Predicting the future state of the physical world under the influence of human activities includes sensing and modelling of weather and climate, ocean flows, terrestrial hydrology and erosion. Global climate models, seismological models and sea-ice models, for example, already draw on a vast web of physical-chemical observational and socio-economic data, giving us an unprecedented capacity to predict future states of land, sea, and air. The development of cheaper and improved sensors, increased availability of autonomous research craft, including underwater vehicles, and remote sensing from space will lead to an explosion of available data.
But we are just getting started — our data-driven physical models of Earth's systems are set to grow ever more refined. Consider, for example, Destination Earth (DestinE), a major initiative of the European Commission.4 Its ambitious aim is to create “a digital twin of planet Earth that would simulate the atmosphere, ocean, ice, and land with unrivalled precision, providing forecasts of floods, droughts, and fires from days to years in advance.”5
