The Magic Eight Ball of Your Existence

often difficult to make. But put yourself in the in the boots in the gold studied jewel encrusted boots of a king or or an Elvis, somebody who's whose decisions are are are sweeping that change the escape of international politics and economics. We're talking about huge ripple effect globally, globally, huge political leaders, leaders of multinational companies, policymakers, The decisions

that they make UH can have catastrophic effects. They can they can change the world for the better for the worst. So in UH, in ancient times, you know, you would have the emperor and he would have like a sourcerer or a diviner there too. I was gonna say, an oracle or an oracle, you know, there would be some sort of magical go to man to bounce these ideas off of and be like, hey, I'm trying to figure

out what to do about this. I don't know this protest situation in the streets, um, but I'm not really sure what to do. Can you look into your magic pool of water and see what the future is going to be, um, and tell me what I should do? Now? Of course, there's no such thing as magic. There is, so I'm sorry atually to tell me that my fortune cookies are full of bunk, except the ones where the fortune is general advice. But but we we love the

idea of being able to do that. Mainly we want to we want to test our assumptions about what should be done versus the outcome of those assumptions in the real world. So what you're saying is that if leaders had some sort of magic ball, right that they could ask a question of and it could it actually spit out an answer that was valid, we could uh really manage our lives on a global scale in the much cleaner,

better way. That's the idea. But of course, to power that magic eight ball, you would need some pretty intense computer technology, and you would you would basically have to have a computer model of everything under there. Uh. And in the same day, in our attempts to understand global climate UH, and just not even global climate, just local weather to find out whether whether we should have a picnic tomorrow. Can I plan on mo in my yard? Should I would bring a raincoat with me to the

to the train station, that kind of thing. We depend on these these climate models, which UHL is we've discussed in the past. Creating an an accurate climate model is very difficult. There's so many factors involved. It's a it's largely chaotic system, and it's it's difficult to judge. Like every every day that you're into the future that you look, the more flawed the model becomes. But but still we we depend on the community computer models for for our

understanding of what the weather is going to be. And if conceivably, if we created a complex enough computer model, could we not have a a kind of simulation of the world in which to test our ideas. So you would have this politician or this policymaker somewhere in a position of power, gold stilettos, and she's thinking to herself, what should I do? Should I enact this policy or

this policy? Well, bring me the magic eight ball and I will ask it in the magic eight ball will then run two scenarios in the in its simulation of the world, one in which policy A is enacted and one in which policy B is enacted. Okay, but this magic eight ball would have to aggregate data of our entire existence, right, so we're talking about the economic existence, are social um existence, the geographical existence um, you know,

the physics of our existence. All of this, uh, would have to be something that we could get our arms around, all this data, right, and and and then we have to have a name for this, all this data. We

call it big data. Big data name for it. And it's kind of like imagine, like the way I was kind of thinking, because I'm writing about some related issues here for work, so I've been been researching, and the way I tend to think of it is imagine, imagine like this this field, all right, this flat plane, right,

what's not completely flat. There's some slight bumps in it enough to where you have numerous puddles of water, and then it starts raining, right, those puddles get bigger and bigger until those puddles all meet and then you have like a giant lake. And so that's the kind of Uh, that's how I like I end up imagining big data because every day we create an estimated two point five quin trillion bytes of data. So to the point of the data in the world today has been created in

the last two years alone. And when I say big data, like this is all these little puddles of data that form this giant lake of big day. We're talking about everything we'll climate sensors, to your to everyone's Facebook and Twitter updates, to digital text, digital video and picture upload.

Stuff you're putting on Flicker, stuff you're putting on YouTube to just to show visions of the world, ideas about what the world is doing, online transaction records, cell phone GPS signals, all of it is coming together into this big picture of big data, right and right now it's chaos to us, right, I mean, this is not something that we've tried to manage before to get a picture of what our lives look like using all of this big data, although some people, some institutions have tried to

do it at a smaller scale, like NASA. Right, it's kind of like imagine the dude or a lady who starts just picking up buying a book every day and doesn't doesn't have any kind of accurate library system going in their house. They just bring a book or to home. They maybe they read a little bit of one, they throw on here, throw on here. Eventually they have an

entire house just filled with books. But they have no system of organization to understand how many books they have, how their selection in one category stacks up against another, or even kind of like just a general idea of what kind of books they like. Um. So we were in this household of big data where data is just everywhere, on everything, but we we tend to lack a complete picture of what that data is telling us. What we're getting to is that there is actually in the works

a a proposal and an enactment of this idea. It's a billion a half dollar idea computing system to actually try to wrangle all of this data. Right. It all falls under the this project known as UH Future I C T, which is really three parts. There's a planetary nervous system and the idea here is you would um, it's like a global sensor network throwing in all sorts of socio economic, environmental, technological data from around the world. Again, like the big day of the big data in the

world is from the last two years. Although there it's the the timiness of this data as it's rolling in. So if you put up enough, put up enough sensors, you you hooked into enough existing data networks, you would have like a real time picture of what is happening in the world and all these different spheres. Okay, and the guy who is heading it all up is dirt helping. He's the Scientific Coordinator of the Future i c T. Which is that what you're talking about, this large scale

European research program to explore and manage our future. And he's talking about the necessity to understand complex global, socially interactive systems. He's saying that we live in a global world and this requires new tools. Yeah, and uh, if i'm engine the first tool the planetary nervous system. Another tool, which we'll get into later, is the Global Participatory Platform, which you can think of in a way sort of

like this the the interactive aspect of this project. But then the really core thing, the thing that we're going to talk in detail about here is the Living Earth simulator. And this is exactly what we were talking about, the engine that would drive this imaginary eight ball magic eight ball. I love this idea because to me it seems like a souped up second life. Yeah, where it's or it's

you can't help. But even though it's it's probably not kosher to really talk about the matrix anymore after the last two films, but it sounds very matrix like the idea that here is here, there's a simulated world where we would we would bring in all this data to create a model of the world on which we can test possible choices. Well, and have you ever seen Google's Liquid Earth. I don't think I have. It's really cool. It's a it's actually created as like someone's project over

at Google. So the Skuy's time, he decided to dedicate to the Google Earth model that they have, you know that consuming on the cities, and he created this highly immersive program has eight panels surrounding you. She almost feel like you're in a video game. And the idea I think is that you know, you can zoom in and out and you can see the taj Mahal and you

can see all the details. Um So when I think about this Earth simulator, this Living Earth simulator, I think about this sort of immersive situation and where you can be on a city street, you can zoom in and you'll have all of this data overlaid on top of it real time, right, And again, real time is key when we're talking about all this data. Um so Dr Dirk Um, Dr Dirk, Dr Dirk he Um. He's very

expressive about all of this. He makes the point that in the past, we we didn't really have the data to come up with a systemic science of how our society works. But now we have this data, right, and of course who could have conceived of it right? Right? Right? Who could have conceived of it in the past. And he's saying it's it's necessary to keep up with globalization, technological change. You have all these systems like smashing into each other. In fact, he often refers to the living

or simulator is a knowledge collider. The idea that you would take all this data and in the same way that the the large hypn collider is is slamming particles together to try to understand how the universe works. This is about like slamming all this information together and seeing

what happens. Which I like this idea because although I will say that it doesn't sound like it's going to be quite that dynamic, because this is this is predictive modeling that we're talking about, and as and as we discussed in the weather example, predictive modeling is uh imperfect at best. Uh. There there are various arguments about what can be done with computer modeling of of complex systems.

There are plenty of arguments that state that you cannot form a perfect model of a complex system that you're you're never gonna be able to to really get down into the exact minusha of it. Uh. It's kind of like with our our ability to understand whether you can look at data telling you what the weather has been like at a particular place, particular times of the year, and you can use that and you can create a general idea of what the weather is going to be

in the future. You know, I can see, like say March third, We can take March third for Atlanta, Georgia, run it all the way through the past as far as the recorded data goes, and we can get a general idea of what March thirds in the future are going to be because it's the their their seasonal aspects

to all of this. There is currents, but it's not that far away from Richard's Almanac, right, or Richard's Almanac, which is what two hundred years old or something that they've been, um, you know, recording all the weather systems to try to predict the best time to plant crops and some one and so forth. So yeah, there's it's different. Um you know, technologies of course to have are in play now that inform us, but it's you know, the

unpredictability factor is still there. But before we talk about that, I just wanted to talk about the impetus for this whole creation. This the the future I see because because it's we can agree that it's a wonderful idea, but what potentially gets the money behind this idea? And uh and that's what Yeah, billion and a half dollars. The European Commission selected the Living Earth Simulator, which is part of this project right as a way to help predict

economic conditions. And this was brought up by the Greek financial crisis because as we know now, it's severely undermine the European Union and a lot of people are saying, well, perhaps, uh, you know, grease should pull out of the euro Zone. And if they were to do that, what would be the ramifications? You know, you would have a highly devalued currency for Greece. But what does this mean on a practical level, for for a global economy. Does this mean

that trade routes would alter? Would there be less disease? Actually, because it would be a less tourist, less people traveling to Greece. Um, they're saying, I wish we had to magic eight ball to ask about this. Dr Dirk says, I have one. I can build one for you. Will only cost a billion and a half. There you go. Yeah.

So they have all these different questions about what would happen if this were the scenario, because of course they don't want Grease necessarily to pull out and you know for the EU to crumble, right, I mean these are big stakes. It's like a big economic ginga game. Um, yeah, it is. It is um. And And then also you know you can use this for for other huge situations or high impact and situations. I should say, like for

instance of volcano eruption. UM could tell you what the short term economic growth is going to be, as well as the effect it may have on everything from education to the distribution of vaccines, political unrest. UM. Disease epidemics was another one. How disease is spread across the world, how we should be prepared for the spread, and that was actually modeled on how the dollar bills are circulated in the United States, which is really interesting that they

use this as a model. And again we'll talk about the limitations of using these types of models for other instances such as disease epidemics. One of the real world systems that this is based on is UH as actually the urban traffic the idea of typically congested traffic and urban area and how do you how do you figure

out what's going wrong, how do you combat it? How do you deal with the little pockets of unrest and change that eventually cascade into just complete gridlock, right, and and Dirk helping this is really his knowledge center, you know, this is something he's been concentrating on in his career. Um in this case it's human and machine traffic patterns.

Helving actually consulted on a project that model the movement of pedestrians during the Hajj in Mecca, resulting in a billion dollars of street and bridge rejiggering to prevent deaths from trampling. So this is yeah, this is of course one of the pillars of Islam. Uh and the the idea that if you were able, you take this pilgrimage

to Mecca to see the holy sites. So it creates a lot of challenges just for the infrastructure in Saudi Arabia to how do you deal with all these these visitors coming to the country to to see these sites and do so in a way that doesn't, like you said, result in trampling, result in starvation. I'm not starvation, but the hydration. I watched an interesting video here just back.

It was actually put up by the Saudi government that it was kind of their their video of saying, hey, we got it under control, don't worry when you come

on the hodge. It's like a public service and yeah, yeah, and uh, you know, so it was definitely coming from from the said of government, but it but it was really interesting because they did go into all these various things that they are doing and or have done in the past to try and and limit the congestion or or or things like the hydration making sure there's plenty of water. Yeah, and this is a really cool model.

But of course there are limitations to this type of model, and in particular, if you look at the Hajje or highways, everyone is moving in the same direction. Right, This is highly predictable, which underlies one of the main criticisms of trying to predict the future based on these types of models. Um, what we know and can predict is actually far less than what we don't actually know, because in real life there's not just a northbound lane and a southbound lane

and turn lane there. It's commendously more complex and every every layer of complexity, Um, I mean it just makes the overall model that much more are difficult to create. Right. And there's actually a term for this. Yes, yes, they're called black Swan events. And when we return, we shall reveal what the black Swan is. The black Swan we're back. The black Swan is, uh, is not a crazy ballerina who turns into a bird. It's true, Yeah, just to

get that out there. Uh, but it is actually an incredible theory about not only the auliers who change the world, but the way that we try, the way the way that we don't understand, um, the importance of those outliers in retrospect, and the reason why we we it's called the black Swan event for black Swan events is because for I don't know, decades hundreds of years. Actually people thought that there were no black swans because all that

had been documented were white swans. Right, so people thought really like that there are no black swans, um, there are only white swans. And in fact they were so confident of this information that black swan became sort of this this uh code word for for you know, something not existing, right, just be something of medical fantasy. Really, yeah, there's there's actually a Latin term that talks about this,

but low and the whole. Some dude in the eighteen hundreds visits Australia documents a black swan, and all of a sudden, this this uh certainty, this this absolute idea that there were no black swans on the white swans was turned on its head. Yeah. It reminds me a lot of two events in the last several years, one being the maybe half hour or so that it seemed possible that we had found Bigfoot and Bigfoot's body was

in a cooler in the in the middle Georgia. Uh. And of course that turned out to be complete bunk bunk. But but for a for a very brief time, I was like, oh my goodness, what if they what if this is it? What if if the the world in which Bigfoot is an unproven mythical creature is about to end, and I am entering into a new world in which Bigfoot is a reality, proven reality, what would that be like?

Another example would be in the last year. And the jury is still out on exactly what these findings means. But the findings out of cern regarding faster than light particles. The idea, I mean the speed of light is is based on our understanding of physics, uh a universal speed limit. Nothing can go faster than that, um, because I mean it would break the universe, to break our understanding of

the universe, it would be a black swan. And then suddenly we have this finding saying, yeah, we we clocked some uh some phimotomic particles going fast in the speed of light. And everybody's like, whoa, I doubt it. Uh, you know, let's let's do some let's study this, let's uh, let's find out if if you're if your findings are actually accurate here. But if they are, it changes everything. It's it just forces us to complete to enter this new world where the rules are are different than we

originally perceived them to be. Right, there's a book by Nacineing Nicholas Talub And he's a distinguished professor of Risk Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute that n y u UM. He has this book black Swan, and he talks about these black Swan events is having three attributes, and the attributes are rarity, extreme impact in retrospective and what he means by that is the first, for for for it to be a black Swan event, it has to be an outlier. Right, it's outside of our realm of expectations

because nothing in the past would have predicted that it existed. Right. Second, it carries an extreme impact. The ripples of its existence are far reaching. Right, and like the photon, I mean the subatomic particle example here definitely lines up with those two right if true? If true? Right, that's that's the key there. For that third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the after the fact, making it explainable to us and

seemingly predictable. Okay, So he says that there are examples of this all around us, like the two thousand and four tsunami, the Rise of Hitler nine eleven, UH, the advent of the Internet. He says, there all all black Swan events that we didn't expect were outliers, changed our culture, um forever right, Uh, changed society, changed world events and uh.

And also the things that we we scrambled afterwards to try to explain their existence, to to try to make them feel not so much like these voids of knowledge to us, because a lot of people would say, oh, well, if we could just only have done this, we would have you know, avoided the tsunami or voted nine eleven. So he actually says, and this is a quote from his book, Um, this is from the intro. He says,

what did people learn from the nine eleven episode? They did they learn that some events, owing to their dynamics, stand largely outside the realm of the predictable. No, did they learn the built in defect of conventional wisdom? No? What they what did they figure out? They learned precise rules for avoiding Islamic proto terrorists and tall bill links. And this, he says, is a real problem because we learned so specifically that we try to apply this model again.

You know, we're talking about model systems over and over again. So he's saying Okay, we learned some sort of lesson from there, but it's so specific it deals with strong predators and tall buildings, that it doesn't necessarily say that we learned a lesson there that helps us to avoid terrorism altogether. Right, I mean, and that comes down to just to wear of our minds work. And we were

talking about this before the podcast. Inevitably, when we're talking about the way we think about the world, we end up falling back on on examples and involve our ancestors, and like savor tooth tigers, like the sabre tooth tiger attacks you, you learn a lesson, but it's gonna be a very specific lesson in these cases, how to avoid

being eaten? How did you avoid being eaten on this particular this particular encounter, right we we He would argue that um Talent would argue that our brains really aren't built for thinking per se, because if our ancestors had stopped to think, you know, that probably would have been torn apart by the sabre tooth tiger. Right, Um that we are so much more invested in pattern recognition and

UH predictability models than unpredictability. So he's saying that now we live in this entirely complex world, and we can't really conceive of all the black swans around us. You know, we think about eighteen hundreds. Probably it is a lot more simple, Right, you were going to turn some butter milk, some cows, um things were you have far less choices. Um,

it was a far lex complex world. So he's saying, really, our brains haven't caught up to it, and that's why we are actually blind to all of the black swans

around us. Well, you know, just think back, you know, I'm speaking to everyone, to you the listener, Just think back on your own life and and just how how little of it you could have possibly predicted you could you know, all the all the little things that have that have led you to this place in your life, that the decisions, the the the bits of of just fate and blind luck and uh and here you are. But you look back on it and you see it, uh the way our perspective on it works. Um, you

don't see those black swans even in our own personal history. Right. But but if you really look closely and you see that there probably are a series of random events. Right. We we plan to the best of our ability, and things happen, and life takes us down different roads, right, and you know, in retrospect we can probably explain some of those away and apply some sort of pattern to them.

But Talib would say that it's complete randomness. Um. And he says, actually, the world is dominated by black swans and that they are the norm. And so this is interesting when he says this, because if you if you take this up face value, it means that this, uh, this Earth simulator is probably not going to work in the way that that the European Commission actually wants it to. Yeah, it's it wouldn't be a situation where, oh, just occasionally you have a black swan that throws the monkey wrench

into the into our our understanding the world. It's not like occasionally, oh occasionally, there's been a lot. Occasionally there'sn't there's a Hitler or Einstein that kind of changes the way it works. You know, he's saying they're everywhere. That that that that the world continues to change at a at a at a steady rate based on the actions of these various black swans, both individuals and just random events in the world around us and these very spheres

of activity. Right, So it's great to have these predictive models, but if you can't build in some sort of system for ferreting out black swans, or you don't have a system in there, and that says, okay, well, we think this is going to happen based on what's you know, historically the data stream that's coming in. But if you can't run that up against something that says, you know, forget it, this might actually not happen, or you have five other variables, uh, then sort of it sort of

discounts the system as a whole. And even if you did have the black swan effect or events built in, you're still not going to get that one answer that they so desperately want. This says this is the right answer, because you're gonna get four variables, five variables, ten variables spit out at you and you're back at square one. And and then this is something that really blew my mind. Um when you when you think, imagine you did build this just enormously complex, uh model of the world, this

living Earth simulator. What gets me is the feedback loop loops you eventually fall into because because because you're building, you're building a model of the world that has access to a model of the world, that has access to a model of the world, that has access to a model of the world, and it just like it just it blows my mind to think of that. How would that pan out? It just would the complexity would just

would spiral out forever. Well, and there's another point here that even if you did have a couple of answers spit out in a in a scenario, right, that seemed like, Okay, this is the best course of action. Because you have such a complex system and you can't even understand how that data came to that conclusion, then you're probably less likely to trust it in the first place. Yeah. Yeah, And in fact, it lines up interestingly with climate change

Man Maine climate change and our our attempts to understand it. Uh, the scientific findings that have come out arguing, uh, the point that hey, humans are are altering global climate and here are some things we should do to stop it. And and just and just how how little of that has been has resonated with the decision makers and with the general public in some cases. Right, Right, So they

have a bunch of information there and they still can't act. Yeah, we ask our our our biggest reasoning machine that we have available to a science what we should do about a given situation, we get an answer for it, and not not everyone's gonna listen. So is there gonna be any better if we have a a complex simulation of of existence that we can turn to our people are

gonna trust that? And indeed, are people are going to trust this supercomputer that has that is using reasoning that we can't even fathom, uh, to tell us of what we should do? And what if what indeed if if it's a suggestion is something that seems nonsensical? Well, and there's this whole idea too, that all of this is predicated on us even understanding our existence in the first place, and how our existence is the fact that you and I are sitting here and everybody you guys are listening.

This is a black Swan event in and of itself. And what I mean about that is the odds of our existence. Um. There's a Harvard professor Dr Ali Benazzar who says, so, what's the probability of you existing? This is a quote. It says, it's the probability of two million people getting together about the population of San Diego, each to play a game of dice with trillion sided dice. They each roll the dice and they all come up

with the exact same number. Say, five hundred and fifty trillion, three hundred forty three million, two hundred seventy nine thousand and one. That's the number. So, you know, we've talked about this before to just in terms of the rare Earth theory, about how the fact that life on Earth came about in and how there's circumstances were just right. But this is a rarity as far as we know, right, Yeah, so it's you know, we have a whole podcast devoted

to this. But but the arguments often come down to, um, it's such a rare event that this Earth exists, Does that mean that we're special or you know? But but we can't think scientifically, we can't view ourselves as special. So how do we how do we wrap our heads around that one? So yeah, yeah, there you go, There

you go. And then if this if this simulator, if this future set, if it actually it works right, if it comes to fruition and it's useful in naturally predicting uh black swans really, because that's what the end result of that should be. Uh, then What does that mean about science? What does that mean about thought experiments? You know, if everything is answerable and predictable, is at the end

of science? I don't know. And and then likewise it also brings to mind any kind of corporate situation where you have a problem. What's the first thing people do? Meeting about it? Committee about it. Let's form a task force to to talk about this, uh, this situation and come up with some recommendations to what extent would this simulation this uh, this Living Earth simulator be a version of that where we're like, oh, we have a problem. Um, you know, there's a there's a there suffering in the

world somewhere. What should we do about it? Throw into the simulator and then we get the results, and then the simulator gives us a list of recommendations and we end up following none of them. Right, we don't have the budget for that, right because we've we've talked about it. We we put the the info into the machine. It

uh it does spit us out some numbers, so we're good. Right, Well, at least we can finally uh let the cat out of Shreddinger's box, right, yeah, all right, Well, let's have the Robot bring us something to read reading Donald, Thank you. There we go. All right, Well, we heard from a listener by the name of Dustin. Dustin Wright sentences Hi, Robert, Julie and the rest of the STB y M staff. I wanted to say thanks for your episode on mesophonium.

My whole life has been driven nuts by chewing, swallowing and smacking. I always thought that my reaction wasn't normal, but now I realized that I'm not alone out there. It was really fascinating to hear about others triggers. At least I know when I expect my triggers and can take steps to cope with the overwhelming anxiety. If a person's trigger was the crunching of leaves, then that must be hell. I really hope that the more research that develops on this topic. Thanks for all of your hard

work and the wonderful show. Yeah, that was really great. We've had so many people right in about mesophonia. It's really interesting. It seems to be just anecdotally, uh more widespread than we saw. Yeah. I mean, I find myself thinking about it all the time too. Whenever I let petty things sounds annoy me, and I sort of have to step back and I'm like, maybe have a touch of messophonia. And then I'm like, well be conscious of it, don't let it irk you in. And luckily I don't

have severe enough reactions that that doesn't work. Yeah. Yeah, you know what, Chris, this was hard for me because I've got a three year old and there was a lot of start from around and I was constantly stop. All right, here's another one just from listener Neil. Neil writes and it says, Hi, Robert and Julie's super podcast again, didn't know about Terry Pratchett's sword made out of meteor? Do they call him sky swords? He's a responding tore away of the Sword podcast. Just a note on kindo.

The foot stomp happens at the time of the strike or cut, not before, or at least not as a warning. The stomp uh fumi komi is part of the cut. Typically, for a cut to be counted, you need to stomp, call out what you were cutting, and of course land the cut in the place that you have called out. This is all to demonstrate what kN Doka call key kin ta ichi, the oneness of the spirit key with

the sword. Can and the body tie. You can, of course foot stomp before a cut, but typically this is a thing to get a reaction, either a flinch or start from the other kim dooka, which might reveal a hesitate to exploit immediately or just put them on edge, or an attack which you might counterattack or otherwise blunt. I am not sure I would call it a warning, since the intention is usually not that charitable. That said, kendo is a great martial art, no disrespect to other

sword arts, and well worth the effort. Fun to boot and the gear is cool too. Anyway, thanks for the super podcast series, Cheers and Neil Cool. Yeah, I was so glad to hear the information. I saw some of the kendo in the documentary Reclaiming the Blade, and it seemed as though they were stomping as a warning. But it's great to share that information. It makes it even that much more intriguing of muscial art. Yeah, it's kind of it sounds a lot like it's kind of like

a like a lunch like you see. I mean, I not that I've ever been in a fight, but you know, you see people in like in a fighting situation, and one will sort of like Yeah, but I like this idea, this one oneness of the spirit and the sword and um, and that's why they did a little foot stomping. I also I was thinking that the little foot stoping because they have tiny little feet with Kendem Marshall artists have

tiny little fie. Okay, I'm kidding, um, but but I mean it made me think of playing pool, like if you were to call out a pocket, but you would do it at the same time that you were to hit the ball, or kind of like Babe Ruth like pointing the field is going to hit the ball. Yeah, thank you, sucker. Try just try to get it. Well. Hey, we would love to hear what anyone has to say about the the idea of a living Earth simulator. Um, what do you think about it? Depending do you do?

You do you think it's a great idea, do you think it's at all feasible? And how do you imagine a future in which we have access to one? Would you want an app on your phone? Yeah, because that was one of the things that they talk about, is the idea that if we had this simulator in place, you would basically be able to get apps where you could see like and I imagine someone would be kind of fun like. Someone will probably be like, what would

a zombie apocalypse actually look like? Let's load that in. What would it be like? If you know, just any kind of crazy scenario you could think of, you could conceivably have an app for it to to to load in to check. And you can just imagine everyone from any like every business in the world would have some sort of access to this model so they could test their various uh, promotional materials, etcetera. But let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

We are blow the Mind on Twitter, and you can find us on Facebook just by searching for stuff to blow the mind. And you can drop us a line at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.