✳ AFTERLIGHT ECONOMIC SANDBOX
LOCAL SIMULATION Findings report ↗
A FIELD GUIDE TO WHAT COMES NEXT

Intelligence is abundant.
Everything else is a choice.

Set the assumptions, choose the policies, then run the century and see who ends up holding the energy and the compute.

Choosing a preset starts a new run.
Checkpoints remain available.

STEP 1 / WHAT THE WORLD IS LIKE

Assumptions

PHYSICS · TIMING · TECHNOLOGY

These describe the world you cannot choose: when the key technologies arrive, how capable and how fast minds become, what sunlight and materials cost to use, and how much Earth can bear. Every value is a scenario input, not a forecast.

Inside the model

This is a playable exploratory model, not a prediction. Money is in illustrative constant dollars anchored to physical power; B means billion. The full mechanics, coefficients, and their limitations are documented in the repository (README.md, docs/technology_model.md) and in the findings report linked in the header.

Energy and heat

Solar flux = 1,361 / distance² W/m². Radiators use Q/A = εσ(T⁴ − Tsink⁴) with emissivity 0.9. Every site has an energy ceiling: sunlight through a body's cross-section times a coverage fraction (1% for Earth, 10% for other surfaces), or a share of solar luminosity for orbital and free-space sites.

Capability

AGI arrives in the chosen year; before it, frontier systems sit at human-level intelligence and 1,000× serial speed. Intelligence and speed then grow exponentially to their ceilings over the chosen number of years. Productivity P = 1 + 0.12 log₁₀(intelligence / 1.5) + 0.08 log₁₀(speed / 1,000). Cognition speeds research; physical construction is bounded by energy and materials.

Industry

Self-replicating industrial seeds become available in the chosen year (never before 2033); conventional outposts can precede them at ten times the cost and a fifth of the kit. Manufacturing capacity grows exponentially, bounded by fabrication lines, industrial power, materials, and the replication time; off-world sites are slowed by the expansion barrier and Earth by its own land, grid, and heat limits. Fission plants burn fissile fuel that only rocky bodies yield; fusion plants, from the chosen fusion year, burn deuterium and helium-3 scooped from gas-giant atmospheres. Resident-weight photonic compute multiplies useful output per watt once research crosses its threshold. Reserves are graded: extraction efficiency halves once the easy first percent is gone.

Demand, minds, and money

Digital population fills available compute up to the chosen reproduction rate; investment scales with the share of capacity that reachable population and human demand can use. The money supply is anchored to total physical power, so prices, taxes, and transfers keep meaning as compute becomes abundant. A capital market sells idle holdings to actors with unmet demand; a treaty regime bars defectors from buying.

Treaties, defection, and enforcement

Defectors are a distinct bloc that starts near zero and grows by its own reinvestment plus a share of newly built capacity diverted at the endogenous defection rate, which rises with the net margin of defecting after detection-weighted penalties. Penalties are only as credible as the compliant bloc's share of capital. Detection falls with the share of defector capital beyond 5 AU and shifts toward whichever bloc runs on faster substrate. A crackdown removes the detected share of the bloc when the annual levy reaches a multiple of its capital, scaled by the capability the enforcer gave up. Treaty costs, penalties, and crackdowns settle in productive capital, not cash. A bloc whose resources reach zero ceases to exist.

Earth

The human-aligned bloc keeps Earth's power under a heat and pollution budget and spends a share of Earth output on habitability; defectors respect only the physical ceiling.

References

All nonphysical coefficients are editable code assumptions in model.js, economy.js, and technology.js.

Economic concepts