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Nvidia Is Simulating a Copy of the Earth
- whartung 3y agoI hope it's detailed. Curious to see how I turn out in it.
- thatxliner 3y ago...and then we start simulating human interactions to get a better understanding of the impact of campaigns, the effectiveness of advertisements, etc.
- chgs 3y agoAdvertising is a cancer on society. Any limited good it does is far outweighed by the bad. In a parallel timeline the smartest minds in the world are fixing climate and medical problems, further the limits of human knowledge and exploration, or even just making fun things to play with. In this world they are trying to outdo each other in brainwashing people to improve the profits of companies larger than most countries.
- m3kw9 3y agoI can also simulate earth it all depends on the detail.
- amlib 3y agoA 386 was more than sufficient to run Sim Earth, so I call that good enough.
- iancmceachern 3y ago(By destroying it using tons of hydrocarbons to do so)
- practicemaths 3y ago[dead]
- infamouscow 3y agoThese technologies are already using green energy. Let me guess, it's not green enough for you? Imagine if climate change advocates understood the fate of the Earth's climate is determined overwhelmingly by poor people in countries that don't care to be lectured by wealthy Western elites because they're poor. This hardware has a real possibility of enabling breakthroughs across all sectors of the world economy, and those poor people benefit the most from those advances. And since the activists refuse to grapple with this problem, I'm starting to be convinced they're just sociopathic maniacs or deeply racist lunatics. The thought of seeing anyone they deem below them rising to their status makes them seethe.
- cdata 3y agoI might think to suggest that unchecked capitalist exploitation of our natural world has an awful lot to do with the inequities you brought into the discussion. And, if you grant me that this is possibly true (even if unconvincing or unprovable), surely you would agree that someone who believes such a thing would be prosocial and certainly not racist to scoff at the notion that somehow ever-more-unchecked-exploitation is the path to absolution.
- brigadier132 3y ago> capitalist exploitation Ah ok
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI don’t know how absolution figures into this or how providing an API for simulations of earths weather systems is some escalation of unchecked exploitation. In fact there was a HN headline article recently that extreme weather hurts the poorest nations because they lack the infrastructure to predict the weather well. Wouldn’t having such an API be of assistance? Is it possible that technology that’s three orders of magnitude more efficient (as they claim) be a boon to the poorest countries that are roughly three orders of magnitude less capable of affording advanced infrastructure like this? Or is grinding political ideology axes more important than actually making important things possible for the poorest countries?
- kstenerud 3y agoAKA the Nirvana Fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy If it's not perfect in every way, it's bad.
- underlogic 3y agoNot a problem; by the time they get to Earth-5 we will be mining iridium oxide from AJ3905
- theandrewbailey 3y agoI thought Earth 2 was a crypto scam thing. https://earth2.io/ https://earth2.io/
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoEarth 2 was a sci-fi TV series in the 90s
- sircastor 3y agoI really enjoyed that show. I was 14 though. My tastes weren't particularly refined. Tim Curry, Terry O'Quinn, Clancy Brown - they didn't do so bad on some casting choices.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoI was really young. Like 7. It really stuck in my memory. My first disappointment in a show being cancelled
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- quasarj 3y agoUh-oh
- grumpopotamus 3y agoThe box contains everything.
- sergiotapia 3y agoToo good and relevant not to share here: https://qntm.org/responsibility https://qntm.org/responsibility
- senortumnus 3y agoTermination Shock plot device
- helsinkiandrew 3y agoPlatform details: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/high-performance-computing/earth-2/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/high-performance-computing/eart...
- jazzyjackson 3y ago> early access for climate tech partners > coming soon > coming soon Answered my questions, thanks
- sandspar 3y agoI ran it through an Nvidia translation AI and it came out as "give us money"
- late2part 3y ago“I have a map of the United States... Actual size. It says, 'Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.' I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.” ― Steven Wright
- exabrial 3y agoDidn’t Japan do this? Earth simulator or something
- molticrystal 3y agoProbably not what you are thinking of, but on a side note, I know there was a visual novel by the Steins;Gate people called Anonymous;Code about the evolution of Earth Simulators.
- feverzsj 3y agoYes, they claimed PS3 can simulate earth.
- pezezin 3y agoYes, they built a supercomputer called Earth Simulator 20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Simulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Simulator
- hettygreen 3y agoFor those that remember the James Burke show "Connections", he also did a program called "After the Warming" that's staged like a documentary that takes place in the future after humanity has solved the global warming crisis. In that show, policy makers use a computer simulation of the world to quantify the limits that they set on emissions, and all of the nations in the world come together to make it happen and look back on this age as an important lesson. I believe there's a low-res VHS rip of it available somewhere if you search, which gives the whole thing an eerie feeling of discovering an alternate-reality documentary.
- hn_version_0023 3y agoThis appears to be the entire program: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip_394-65h9wd4r https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip_394-65h9wd4r
- ptrott2017 3y agoFor those outside US where content is currently not available at your location: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=451xJqNGFqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=451xJqNGFqU
- barbarr 3y agoNvidia is really embracing the hype train I see... I'm assuming this model is in the same vein as ECMWF, GFS, ICON, CMC, and NAVGEM. Imagine if the NOAA or an academic lab released such a model called it "Earth 2.0" or "Earth's digital twin". It would just feel... like hubris? Not sure why (or how) Nvidia gets away with such messaging.
- behringer 3y agoHubris is allowed in marketing
- perrygeo 3y agoExactly. Different tech and different buzzwords over the decades but the idea of building a global GIS or a spatial model of the world is not at all revolutionary. Not by half a century. "Digital Twin" is just the latest buzzword, and it's falling short of expectaations per usual. I was hoping the AI buzz would kill the digital twin. But now it looks like we're getting "AI-enabled digital twin". Hype trains a rollin'.
- bjterry 3y agoNASA has a project they call the Earth System Digital Twin (ESDT): https://esto.nasa.gov/earth-system-digital-twin/ https://esto.nasa.gov/earth-system-digital-twin/. The ESA also uses the same language at https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/09/Digital_Twin_Earth https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/09/Digital_Tw...
- bitschubser_ 3y agoThe Copernicus project (esa, ecmwf) also markets some products as „digital twins“
- barbarr 3y agoOh, I had no clue. The Tony Stark-esque spinning earth graphics are hilarious. Guess the hype train catches everyone then.
- rokkitmensch 3y agoShades of Snow Crash.
- erie 3y agoNvidia has dabbled before in similar undertaking, Keyhole in 2001 raised first round funding from NVIDIA and Sony Digital Media Ventures, making official its existence as a standalone company. Keyhole’s first product, EarthViewer 1.0, was the true precursor to Google Earth.
- servus45678981 3y agoThe real precursor was a german project, at the end of the cold war in Berlin; it was called terravision.
- bufferoverflow 3y agoThe big problem with precise weather simulations is that we don't have the sensors in 3D. They are all pretty much sitting on the surface, apart from some weather balloons. So we don't have precise data for wind, temperature, pressure apart from the surface. And all of these factors change A LOT with altitude.
- akie 3y agoWe have weather satellites observing everything from above though. Combined with the ground based sensors we have a pretty decent clue.
- tempaccount420 3y agoYeah, this seems like the perfect problem for AI to solve. Combine different data and find hidden relations.
- bufferoverflow 3y agoWrong. Satellites only look at the surface and maybe clouds when available. We have almost no data from above the surface. Very few weather balloons.
- woopsn 3y agoNo, over a million meteorological observations are collected each day by commercial airplanes, and these are a principle source of data for weather models. Weather balloons and other sounding instruments (satellites are capable of this) also make significant contributions, of course. It's been proven for decades, the big problem with weather simulation is that the dynamics are chaotic. They continue to be, even as we collect more data from the surface and above. Our forecasts improve, slowly (by a day per decade or so, historically), but simulation cannot be accurate and precise in the same sense. A good introduction is "Weather Prediction: What everyone needs to know"
- Semionilo 3y agoAre you stating this because you are a weather researcher or because you think that? Because we do have weather balloons and weather satellites and weather stations in variant heights and situations.
- falcor84 3y agoWhat is the purpose of the word "copy" in the title sentence? Shouldn't it just be "Nvidia is Simulating the Earth"?
- forgotpwd16 3y agoThe press release calls it an "Earth climate digital twin" and project is named Earth-2.
- falcor84 3y agoBoth are essentially synonyms of "simulation", but "simulating a copy" sounds to me like a "simulation of a simulation"
- Nevermark 3y agoI see room for distinguishing between a particular model + simulation protocol, vs. a model designed for flexibly running qualitatively different simulations designed by different researchers. For the latter, emphasis on the model as a platform vs just a simulation, makes sense. I.e. a “digital twin’ meaning a rich flexible model capable of being the basis of many different simulation scenarios, not limited to a designed in class of simulations.
- esperent 3y agoIt makes it sound like Nvidia is doing something futuristic and exciting. Whereas if they said "Nvidia is creating a highly detailed climate simulation", very few people would read it.
- lazylion2 3y ago= clickbait
- blueboo 3y agoThis is the latest in a particular thread in Earth science research. Most prominently reminds me of the EU’s Destination Earth https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/what-we-do/environmental-services-and-future-vision/destination-earth https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/what-we-do/environmental-serv... - another digital twin of Earth climate NASA has another project https://esto.nasa.gov/earth-system-digital-twin/ https://esto.nasa.gov/earth-system-digital-twin/