Simulation is a fundamental component of planetary intelligence. This is the conclusion of the Infinity Mirror project: a history of simulation technology produced by the interplay between military strategy, video games, and earth system science.
During the Anthropocene’s critical period (1950–2050), computing devices augmented with graphics processing units (GPUs) became the substrate on which a new kind of spatial intelligence was built, enabling the capacity to forecast, feedback, and modulate behaviors on a variety of scales.
Yet, as the size and complexity of target systems grew—from armies to landscapes and genomes, to the coupled systems of the whole Earth—so too did the sophistication of the hardware required to model them.
Over several decades, a machine was constructed and installed in low Earth orbit, an extraplanetary supercomputer capable of making predictions born of experience and facilitating billions of distinct simulations at once.
In hindsight, the need for such a device might appear self-evident, a precondition for the continuation of life. But in the early days of simulation science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it was far from obvious what was being built.