’t even have a good model for how things work. It’s dangerous to assume that the scientists working on these projects/simulations don’t use generalized physics solvers just because they’re not ambitious. It’s almost universally because reality is messy and difficult to model in full, so approximations and compromises have to be made otherwise you’ll never get anything done. I find that mathematicians and theoretical physics peeps tend to fetishize universal solvers in this way, but the long and the short of it is those guys only fetishize it because they live in a perfect physics world where inconvenient factors are abstracted out to a coefficient and they just say “that’s an implementation problem”. Making simulators which can actually be trusted is difficult, time consuming, and sometimes completely counter-intuitive. So I wouldn’t call what this person is suggesting a “moonshot” per se, I’d more call it “attempting to create God”.