Simile Earth is a public simulation of the planet's remaining resource runway — freshwater, arable land, rare metals, breathable air — mapped against the humans drawing on it. Not a product. Not a company. A placeholder for a calculator anyone will be able to point at their city, their industry, their kitchen — and read the years left off the dial.
We are living in the first moment in history where every graph — freshwater, topsoil, cobalt, phosphorus, breathable air — has a slope that quietly assumes the planet is infinite. The math that got us here is running out of room. The number of humans is not.
Simile Earth is about what happens when you finally put a clock on it. Not a filter. Not a policy. A simile. A digital thing that stands next to the real planet and rhymes with it — tuned to say, out loud, how many years of a given thing we have left at the draw we're actually pulling.
Some of the words this project keeps circling around: resource runway, biocapacity, overshoot, planetary boundaries, freshwater, arable land, rare earths, per-capita draw, carrying capacity, degrowth, doughnut, sustainability, Earth budget.
Some of the questions: How long does the water last? How much of the good soil is left? How many phones fit into what's actually in the ground? What number of us can this planet run, and for how many years, if we keep living like this?
A finite substrate. Every barrel, every aquifer, every hectare of arable land, every gram of lithium in the ground has a measurable ceiling. The planet is a budget, not a background.
Draw grows with headcount, and headcount is still climbing. Every human is a rate — of water, of food, of metal, of air — and the rates compound faster than the substrate replenishes.
Somewhere between the two is a number of years. Simile Earth is a public attempt to say that number out loud — a runway that anyone can watch, and anyone can bend.
Imagine an open, live, Simile-style calculator sitting on top of the planet's actual supply — not a dashboard for policy wonks, not a paywalled think-tank report, not a walled garden. A shared, machine-readable, human-legible dial that shows how many years of a given resource we have left at a given draw, updated continuously, contextually understood, and available to anyone: a household, a factory, a city, a country.
Imagine "years of freshwater left" having an API. Imagine "years of arable topsoil left" being something you can look up on your phone. Imagine a farmer, a mayor, a school teacher, and a kid all pulling from the same Simile Earth in ways that suit their craft — and watching the number move as the world changes what it draws.
We built this idea after growing up on SimCity and Second Life — the two virtual worlds that first taught a generation you could hold a planet, a city, a life inside a screen and watch every choice compound. Simile Earth borrows from that lineage and points it at the real thing: the same clock, the same budget, only this time the map is the territory.
This is the vague shape of the thing we're circling. Not a promise. Not a roadmap. A direction — toward a calculator everyone can use.