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Paper short abstract

Digital twins such as Destination Earth turn climate modeling into future-making. By operationalizing what-if simulations and synthetic data, they collapse prediction and intervention, rendering planetary futures actionable in the present and reshaping how planetary futures are known and governed.

Paper long abstract

The emergence of digital twins challenges the premise that no computer can accurately predict the future. Digital twins are real-time, data-driven models of material systems that simulate their behavior under specific conditions. The data generated through these simulations is then used to modify their “material” twin, enforcing or preventing projected futures. In doing so, “a continuum between the physical and virtual worlds” (Crespi et al. 2023, 8) is created, transforming “physical objects into programmable entities” (Ibid.).

Initially developed in manufacturing, digital twins now scale to planetary dimensions. The most ambitious example is Destination Earth (DestinE), an EU-funded project developing digital twins for climate change adaptation. Here, “What-If Simulations” model hypothetical climate scenarios by varying parameters, generating synthetic datasets that inform interventions aimed at reshaping planetary processes.

I argue that digital twins collapse the distinction between prediction and intervention, enabling a mode of future-making in which futures are determined in the present. Designed to make projected futures actionable, they enact the futures they model. But how, through recursive entanglement with material processes, do they render planetary futures governable? What political and epistemological consequences follow once the management of planetary futures relies on synthetic data?

To address these questions, I analyze specific “What-If Simulations” conducted within DestinE’s Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin during my research stay at ECMWF. Understanding digital twins as “operational images” (Parikka 2023), as visual phenomena which themselves act, I draw on “operational analysis” (Friedrich/Hoel 2023) to examine how future-making is enacted through technical operations in DestinE.