Episode 177: Transcript
Episode: 177: Simulating Earth and Politicizing Science
Transcription by Alexander
Annalee: [00:00:00] Charlie Jane, what was your favorite video game when you were younger?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:03] You know, I became really obsessed with a game called Parodius, which I think only exists in Asia. I don't think it ever was released in the US. And as the name Parodius suggests, it was like a parody of other kind of like side shooter games at the time where you're like a little ship that goes from left to right and you shoot at stuff. It was just very goofy. There was like you had to fight a giant pirate ship that the ship was a cat. And all the pirates on the ship were cats.
[00:00:33] It was like, according to Wikipedia, which I just looked at, this game is referred to as a cute ‘em up rather than a shoot ‘em up. Because there's like penguins...
Annalee: [00:00:43] Wait, it's a ship made of cat, which contains cats.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:46] I believe so. And there's videos online of Parodius gameplay. I've never been able to find a Parodius simulator online. It was just so cute. I was living in Hong Kong. It was my first journalism job. And I was living in Hong Kong. And I just played that game for hours. And I just became obsessed with those cute little cats on their cat pirate ship. And they all had little pirate hats. And it was just...
Annalee: [00:01:10] Oh, that does sound soothing.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:12] It was a cute ‘em up.
Annalee: [00:01:13] Cute ‘em up. Wow.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:15] Like that's apparently, instead of shoot ‘em up, it's cute ‘em up. Annalee, what was your favorite game?
Annalee: [00:01:20] I guess also in a way, kind of a cute ‘em up, although it did involve shooting. I was obsessed with Centipede when I was a kid. Here's the thing. I'm still obsessed with Centipede. I go to the Maid Museum over in Oakland, which is a retro video game museum. And I play their Centipede there.
[00:01:38] And it's really kind of goblin core because you're a little shooter guy. It's kind of like Space Invaders. You're moving along the bottom with a track ball. And you're shooting a centipede that's slowly making its way down the screen. And it's going in between mushrooms. And there's spiders and other creepy bugs. There's ticks and scorpions. And I really just liked the feeling of the trackball controller. And I just spent hours playing it at our local movie theater.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:10] Yeah, those spiders freaked me out when I was a little kid. They were a little creepy.
Annalee: [00:02:15] Yeah. And one of the things about this game that I learned in retrospect is that it was one of the very first video games created by a woman.
[00:02:23] Donna Bailey wrote a bunch of the game's code and worked a little bit on the design. And it was a hugely successful title. Like just it was astronomically popular. And the thing is, is that people always made a big deal about how it was somehow designed by a woman and that that affected the audience because supposedly it was one of the first video games that was enjoyed equally by men and women and non-binary people, apparently, if I'm any indication.
[00:02:54] And it's funny because there's like nothing gendered about the game. Like I said, it's basically like Space Invaders, except with bugs instead of alien ships. It's not like Ms. Pac-Man where there's like a little bow or like there's nothing. You're not doing anything that's like traditionally gendered female. But, you know, I think it does show the fact that there was this audience response where it reached a mainstream audience, not just men. It shows that if you do have women in technical roles developing a game or software, that may actually help your product appeal beyond just guys. So that's pretty awesome.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:29] Yeah, and I guess if you want to get super productive, the lack of a joystick makes it less phallic.
Annalee: [00:03:35] Click controller.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:36] It's actually interesting how many early video game designers were trans women or later came out as trans women. We're both friends with Jamie Faye Fenton, who designed the super popular video game GORF and later transitioned and is just a really cool person. But I feel like there's a lot of trans women who were early video game designers.
Annalee: [00:03:55] Yeah, 100%. And I think there were a lot of women who were working behind the scenes who still haven't been acknowledged. And so I think in the case of Centipede, because Donna Bailey had such a huge impact on the game and really was like one of the main coders, like they couldn't deny it. You know, there just wasn't a way to pretend like no women had been involved.
[00:04:15] So on that note, you are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, the podcast that slashed America's cryptocurrency budget and put all that money into studying trans health care and gun safety.
[00:04:26] I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction. And my forthcoming book is called Automatic Noodle. It's coming in August. And it's about what happens when a group of robots open a noodle restaurant in San Francisco.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:40] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction and fantasy writer. And my next book also is coming in August. It's called…
Annalee: [00:04:47] Hell Yeah!
Charlie Jane: [00:04:48] Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's about a young trans woman who teaches her mother how to become a witch. And the two of them do some magic together. It gets pretty intense, but also there's a lot of healing and joy.
Annalee: [00:05:04] It's a great book.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:06] Oh, so is Automatic Noodle.
Annalee: [00:05:09] So today we're going to be talking about the difference between politicizing science and acknowledging that science is political. I know, it sounds like semantics, but there's actually an important distinction to be made. And we're going to talk about it. And joining us later in the episode is contributing host, Maddie Stone, an environmental journalist whose newsletter is called The Science of Fiction. And she is going to tell us about the incredible history of the long lost video game SimEarth.
[00:05:42] Also on our mini episode next week, we'll be talking about a recent study that flies in the face of conventional wisdom about why humans developed social hierarchy way back in the day when we were first developing cities. All right, let's vote yes on some science.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:01] Woohoo!
[00:06:01] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Annalee: [00:06:32] So I wanted to have a conversation with you, Charlie Jane, about science and politics because right now in the United States, our current government led by Donald Trump is ripping the guts out of public support for science.
[00:06:48] We're seeing really deep, dramatic funding cuts being floated for the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which handles things like weather reports, the National Institute of Health, which funds all kinds of research into like cancer and Alzheimer's, plus NASA, our space agency is being cut, and Health and Human Services just cut 10,000 people, which is a subject of some consternation because some of those people do things like food safety and pandemic awareness and pandemic tracking.
[00:07:31] So like a lot of people who care about science, but also who just care about the progress of our knowledge, I'm devastated. I'm scared. I don't know what's going to happen. I worry that I won't know when bad weather is coming or when a pandemic is coming.
[00:07:54] At the same time, there's this kind of paradoxical thing where I'm feeling some relief because now people are openly admitting and discussing that science is political. And this has always been an issue in the sciences that some people, both people working in science, but also observers have said, you know, science is apolitical. You know, it knows no affiliation with Democrat or Republican or liberal or progressive. It's just facts.
[00:08:26] And of course, that's never been true. So, at least with the government making all these moves to make it seem as if Democrats love science, Republicans hate science. Now we're in the world of, yes, science is political.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:41] Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the things I'm proudest of from IO9, the site we used to do, is that you spearheaded this whole thing about publicly funded science and why we should appreciate it. And like a lot of people think science just happens, like it just appears somehow, or people are just at universities and the universities pay for them to do science or industry pays for them to do science. And no, the government pays for science.
[00:09:06] And, you know, unfortunately, like Joni Mitchell said, you don't know what you got till it's gone. We are now going to be missing that thing that we really took for granted.
Annalee: [00:09:13] Yeah. And one of the things that the government has always done through some of those agencies that I named and many others that I didn't name is that they give money to universities. And it's really the government's job to fund what's often called just basic science or research science.
[00:09:28] This is science that's done just for the spirit of inquiry. It doesn't necessarily have a financial payoff at the end, unlike, say, pharmaceutical discovery, where you know at the end you might have a drug that gets a lot of money, or say, engineering, where you might be able to sell a product at the end. This is stuff that we're studying just to learn. And in the end, it might lead to something like a cure for a particular kind of disease, or it might just teach us more about how the human mind works. That's the whole point of inquiry.
[00:09:58] And so when we talk about making science political, this is where I want to get kind of into semantics, but also just kind of into making a distinction here between what's happening right now in the United States, which I would call politicization, which is just the idea that, like I said earlier, Democrats love science and Republicans hate it.
[00:10:20] But then there's this other tradition, both within science and within kind of allied areas, where people study how science is affected by political belief. It's an area where we study how politics can distort or shape science, how political bias can affect the outcomes of science. And that's a long-standing field of study. So I really want to talk to you about the difference between what I'm calling politicization of science and the politics of science.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:54] I'm so glad we're talking about this.
Annalee: [00:10:55] Yeah. So let me start by, like, throwing an idea at you, which is that when we talk about the politics of science, what I'm talking about are things like studies of how race impacts health care treatment, where you see a disparity between the way a black patient is treated for heart disease and the way a white patient is treated. There's different outcomes for those two populations.
[00:11:21] Or it could mean something like a study of how to create green industrial processes and nontoxic building materials. These are areas that acknowledge the politics behind how we do science and engineering and try to present alternatives, like green chemistry presenting an alternative to, you know, using something that's a horrific toxin. So it really measures bias or blind spots and attempts to address those.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:48] Yeah. And, you know, sometimes science comes up with things that are uncomfortable for us, conclusions that are culturally or economically inconvenient. Like, you know, politics is about how we how we share and, like, distribute resources and the kind of decisions we make about things like our environment and our health care and stuff. And science can provide us with more insight into that stuff. But sometimes we don't actually want to understand those things better because we'd rather do things the way that make us comfortable, you know, comfortable.
Annalee: [00:12:20] Yeah, for sure. And I mean, that's the part where it gets difficult, because if you do a scientific study and it says, you know, “hey, this chemistry chemical called PFAS is in all of these different products and it turns out it's actually killing a bunch of stuff and destroying the environment.” But there's all of these industries that depend on using PFAS in their manufacturing process. You know, that's the politics of science, right?
[00:12:50] Like, as you said, like people don't want to retrofit their entire industrial process with a new chemical or even come up with a new chemical to use instead. So that is usually where the government steps in is like, “OK, we're going to fund green chemistry and come up with alternatives.”
Charlie Jane: [00:13:06] Or we're going to restrict these harmful chemicals. We're going to say, don't dump pollution into the rivers anymore. And that's going to inconvenience a lot of people. I mean, science fiction has this sort of naive assumption, especially older science fiction, that like if people see compelling evidence that something is true, they will respond rationally and be like, “oh, well, the evidence says blah. So I guess I'm going to have to do blah.” And unfortunately, people just aren't wired that way. We're not rational to that extent.
Annalee: [00:13:32] I know there's like that classic science fiction trope, which I've seen a million times where it's like, “oh, we've discovered the bad guy was doing this thing. We're going to put that on the on the airwaves and like people will see it and they'll change their minds.” It's like, no, they just changed the channel, dude. They just went back to listening to Space Joe Rogan.
[00:13:56] So, OK, there's also kind of a gray area where you see studies that are looking at the politics of science that kind of overlap with some of these areas that are being politicized. And I wanted to make sure that we talked about this gray area a little bit. So it's basically I think the best examples we see are really in health care where, you know, it's an area that we know has bias within science, but now is subject to political bias.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:28] Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, you see something like trans health care where currently there is an effort to create a quote unquote debate about something that actually the science is pretty settled. At least there's a pretty strong scientific consensus that trans health care is good and helpful and that everybody, including youth, teenagers should have access to health care.
[00:14:49] But it is an inherently political issue because the existence of trans people, unfortunately, is political. It's something that a lot of people have political concerns about. And so they try to politicize the science.
Annalee: [00:15:01] Yeah, they politicize the science and create a lot of confusion about what the actual medical studies show. And then you get things like there's a new report from Health and Human Services in the United States on trans health care, which is essentially just a revision of a UK report, which is called the CAS report, which also was about essentially why the state in the UK shouldn't provide trans health care for youth, for teens, but also heavily implied that they shouldn't do it for adults either.
[00:15:40] And, you know, there's a lot of, speaking of the politics of science, there's a lot of studies showing that trans people get really different health care from cis people and that they are often under-treated, that they're often treated as pathological. So that's the politics of the science.
[00:16:00] But then there's this politicized, like the CAS report and the HHS report. These are politicized versions of an already political issue. So as you were saying, it's so complicated.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:12] Yeah. It's that thing of like there's an inconvenient thing. Like I hate to sound like Al Gore, but there's an inconvenient conclusion that science has reached that not only should we stop dumping raw sewage into your rivers, but also we should treat trans people better. And those are things that, you know, there's a lot of people who don't like that. And so they're like, “let's kind of set out to deliberately create obfuscation around this.” So it's a political topic about which science has a fairly clear answer. And then political actors try to make that clear answer less clear in the public's mind.
Annalee: [00:16:47] Try to make it seem like there's a controversy. And then they're aided by the media. You know, there's like ample reporting on the reporting in the New York Times, which made it appear that there was a lot more push back to trans youth health care than there actually was. And then that fed into these policies that we didn't see reflected in these health reports.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:10] Many people are asking questions.
Annalee: [00:17:11] Yep. Just asking questions about whether your child should be allowed to have health care.
[00:17:17] So, okay, let's get to the final category of science and politics, which is what we're seeing most now, which is the politicization of science. And so this is again in the United States gets staged as Democrats versus Republicans, where Democrats like vaccines. They like mask mandates. They like trans care. They like environmental regulation. They like gun control. All of these things that are kind of issues that have been studied by science and validated by science.
[00:17:50] And then Republicans just hate all of that. And it's kind of wild because it's almost like saying band-aids are a political issue. The idea that it would be a Republican issue to not have vaccines and masks. Like that's never been a political issue before. And like I said, I keep thinking about the idea that at some point, Kennedy is going to come out and say, like, “band-aids are, you know, a communist plot. Like you should just freely bleed.”
Charlie Jane: [00:18:18] I mean, fluoride. They're trying to ban fluoride. Like seriously. And like, yeah, these things about which there used to be kind of a bipartisan consensus not that long ago are suddenly super partisan. It's really upsetting. It makes me just want to scream all the time. It's really like it drives me around the bend.
[00:18:38] And a lot of this stuff, I mean, I want to refer people back to the episode we did about rugged individualism because I feel like a lot of this does come back to the notion of like healthcare, unfortunately, is a collective.
Annalee: [00:18:51] It's a community.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:51] Your healthcare affects me and vice versa. If you get sick, I'm more likely to be sick. And that's not what we want to believe as a nation where we have this like cowboy out on the range kind of idea of like who we are that like everybody just takes care of themselves and nobody worries about anybody else. And like, that's not the world we live in. That never has been.
Annalee: [00:19:11] One of the things that I think is difficult about talking about the politicization of science is that there is a history of right-wing and conservative thinkers in the United States accusing progressives of being the ones who are politicizing science because those are people who are doing, you know, who are doing studies where they reflect on how politics informs science, right?
[00:19:33] Like what we were discussing at the top, especially kind of in the early 2020s when we were dealing with COVID, there were a lot of op-eds in scientific journals that were about how, you know, cancel culture and the politicization of science are, you know, ruining our ability to have free inquiry, partly in response to some prominent figures in the sciences, like the physicist Lawrence Krauss being called out as sexual harassers and abusers.
[00:20:02] And partly it was in response to people who were against acknowledging climate change, climate deniers, I suppose we call them. Partly it was response to the cancellation of climate deniers as well. And so it was kind of on both the sort of, you know, the personal front of like, “oh, we're just sad that our friends are getting called out for bad behavior.” But it was also this sort of political idea that like people should be allowed to have whatever opinion they want to about the environment. And like when they get called to task, like that's politicizing.
[00:20:37] And Hank Green, who is a great science journalist and YouTuber, was actually pointing out on Bluesky that Lawrence Krauss, the aforementioned canceled physicist, has a book coming out in July. It's called The War on Science, and it's about the politicization of science, but it's about how leftists are, you know, making a war on science and what Hank Green was saying was, you know, “wow, bad timing.” Because now we're in an era of right wingers, you know, literally canceling science, canceling funding, canceling grants, firing people en masse.
[00:21:14] And it's like, if you want to know what canceling science looks like, just look at the U.S. federal government right now. That is what's happening, is that a small group of people with a lot of political power are dismantling decades of research and like flushing away a bunch of data.
[00:21:36] You know, NOAA, which does weather prediction, among other things, they now don't have enough money to release enough weather balloons to make our weather predictions accurate anymore. And after just a month of that, weather predictions are about 10 to 20 percent less accurate. You know, and it's like, again, how did weather prediction become a political issue?
Charlie Jane: [00:22:03] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:22:03] hat's the reality that we're in right now.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:06] I just want to address the harassment thing for like one second because that is an area where like, you know, there's a part of me that's like, “OK, you know, what if Lawrence Krauss was the greatest physicist in the world?” You know, what if the price of him? I don't know much about Lawrence Krauss, so, you know, forgive me. But what if he was like the Einstein of our era and like he was going to like solve...
Annalee: [00:22:28] Which FYI, now people think that Einstein's wife like did a lot of his work.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:32] Right? Well, that brings me to what I'm saying.
Annalee: [00:22:34] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:34] Like this idea that like, OK, what if we just allow him to like harass like three people a year and he's going to give us amazing physics insights. He's going to solve string theory. He's going to explain quantum gravity and everything.
[00:22:47] But, you know, the thing about science, as with so many other fields of inquiry, the more perspectives you have, the better. And the more people who are kept out of it, the worse your results. So if you create an environment where women and people of color and queers do not feel welcome in the sciences, you're going to get worse science, like axiomatically across the board.
[00:23:09] And so that's a subtle area in which science is kind of inherently political because inclusion makes for better science because you're going to get more ideas and more perspectives and just better results. And someone who's a harasser, someone who creates a hostile environment is actually degrading the quality of the science that we're going to see.
Annalee: [00:23:27] Yeah. And it goes beyond sexual harassment. I mean, some of the scientists who've been, quote unquote, canceled, it was just because they were extremely abusive. You know, they would treat their grad students like garbage. They would like overwork them, take credit for their work, text them at 2 a.m. and force them to do things like your classic bad boss behavior.
[00:23:47] And like you said, what that means is the science is worse and they're mostly dudes. A lot of them get caught because it turns out their data sucks because they are also cutting corners in their research and they have so much hubris that they won't admit when they've had a result that's maybe not quite as clear as they might want it to be.
[00:24:12] One of the things about the politicization of science that I think we really need to emphasize before we wind up is the fact that it creates confusion. We kind of mentioned this earlier, but I think that when you're trying to decide, when you see a story about science and politics and you're trying to decide, wait, is this a story that's politicizing science or it's a story about the politics of science?
[00:24:38] So if it's politicizing, it's going to be trying to make it seem that nobody really knows whether, say, masking is good for us or they might even say, “oh, there's people who think vitamin A is really great for dealing with measles” and they'll be taking established scientific data, established scientific hypotheses and just making it seem like those are just as valid as some guy sitting on his couch musing about what would be cool to do with vitamins.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:16] Yeah, I mean, I feel like this goes back to when I was a kid and we had all this talk about, should we teach creationism in schools? Should we be teaching the theory of evolution in schools? I feel like religion is one part, one piece of why we have debates that aren't really debates, where it's like, should we give equal weight to perspectives that have evidence versus perspectives that are faith-based? And I have enormous respect and admiration for religion, but I also do think that people should be taught what is scientifically proven, especially in a school, in a secular school.
[00:25:57] And then you have industry, which going back to the debate over whether cigarettes cause cancer or the debate, this is a playbook that's been run over and over again, is to create confusion about very clear-cut science. And that's a huge piece of what we're dealing with now. It's a huge piece of what we are referring to as politicization is the idea that we have to give equal weight to perspectives that are basically not evidence-based or that we have to pretend that there's uncertainty that doesn't exist.
[00:26:25] And I feel like the problem that we're having now is that there's been so much capture of mainstream voices, mainstream media, mainstream pundits, and mainstream politics, that even people who at one time would have been like, “no, the science is settled, let's just move on,” are like you mentioned the New York Times earlier, like on trans issues, and I think on some other stuff too, are like, “oh, let's actually get into this.”
[00:26:51] And now you're seeing newspapers, reputable newspapers saying, “well, maybe RFK Junior has a point about X, Y, and Z.” And it's like, no, he doesn't. He literally has no point.
Annalee: [00:26:59] Yeah, I mean, when you have public figures who have the bully pulpit of being in charge of a federal agency, for example, and they're saying, “take vitamin A if you want to not get measles,” it really does set a tone.
[00:27:17] And I feel like in a way, every kind of healthcare issue in the United States has become a version of the abortion debate, where on the one hand you have moral panic, and on the other hand you have decades and decades of medical research showing that the outcome for women who can choose whether or not to take their pregnancy to term have better lives in every measurable respect.
[00:27:41] There's an incredible study that I highly recommend that people check out called the Turn Away Study, which became a book, but it's based on a longitudinal study of outcomes for women who were denied abortions and women who were able to get them. Again, evidence-based studies showing that women who are denied abortions are in worse economic circumstances, worse domestic circumstances in terms of being exposed to the possibility of spousal abuse. They're in worse psychological circumstances. They suffer more from mental illness than women who were able to choose whether they wanted to keep their pregnancy or not.
[00:28:17] And so that's the science. And then there's just the vibes, the moral vibes, you know, like, “oh, you know, we're just not sure if it's a person or not.” And like, “once they're born, we don't give a shit about them. But while they're in the womb, you know, we want to protect them at the expense of the mother's life or the parent's life.”
[00:28:36] And then I think the other thing I just wanted to make sure that I flicked at something that you said that was really important, which is that the other piece of this is corporate interests. And so that's where you get, you know, confusion around like, “well, is it really bad to harm the environment? I mean, a bunch of giant companies think it's totally fine because one day AI will solve environmental problems for us.”
Charlie Jane: [00:29:01] Yeah. And it's just, I mean, there's so much willful obfuscation and I feel like we're just swimming in it. You know, it's almost like stories are weapons.
Annalee: [00:29:10] It almost is like that. All right. Hopefully this can help folks as they're going forward hearing about the dismantling of science in America. At least you can have a rubric for thinking about when things are being politicized versus when people are just talking about the legitimacy and the ultimate political implications of scientific work.
[00:29:34] And after the break, we will be hearing from Maddie Stone about why SimEarth is the greatest environmental science game that you've probably never played.
[00:29:43] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
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[00:30:37] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:30:41] And now we are super happy to welcome our contributing host for this episode, Maddie Stone. Maddie worked with Charlie Jane and I back at IO9, where she created a blog devoted to environmental reporting, which is called Earther, which was super awesome. And I still miss reading it.
[00:31:00] She has a PhD in earth science and has written for Grist, National Geographic, Technology Review, and many other awesome places. And she has a newsletter called The Science of Fiction, which you should obviously sign up for right now.
[00:31:00] Today, she is going to give us a deep dive into the video game SimEarth. Welcome to the show, Maddie. So tell us your story.
Maddie: [00:31:23] Like many environmental journalists, early trips into nature sparked my interest in the field. But so did a1990 video game called SimEarth. SimEarth was the second installment in game developer Maxis's iconic line of sim games following the release of SimCity in 1989. SimCity broke the mold of what video games were expected to be. There were no high scores to beat or races to win. There was just a pixelated landscape on which players could design a city and watch it grow.
[00:31:54] The game was so sophisticated for the time that urban planning professors used it in their courses and political candidates played it to prove they had the chops for city management. But if SimCity showed the world that video games can convey big ideas, SimEarth took that to a different level.
[00:32:11] In fact, you can argue that the game was primarily intended to expose players to one big idea, the Gaia Hypothesis, which proposed that Earth is alive. The Gaia Hypothesis was first put forth in the early 1970s by NASA astrobiologist James Lovelock and evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis.
[00:32:34] Lovelock and Margulis observed that life on Earth has persisted for billions of years, despite apocalyptic asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions, changes in the Sun's light output, and recently an industrial civilization seemingly hell-bent on wrecking the place.
[00:32:48] The two scientists suggested that Earth's biosphere, the sum total of its life forms and ecosystems, keeps the planet's non-living parts habitable through a series of feedback mechanisms. Just as individual plants and animals regulate their internal environment, Gaia, named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth, regulates herself like a giant super organism.
[00:33:12] Today, Earth Science 101 students learn about how life shapes everything from the planet's climate to the chemistry of the atmosphere to the weathering of rocks. But in the 1970s, this sort of Earth systems thinking was radical.
[00:33:26] Maxis co-founder Will Wright, who enthusiastically immersed himself in new fields of study, found the idea fascinating. Here's Maxis’ other co-founder, Jeff Braun, reminiscing about Wright's interest in Gaia theory.
[Clip of Jeff Braun]: [00:33:40] Everything he did was pretty much what he was interested in. And I think the idea of the Earth as a living lifeform is what really got Will excited.
Maddie: [00:33:51] Wright wound up meeting Lovelock through their mutual acquaintance, the writer and futurist Stuart Brand. The two men struck up a correspondence, and Lovelock agreed to advise Wright on a game that would help bring the Gaia hypothesis to the masses. Throughout SimEarth's development, Wright and Lovelock were in touch repeatedly.
[00:34:10] But while Wright wanted to get the word out about Gaia, Braun had a different concern, sales. A simulation of a city where players manage the flow of traffic and try to entice high-value real estate developers was risky enough. Braun felt that it worked because players could direct the city's development. It was theirs to manage as they saw fit.
[00:34:30] Planets are much harder to manage. SimEarth invites players to try, but there is only so much they can control. The game simulates the evolution of an Earth-like planet for billions of years. All of the major systems and dynamics present on Earth's surface are included in the simulation.
[00:34:48] There are plate tectonics, volcanoes, ocean currents, weather, and life, which begins as single-celled organisms and eventually can evolve into an industrial civilization capable of nuking itself or blasting off into space.
[00:35:00] Players can intervene in planetary affairs by altering the atmosphere, adding landmasses and biomes, or triggering meteor strikes. They can choose a scenario with a goal, like managing the Cambrian explosion, helping a civilization advance, or even terraforming a Venus-like world. Or they can sit back and watch the simulation play out on its own.
[00:35:22] That is what I remember doing as a 7-year-old parked in front of my family's Performa Macintosh computer, watching as biomes expanded and contracted. As polar ice caps retreated and advanced. As life evolved and spread. The nuances of what was happening weren’t always clear to me, but the big picture was. Our planet is a vibrant hunk of rock, constantly changing and responding to changes in a drama playing out over eons.
[00:35:48] I found sim-Earth riveting. The co-founder of Maxis did not. Here's Braun again.
[Clip of Jeff Braun]: [00:35:55] It was a science fair project. Fun was not the goal of this thing.
Maddie: [00:35:59] Too esoteric, too impersonal, and too technical, Braun feared SimEarth would be a flop, and so he went into damage control mode, doing everything he could think of to make the game more enticing and help it find its audience. He asked Michael Bremer, Maxis' lead manual writer, to go big for SimEarth. The result was a 228-page manual that covered game play and the inner workings of the simulation, but also included textbook-like chapters on subjects ranging from Gaia Theory to The Greenhouse Effect.
[00:36:31] A grad student at UC Berkeley, Carolina Lithgow Bertelloni, was hired to write a geology chapter. She’s now chair of the Earth Planetary and Space Sciences department at the University of California, Los Angeles.
[00:36:45] Lovelock, himself, wrote the manual’s introduction. In it, he opined why he believed it made sense to view the Earth as a living organism. Here’s an excerpt:
[00:36:55] “I recognize that to view the Earth as if it were alive is just a convenient, but different way of organizing the facts of the Earth. I am, of course, prejudiced in favor of Gaia and have filled my life for the past 25 years with the thought that Earth may be alive. As the ancients saw her, a sentient goddess with purpose and foresight, but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and soil.”
[00:37:27] With a science and philosophy rich game play manual in hand, Braun shopped SimEarth to schools. He entered a distribution agreement with Davidson and Associates, a software company focused on the educational market, and he hired a consultant to design a SimEarth curriculum for high school and college students. The game wound up being played in science, math, and geography courses across the country. Teachers gave it rave reviews.
[00:37:52] Despite Braun's efforts, SimEarth didn't achieve the same level of commercial success as SimCity, but it was successful enough that for years after its release, Maxis continued to put out games that transported players to a different world. There was SimAnt, which simulated a backyard ant colony, and SimLife, which allowed players to modify the genomes of plants and animals living in a simulated ecosystem.
[00:38:17] Maxis even toyed around with the idea of a game where players could try their hand at terraforming the red planet. Elements of SimEarth's planetary model were incorporated into a SimMars prototype.
[00:38:32] But after Maxis was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1997, the brand refocused on human-centric simulations. SimMars was left unfinished, and in 2000, Maxis released a dollhouse simulator called The Sims. It became one of the best-selling video game series of all time. That success would come to define Maxis for the next decade and a half.
[00:38:55] SimEarth, meanwhile, faded into obscurity, one of many odd digressions in Maxis' history, remembered mainly by the developers who worked on it, and by people like me, who grew up playing it. And, of course, by Lovelock.
[Clip of Holthaus]: [00:39:09] 25 years ago, there was the video game that you worked on with Will Wright called SimEarth.
[Clip of Lovelock]: [00:39:15] That’s right. That was really fun.
Maddie: [00:39:17] That was James Lovelock speaking with climate reporter Eric Holthaus in 2015. Lovelock died in 2022 at the age of 103.
[00:39:28] The generation growing up today has more video games than ever to choose from. Unlike when I was a kid, many of them address environmental issues. There are games like Final Fantasy VII, where the villains are committing crimes against the planet, and games like Animal Crossing, where wind turbines and solar panels blend cheerily into the background. There are games whose explicit goal is cleaning up the ocean or restoring a blighted ecosystem.
[00:39:52] But there's never really been a successor to SimEarth, a game that tries to incorporate all major aspects of Earth's science into a playable adventure. Maybe Braun was right, and the concept is simply too out there. But for the aging millennials who grew up watching pixelated planets evolve from barren rocks to industrial societies, SimEarth mattered.
[00:40:15] For me, SimEarth sparked a lifelong interest in paleobiology. I learned that life first emerged in Earth’s oceans eons ago, and that it was microbes that gave our atmosphere enough oxygen for more complex lifeforms to evolve. I learned about the Cambrian Explosion, the event half a billions years ago when animals underwent a burst of evolutionary innovation, and I began to appreciate my own genetic connection to seemingly distant organisms like frogs and insects.
[00:40:43] SimEarth was also where I first learned about the global carbon cycle, which I would go on to study in grad school 20 years later, and the greenhouse effect. At a time when fossil fuel companies were successfully sowing doubt about global warming in the minds of countless adults, SimEarth showed kids like me a simple truth. Burning fossil fuels for energy releases heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, warming the planet. Do so for too long, and the planet will be transformed into an uninhabitable hellscape.
[00:41:14] I can't draw a straight line between this one game and my eventual career reporting on the dangers of climate change and the need for a rapid transition of the energy system. But I am grateful to Maxis for giving me an early 16-bit window into the inner workings of the planet, and for showing me how fragile life's hold on this ancient rock really is.
[00:41:36] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:41:39] Thank you so much for listening. This has been yet another episode of Our Opinions Are Correct. You can find us on Mastadon, Patreon, Instagram, Bluesky, all the good places. We’re usually Our Opinions or OOAC Pod. Easy to find us. And please, please subscribe and review our podcast wherever you are getting this podcast. Having subscribers helps people find us, it helps us know who's listening, and we would just really appreciate it. And then we'll pop up automatically in your feed every other week.
[00:42:18] Thank you so much to our brilliant producer and engineer, Niah Harmon. Thank you to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez-Nichols for the music. And if you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord. No matter what, we'll talk to you later.
Both: [00:42:32] Bye!
[00:42:33] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]