The internet never ceases to provide us with weird things to write about, but we never expected to write about "Earth 2". However, as luck would have it, that's exactly what we're doing.
Hardware and software Nvidia has announced that its looking into developing "Million-X computing", with the aim of making a digital Earth-2. It's an interesting idea, but it's probably worth understanding what all of that means, and why.
What does Million-X mean?
First things first, what on Earth (1) does Million-X mean? Essentially, it's a fancy term for big advances in technology across different areas. We're talking about the ones that outstrip usual computing advances, and go way beyond what we'd expect to see in any generational leap in hardware.
Rather than reading us paraphrasing this, it makes a lot more sense to just read this blog post on it that Nvidia has put up. In it, they go into detail about the areas they're targeting, how they're doing so, and why as well. Ultimately though, for this at the very least, they're talking about building an Earth-2.
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Why make an Earth-2?
In essence, Nvidia is planning to use "the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer dedicated to predicting, mitigating and adapting to climate change," in order to see what could happen as climate change continues to affect the planet. It's a logical enough thing to do, and they're doing so within the Omniverse.
Of course, if the technology is as impressive as they state, and there's no reason to believe otherwise, you've also got to assume that there's a fair amount of energy consumed to do so. Hopefully this single task won't throw anything too out of whack, but if we're using energy to see the effects of energy, you've got to wonder why we aren't also just trying to do more to stop climate change than using more energy to see what it's going to do.
Then again, full models mean that if we mess up and it becomes completely inevitable, which is the path we appear to be stuck with, then at least we know where's most likely to be worst affected. No matter what though, it's all really quite strange.