I make simulations of countries, maps, space and what-ifs, built from real data and real physics, showing things no camera could ever film.
Joined April 2009
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Run The Sim retweeted
The centre of the Earth is hotter than the surface of the Sun.
It's a ball of solid iron at about 6,000 °C (10,800 °F), crushed by more than three and a half million times the pressure we feel, and the deepest hole anyone has ever drilled, 12 km (7.6 miles), barely scratches the skin of the planet above it.
A 1 kg rock that doubles its speed every second starts slower than you can walk. After 29 seconds, it's heating the whole Earth faster than the Sun does.
The centre of the Earth is hotter than the surface of the Sun.
It's a ball of solid iron at about 6,000 °C (10,800 °F), crushed by more than three and a half million times the pressure we feel, and the deepest hole anyone has ever drilled, 12 km (7.6 miles), barely scratches the skin of the planet above it.
This is how our planet looks from other worlds.
From some of them it's a beautiful blue ball hanging in the sky. From others it's a tiny dot you could hide behind a grain of sand held at arm's length, and from the farthest you can't see it at all.
Yet everyone you have ever loved and everyone you have ever lost lived on that dot. Every birthday and every funeral, every first kiss and every last goodbye, every flood, famine and plague and every time people rebuilt afterwards, all of it happened there.
Run The Sim retweeted
A company is planning to sell sunlight after dark, beamed down from mirrors in space. Would you buy sunlight at night?
A company is planning to sell sunlight after dark, beamed down from mirrors in space. Would you buy sunlight at night?
The light spreads into a patch about 12 km (8 miles) wide, and every mirror races past at 17,000 mph, so it can only hold the spot for a few minutes before the next one takes over.
What Earth looks like if you drain the oceans
What if we pulled the plug on the oceans?
This simulation lowers the sea metre by metre on a real map of the ocean floor from NOAA, and a computer finds the exact moment each piece of land touches the next. Long before the water is gone, you could walk from India to Sri Lanka and from Asia to America. Where would you walk to from your country?
If the oceans drained, the air wouldn't stay where it is. It would sink into the empty ocean basins, and over a quarter of the atmosphere would end up below today's sea level.
Standing on a beach would feel like standing about 2.7 km up a mountain, with roughly 28% less oxygen in every breath, while at the bottom of the old Mariana Trench the air would be almost three times thicker than it is at sea level today.
What do you think would happen if Earth suddenly stopped spinning for a week and then started again?
If the planet suddenly stopped, everything not fixed to bedrock would keep going east at that speed. People, cars, trees and loose rock would be thrown east instantly, and most buildings would be torn off their foundations. The air would keep moving too, so the whole atmosphere would turn into an eastward wind faster than the speed of sound at the equator, several times stronger than the worst tornado ever recorded. The oceans would keep moving east as well and slam into the west coasts of the continents, which is why Perth gets hit within minutes.
Here's what makes it so violent. Earth spins from west to east, and everything on it is moving with it, even when you're sitting still. At the equator that's about 1,670 km/h (1,040 mph). The speed drops the further you are from the equator: about 1,260 km/h (785 mph) in New York, about 1,040 km/h (645 mph) in London, and almost nothing at the North and South Poles.
Run The Sim retweeted
What do you think would happen if Earth suddenly stopped spinning for a week and then started again?
Run The Sim retweeted
What if every person on Earth moved into one spot in the Sahara?
Standing shoulder to shoulder, all 8.3 billion of us fit in a patch a little bigger than Greater London, and with as much room as people have in New York, we'd all fit inside Egypt.
This bird weighs about as much as your phone, and every year it flies from Sweden to Antarctica and back.
That's about 48,500 km in a single year for an Arctic tern of about 100 grams. I followed one real tern using its tracker data, through every leg of the journey and every stop it made to rest.
What if every person on Earth moved into one spot in the Sahara?
Standing shoulder to shoulder, all 8.3 billion of us fit in a patch a little bigger than Greater London, and with as much room as people have in New York, we'd all fit inside Egypt.