Galaxy Simulation

I think ill try defying gravity

Dealing with a large amounts of planets I had to create a function to handle the gravity. This had to be fast enough to run N squared amount of function calls (where N is the number of planets in the galaxy). I spent a lot of time trying to come up with more simpler maths as I was adamant I wasn't going to be recalculating radians all the time.

The below utilises Pythagoras theorem to do the calculations from working out degrees or radians and translating between 360 degrees and your force and just representing the force as a  proportion acting upon the two dimensions that are being affected. I think it could be extended into 3 dimensions.

I haven't tested it perfectly against calculating radians but given the exponential number of calculations you end up doing in a whole galaxy even if it had problems I would probably prefer it. I have tested it and it can guide a ship to land on a planet perfectly accurately with turning and the like.

I am really happy with it. It seems faster than that whole thing with compass bearings which I wasn't sure why had 360 degrees anyway. It is much more digital as it squashes the forces by multiplying by a proportion of the forces on the vector. 

The function for python is below and sits within the planet class which also reused for ships and anything that flies around.  It also bypasses having to get the square root of the distance to get actual value as all that matters is the proportion of distance in order to calculate the angle and therefore I posit it is computationally faster. 

I could also drop the comparison between x and self.x that orientates the direction of force and manipulate the calculation of a and b to make the eventual forces signed; I doubt this is computationally faster but haven't the knowledge.

Gravity used the mass of  a planet which was randomly selected by a scale between 3-3,000,000 mass (I didn't benchmark this against actual real life scale of mass). Especially large objects in 95 percentile range for the galaxy were automatically assigned the status as stars and admitted heat that would warm nearby planets dictating if they would be too cold, too hot or just right. 

Code:

def gravity(self,mass,x,y):

a=(self.x-x)**2
b=(self.y-y)**2
distance=a+b
if distance > 0:

#0.0000000000006674
grav=(0.0000000000667408*mass)/distance
if x > self.x:
self.inertiax-=grav*(a/distance)
else:
self.inertiax+=grav*(a/distance)
if y > self.y:
self.inertiay-=grav*(b/distance)
else:
self.inertiay+=grav*(b/distance)

return grav

else:

return 0

Note: as per python norms where the value is self. i.e. self.x then x belongs to the parent class which in this case is the planet. self.x and self.y give the planets location. mass is of the other attracting planet and x and y is position of the attracting planet or object (I use it for a black hole at one point).

So Criticism 1 of the grabby aliens theory. Things don't stay still galaxies change. Point one aliens expand at some fraction of light around some central point is the axiom of the grabby alien hypothesis. Well what happens when that point in space continuously change and every other point also changes. A shiny new dyson sphere project only remains viable if it remains within your capitals sphere of influence long enough to complete the project; and, or either you get lots of lost colonies and then really its not one civilisation spreading rom one central point but several.

Surely that changes the Grabby Alien Hypothesis if the grabby civilisation splinter into lots of mini civilisations? This seems a possibility when considering gravity and the scale of a universe.

Lots of mini civilisations seem unlikely to do the big projects to satisfy part 2 of the grabby alien hypothesis and complicates the first axiom of the hypothesis. 

It's getting hot in here

So headline for the fermi paradox is life itself doesn't appear hugely often in huge numbers hugely close to other life a huge amount of time. Just taking some basic assumptions of how the maths work the simulated galaxies produce single digit numbers of inhabited planets versus hundreds of empty ones. Therefore by chance statistically you would expect a few civilisations to spring up with no one nearby. So maybe that's criticism 0 of the grabby alien hypothesis that the fermi paradox may not be a paradox at all if life is just especially rare in the first place.

So after generating gravity I needed to work out how hot planets where so to work out where liquid water could be and therefore where life could be.

To fit a whole galaxy on a screen (or at least more of one) I made it so the screen size and galaxy size was autofitted so the size of the above is 15 light years. The time frame represented is one frame of the simulation equals 1 million years. In the background  This should put things in perspective the lifetime of planets solar systems things take a long time. 

If anything the above simulation is very generous in the number of planets and suns; rather than using constants for the boiling point and freezing point of water (what makes the planets red, blue or green); I have had the system calculate a best fit temperature system to ensure life shows up in the galaxy simulation. Small mistakes here can cause vast areas of the galaxy to start out sterile and cold.

To work out how hot planets are we have to work out how much energy they will absorb.

The planets have albedo representing the energy absorption (from sunlight) of the planet.  A ice planet will absorb less heat to around a albedo of 0%. A hot red planet albedo will go up and down to converge around 0.7 representing the albedo for rock. A planet with liquid water will form large pools of water that by there black colour will increase the absorption of heat on the planet meaning albedo will rise till 0.05. 

To make sure these changes are gradual I applied the arbitrary change rate of 0.001% for atmospheric albedo but in reality it might be much faster. I had looked up rate of atmosphere loss on mars and while a arbitrary guess it didn't seem disconnected from the insistence it took millions of years though I would assume if it really gets too hot or cold it becomes quite instantaneous. 

This causes a conclusion about the larger galaxy most planets will be cold lifeless rocks as once water starts freezing energy gets absorbed less and other gases like hydrogen blown off the main star start to get cold become affected by gravity and form clouds on the planet (and eventually a gas giant). These clouds are white so regardless of whether its snow, ice or clouds your not going to be able to get warm gain if you slip off into the big black void.

Conversely a planet where liquid water is drying up exposing more rocks. Therefore it is quite common for planets in stable orbits to cycle in and out of too hot and just right for liquid water. I think we call that weather :).

So criticism 2 of the grabby aliens hypothesis space is huge depressingly huge you have to assume a civilisation has time or technology to circumvent this. Another criticism is that the main enemy of civilisation in such a model seems to be entropy and while I tend to agree the probable outcome of this is wanting more land therefore grab any real estate you can build a civilisation around though it seems a unexplained assumption. If I have technology to move people to other planets light years away why not move ice balls a few AU away a bit closer or change the albedo and colonise them?

On balance I would probably think over the million years the model assumes you eventually do run out of real estate and go looking at expanding but it seems a unexplored point, imperialists and explorers do eventually want to explore more but it doesn't seem to be automatic mean every society will fit this model. 

Many civilisations may start isolated and any expansion would probably not be at a constant rate around a planet and would probably include complexities and strategic issues around gravity wells and island hopping from planet to planet (where habitable). This challenges the first argument of the grabby aliens hypothesis. 

If a society was isolated say as ourselves on the galactic arm whole civilisations may exist in galactic core and you may not see them. 

It is human history that we expanded out of Africa going in all directions affecting the world around us and it is hard to not think it is right that this would work in space. Though it is not automatic that civilisations in space might be constrained by numerous strategic barriers and gaps between systems and therefore two relatively advanced species may just end up outside of reach afforded them by their technology. Technology and expansion may not be in fact constant and maybe capped, logarithmic with time or something similar. 

The above is the same galaxy at 41321 million years. The galaxy generates new planets as the fall off the left edge or bottom and there is some manipulation in this version to make sure the galaxy falls apart. If the new planet added are of sufficient mass they will be new stars and new systems will form. It has 1 interstellar empire in this galaxy. 

The grabby aliens hypothesis; sometimes you just really are alone. The grabby alien hypothesis assumes the below.

1. such aliens expand from their origin planet at a fraction of the speed of light, 2. They make significant and visible changes wherever they go. And 3. They last a long time.

The below causes that to breakdown as if 1 the speed of expansion is <  less than "they last a long time" they may not survive till the universe change in such a way for their existence to matter. This is especially true if the issue under discussion is that either there is not many inhabitable planets or the planets that are inhabitable will be ice balls or something within a few million years.

A further 500 million years later I checked and the same galaxy now has 2 interstellar empires. So everything changes.

So criticism 3 the galaxy time frame is measured in millions of years. Unless those civilisations act and grow in less than million years they will be affected by entropy far more than the galaxy will be affected by them. My simulation assumes that rocket power grows exponentially and had started looking at rocket thrust today it has not grown in such a way.

It is probably natural to assume galactic civilisation history is measured in a large number of years; by which I mean I do not think a galactic power will be colonising a planet a year every year and bringing the new outpost up to the same development level without amazing technology that breaks our current understanding of physics.

A single modern day rocket I calculated moves at 0.000009600614439324117 AU a hour, a AU is 0.00001581 of a light year. So we can put into argument 1 of the grabby alien hypothesis we have an idea of what our current fraction of the speed of light looks like and its very low. To put it in perspective that's 1.5178571428571428e+10 hours to travel 1 light year. To do the maths that is 1,732,714 years to travel 1 light year a planet might be several light years away.

Therefore the grabby alien hypothesis can be wrong if the fraction of a speed of light from "1. such aliens expand from their origin planet at a fraction of the speed of light" is not vastly larger than our current estimates for rocket speed as we end up in millions of years timeframe for colonisation and the picture below shows the amount of changes that can happen over millions of years. 

So for the grabby aliens hypothesis to be true we must island hope from our current planet faster than currently proposed. 

Life Finds A Way

To represent that life has to evolve I have also tried to create a system using a random walk dependent on the planets atmosphere if the planet is in the goldilocks zone for liquid water a random float is generated and if greater than its current Albedo life progresses. Conversely if the planet is too cold or too hot then the opposite happens with life going backwards.

The ages look like the below the numbers represent the number of "progress points" till a planets ecosystem progresses to the next stage. After the interstellar era a planet is considered to be "post singularity".

ages=[("prion",1),("protobacteria",16),("bacteria",10),("amoeba",4),("fungi",2),("moss",2),("crab",1),("worms",2),("plants",1),("insects",2),("fish",1),("parasites",1),("swarm insects",1),("lizards",1),("predators",1),
("pack animals",1),("megafauna",1),("tool use",1), ("language",1),("tribal society",1),("transhuman age",1),("interstellar empire",50)]

Obviously this scale is arbitrary and loosely based on how many millions of years it took for life on earth (or at least what can be found out on Wikipedia). You could change this scale to fit your notions on how long it took things to evolve. Though while it interacts with a system that I am not going to talk about here for the larger galaxy purposes all civilisation can be split into not intelligent, intelligent and not spacefaring, spacefaring probably highly intelligent.

The below was the print out to the console you can see after 575 million years we have 256 ice planets 61 planets with liquid water and 48 rock balls. On 13 of these planets bacteria have evolved (17+ evolution). There has formed 3 interstellar empires. 3 after 575 million years in a region of 15 by 15 light years may give you an idea of the concept of space is big.

Though this brings me to criticism 4 of the grabby aliens hypothesis; life can go backwards and forwards. The assumption of the grabby alien hypothesis is that life will keep going forward and expanding at some percentage of the speed of light. But if life can suffer setbacks go forward and backwards? Then surely it is not that simple and multiple variables maybe involved. A civilisation might get to the point where it starts expanding as a spacefaring species but that might last a short time, a given civilisation may have problems back home.

And while this maybe a shallow criticism as a stochastic random walk may not be as simple as a rate of progress it maybe ca be accounted to in say the statistically large number of planets in a galaxy. 

For A Safer More Unified Galaxy

So we get down to the nuts and bolts of the galaxy simulation. On a much larger galaxy of 3000 planets/stars spread around the 15 by 15 light years civilisations evolved spread fought wars and created empires.

The rules for the colonial development of a planet into a empire are as follows.

After developing the interstellar empire level they sought to expand automatically to any planet within 1/4 in AU for every development beyond initial interstellar empire level of the developed planet absorbing it into their empire (which exists separate from the parent planet once formed).

A planet will regard planets colonised by another empire within 1 AU per development beyond initial interstellar empire level as dangerous and will either decide to trade with them or destroy them and colonise the ashes now reset to a dead planet (we have nukes they obviously have nukes).

A empire will become more militant or more peaceful depending on its interactions with other empires the aim of the test is to see what dominates the galaxy a warlike empire of a galactic cooperative. Spoiler the militant powers win so badly there is no instance of any peaceful interactions detected the results after initial contact is for one side to meet the other the side that declares trade gives up a chance at a first strike and therefore don't survive.

Trade will result in both participants becoming more peaceful. If attacked and a polity survives with other planets then the survivors to become more violent. Ability to invade and  take over a planet is resisted by the planets development level. A advanced post singularity civilisation is resistant and unlikely to be destroyed by an new species at the start of its development. 

A empire once developed is independent of its capital and can have multiple advanced planets though the aggression or peacefulness of a civilisation is related to the empire not the planet so any attack on part of the polity is a attack on the whole. Makes me rethink NATO if it leads to the outcome that happened...

In The Far Future There Is Only...

Trigger warning in the far future there is a awful lot of war; maybe all of its war. 

The Nash equilibrium seems to be as follows a large post singularity planet is able to surround itself with the burned husks of many war worlds as a buffer zone against the aggression of all enemy empires. The primary weapons are all WMDs then the aim becomes to outrange your enemy with your WMDs while creating a buffer zone to stop them getting a ability to bomb you. To make sure these buffer zones don't develop into enemy civilisations or are occupied you may habitually nuke them every few million years or fight ongoing wars on them just to deny them as missile bases for the enemy. Eventually with enough curtain bombing and slow moving fronts you'll get a kill on a major dyson sphere collapsing the support and logistics to the front and leading to extermination of a whole sector; though more likely you may just have to wait for entropy to kill off a major star base as it wobbles and falls into a star by accident and the war lurches forward (I'm sure the relevant politicians still claim responsibility).

This is war fought on geological timescale. It is the natural mathematical outcome of this depressing simulation. 

At the beginning lots of empires fight this long war but over time a few fall to entropy and enemy action; the result was a dense galaxy of ever fewer empires. Eventually having watched the finale of 3 elder civilisations staring at each over the below black hole in the centre of the galaxy; in a never ending trench warfare 1000s of planet wide and deep and each planet not wholly conquered by one side sterilised every million years if not by one but  by both empires all to keep the enemy wolves away from their small ember of civilisation.

This was way more grimdark than 40k,whole civilisations fight for more generations than life took to evolve and evolve again over the same rock. The names where forgotten the reasons would have been forgotten given the sheer expanse of time everything would have been forgotten save the cyclic sterilising of beautiful life giving worlds to keep the horror of the alien at bay. Imagining the horrific 1984 scale of bureaucracy such a empire must exist under to order itself in a nigh endless nihilistic war against every other sentient species in the galaxy and know if you failed they where going to do the same to you not because they hated you but because that was the conclusion the arithmetic of life required of you. 

The terrifying conclusion is despite how evil the above sounds mathematically they where right the enemy wants them dead and they want the other side death. This is the natural outcome of the game theory where the cost is destruction. 

The empires in this simulation don't sterilise any planet automatically they only destroy planets that becomes a threat by meeting a minimum spacefaring level where they become perceived as a threat. The empires involved don't hate all other life they have just found advanced alien species dangerous and remove them. 

Where it gets terrifying is when one considers the political will and what sort of society exists when such a forever war is normalised. Do the populace know what is done in their name? Do they take it seriously or do they just send the minimum outdated equipment and troops as the war is a necessary farce but a farce anyway? Trying to be morale and efficient and having millions of years to optimise the conflict you might try to find the absolute minimum violence that keeps the enemy of your buffer planets. It is really a mad galaxy but it seems the outcome of simple axioms...

It is easy to imagine a 1984 dictatorship or the 40k imperium of man a candidate for this universe. The problem is in this reality when "national security" is no longer about protecting millions but 100s of trillions of people against hostile aliens  and any slip in vigilance could permit the use of a WMD against your family or friends you would support ever increasing totalitarian safeguards in the name of security. Eventually any dictator who will give you security is worth baptising as messiah and any deal with a devil is worthwhile if it reduces the infinite risk of alien assault that exists just outside your planets atmosphere.

If we say killing 1 enemy can be justified by saving X of our people. Then if X is any number but 0; Then in a infinite galaxy with infinite space and therefore equally potentially infinite theoretical members of our race we may get really ambivalent, really totalitarian and really evil just following normal thinking about mitigating security risks. In this galaxy every alien encounter is infinitely risky therefore we can justify infinitely anything. The people we are "trying to save" don't even have to exist to justify the morale panic, the completely theoretical threat of destruction of 10 of our planets justify the pre-emptive strike on the other planet because with such huge numbers of people at risk why even pretend peace is a viable option?

I simulated this for weeks in real time and as per criticism 5 the main decider of the war was not the warriors or ships of the combatants who lacked the fuel stops and support to launch deep offenses past the walls of burning worlds the elder civilisations had built around themselves and had no reach to meet, attack or even talk to their enemies capitals. This was war on galactic time tables entropy was just another part of the conflict keep fighting and wait for the enemies home planet to die from sheer length of time; Trench warfare on a galactic scale. 

I feel that there is a whole game setting there for people surviving on these war wall worlds. Endlessly destroyed and destroyed again. Survivors in bunkers following insane multi generational war plans closely resembling "black adder goes forth"; who now wait for orders  from a central polity that forgot that their army exist centuries ago due to a accounting error when someone didn't round down the amount of troops they deployed to a sector and politicians buried the mistake in paper work. The survivors fight desperately on a lonely outpost backdrop probably looks like a desert. The enemy an alien they have little or no understanding of but who is largely stuck in the same predicament but sharing no shared language or even similar biology cannot communicate. The enemy probably look like bugs; but then they say the same about us.

A bit like the Forever War with Dr Strangelove mixed with 40k via the worst elements of 1984 with fallout tagline of "war never changes" as a quaint understatement. Its a galaxy where victory is a joke and a prelude to the punchline of another war... 

Got carried away there... but you get the point...I decided that couldn't be the final story of my galaxy simulation though moving onto criticism 5.

Criticism 5 of the grabby aliens hypothesis. You won't see any large structures they used nuclear weapons the reason you don't see evidence of other alien civilisations is they don't leave much behind of their enemies.

This is also very intuitively correct 

While it could be argued that this supports the grabby alien hypothesis because we don't see evidence of alien civilisation it could be countered either we are not advanced enough to be a target or and I think this seems obvious their missiles outrange the colony ships. If the missiles outrange the colony ships you will never meet the grabby aliens because they will send the missiles first. 

Therefore if the dominant life in the galaxy is in a cold war deadlock like the dark forest trilogy proposes you don't see evidence of alien life because either  A) your not in missile range (yet), B) your not a threat, C) they destroyed each other already using weapons powerful enough to eliminate much of the remains and your evolving amongst the galactic ruins. 

The pictures show the swing of the war below. On first then 103 million years later; Only a single part of the front shift in top right corner and with this you can see the appalling scale of the eternal war they are engaged in. Anyway too heavy metal for me so to make a different model. The indicated empire is in white. 

103 million years later the empire only a few steps forward. Though this probably brings to light the horrific lack of advancment.

War What is it Good For

For the record simulations are decided by maths don't blame me for imaginary hyper totalitarian galactic empires... suffice to say not my politics. 

The Wheel Of Time

So wanting to create a universe which seemed more in keeping with my political sensibilities and less in my music heavy metal proclivities I added a new variable decadence. In this situation when a empire hit Interstellar Empire stage a decadence counter starts counting up when it gets higher than its current technology level the planet government collapses back to a pre Stella state. This represents Asimov collapse of the empire in the foundation books and or may parallel the collapse of Roman or maybe the British Empire (maybe we are in the twilight of another).

The decadence track is lowered whenever a planet wins a war or trades with another empire. This represents the need for governments (especially oppressive warlike ones) to find a way to legitimise themselves through either trade and therefore cultural stimulus or war and therefore financial expenditure. Anything else is a closed system and a closed system will eventually collapse.

This has a real interesting change the empires form and for 50-100 million years 250 tops they hold sway as in the above they create warzones and conquer many planets. Then they die out as without enemies to plunder a single break in the war effort a pause in their eternal war and the empire loses meaning and eventually collapses and stunningly eventually what forms in the ashes of dead empires is many small polities of peacefully trading systems that prefer peace to war.

You see its evolution in the old galaxy peace offered no improvement to survival chances you only have to find some way that these other empires can be helpful and it changes the calculations immensely. So a interesting proposition all you need to do to avoid a war is find a small way of which other people can be helpful to one another, 

The empire in this system are just a early predatory polity they carve out a space amongst the early Stella period then collapse becoming a interesting point in the galactic simulations history but not defining it.

Criticism 5: even when trying to prove the Grabby Alien hypothesis you end up introducing new variables and the new variables change the behaviour of the system. The above satisfies the Grabby Aliens hypothesis the successor empires grow up amongst the ruins of old empires who collapsed from morale decay they are likely surrounded by a universe filled with forgotten ruins and technology. Though I had to create add or remove variables to make that outcome likely in this model. If the hypothesis is not true in every model but only where I manipulate it is it true at all?

Though I like this simulation better; it says after we got past that horrible infantile business of empire the galaxy moved on and people met for the first time and simply talked and that was enough to form the basis of continuing social organisation and living for millions of years.

My suspicion of this is it is a naïve view life is monstrous and to imagine there is no path back from this stable state seems unlikely as I could imagine a more smarter AI playing like a game rather than a set policy shifting between peaceful or predatory behaviour based on perceived risk again creating a much more complex dynamic.

So Criticism 6: your just not that interesting, the grabby alien hypothesis proposes the aliens spread out in all directions at same rate. What if the aliens just not interested in coming your direction maybe Stella density near core yields more resources and they travel in that direction. Maybe the aliens only want to meet those interesting enough to trade with and maybe we aren't interesting. If aliens are thought to behave intelligently then why would they spread slowly in all directions as a constant rate treating all encountered planets, directions and civilisations as equally interesting to expand towards. If the aliens in any sense cherry pick their expansion then the grabby alien hypothesis might be undermined. Aliens might have been out there for billions of year they're just not interested in the expansive imperial and macro projects we think they should be and we won't find them till we stumble on what they really valued and cherry picked for.

Maybe the aliens only pick the planets with red plants and green seas because that's worth a lot in the booming holiday industry and otherwise they just don't care. No expansion because lets be honest you might love a new planet but you couldn't eat a whole one. Alien values are likely weird why would it be necessarily true they value expansion or leaving vast macro monuments we can detect.

Predicting aliens like the grabby hypothesis proposes we would first need to predict their values. Good luck with that!

Arguments for grabby aliens

In all the simulations aliens do manage to colonise planets around theirs. Even where the simulations have instability and the solar systems don't last a huge amount of time it is often enough time for life to form and grab a little real estate. 

The universe is naturally entropic a escape from this entropy would be projects like dyson spheres and terraforming. It is natural for any civilisations to adopt the methods of grabby aliens a dyson sphere proposes to maximise efficient energy usage of a star and you no longer have to be concerned about your solar system falling apart. This seems a neat obvious solution.

The closest simulation to Grabby Aliens Hypothesis is the last included the decadence and collapse of empires. There is a intuitive rightness with what we know about our own experiences of human polities that they have a bad habit of expanding and building monuments to themselves then either catching a cold or otherwise having a argument over who is the kings cup bearer and collapsing. We expect the world to be populated by failed states the immortal states fighting never ending wars of our forever war simulation feel unlikely when one knows real world politicians. There is therefore a intuitive rightness to the Grabby Alien hypothesis. 

While the endless war scenario might be a bit extreme any security concerns might naturally lead to this conclusion. Having real estate outside your home system gives warning against hostile aliens and the privilege of fighting any war on colonies and not your home system. That appears valuable enough that if the cost is not prohibitive you will do it anyway. The argument about missiles only applies if the aliens are so hyper aggressive that a first strike is considered the standard strategy; though it must be added that was the conclusion of that simulation. 

A Surprising Conclusion - the case against simulating a galaxy

Though I guess this has been my point while you can propose a theory like grabby aliens you can also propose subtle changes that massively change the outcome and the story.

I have focused on the Grabby Alien Hypothesis but I want to make the case against using simulations to in a sense "prove" anything. A simulation or any forecast cannot be used to prove anything. Within larger society we have a tendency to present simulating or forecasting data as having a higher pedigree than pure opinion. Though as I think I showed with this it is possible to insert ones opinion into forecasts in the way one adds or removes variables; poetically whole other universes can be left on the cutting room floor when creating simulations and forecasting data. 

I think I have come up with 6 good criticisms of the Hypothesis and can show how they would work in the simulation. The grabby alien hypothesis is purported to come from this idea that the authors created a simulation that in some ways leads you too a conclusion and gives the appearance that such a hypothesis should be taken seriously. I think from my 6 criticisms you can see how it is easier to use a simulation to critique hypotheses than prove anything.

We have a tendency to where using simulations to even if we produce lots of variants to report on the worst case scenario. I think this happens  a lot with COVID and so much so I suspect they are counterproductive despite having vastly more data available. I know the WHO has cautioned against using simulations for planning against COVID; though I am curious without simulations what can you use to predict and critique our assumptions? I would therefore argue that the WHO is right but only in that we regard that simulations prove anything but we might use simulations to demonstrate ways in which a hypothesis might be wrong. 

I think building or planning a simulation in a business (of said business) can be useful as it identifies the business objects and variables being used and as a thought exercise how you would or ought to start getting and where someone disagrees that a certain structure doesn't have the right granularity or doesn't quite work that way can be illuminating (I had no idea about albedo role in greenhouse affect before doing this). At its most basic planning to simulate and forecast probably doesn't generate any accurate forecasts or predictions but it can be useful as a thought exercise for building understanding and consensus on how the business works. 

I think this ought to be intuitively true in that the great boon of simulations and data is the chance to be wrong in simulations and save right in the real world! Instead it appears epidemic to me that we use it as a proof of hyper cognitive rightness that we can predict certain things and we ignore in sense data can only act as proof within the narrow bounds it was generated in.

Though this is the sense that simulations are probably indispensable it can show you many ways all those whole other universe that those presupposition's such as the grabby alien hypothesis maybe wrong and under which set of assumptions it would remain right. Also Simulations can make you very aware of the granularity and objects that your using.

So I suggest we use more data, simulations and simulate whole galaxies but not to prove anything but because simulating things maybe give us the chance to figure out all the universes our ideas might be wrong in before we start looking at the universe we live in which can be confusing and isn't amenable for running it multiple times on a Sunday evening. 

There is a neglected role for simulation in businesses not for proving hypothesis but creating and inviting the ability to challenge hypothesis. It should be considered I have simulated a whole galaxy I have learned a lot. Maybe if we took the argument to simulate our own businesses not to prove anything but to critique and ask questions about our assumptions maybe we would learn a lot. 

To address Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation quote at the top of the page sometimes simulation is the map but it can never be the territory. It can never prove anything but in reference to where simulation and fact differ there is insight and after insight we build a better map.