The Nature of Simulations

Much of my experience with nature has been by means of simulation. I’m a city kid, born and raised in Beijing, the second-most populated urban area in China. I lived on the 29th floor of an apartment complex in one of the eastern districts. A 15-minute walk away was a small park with a hill in it. From the open-air pagoda at the top of the hill, I could see the city stretching on and on in every direction, as if it were a single machine made up of an infinite number of infinitesimally small parts. Some people would find such a world oppressive, cold, and devoid of beauty. But as someone who grew up in it, it felt like home. The sound of cars on the road greeted me in the morning, signaling that the world was already hard at work. After school, my friends and I would go to the abandoned area behind the mall to pick up interesting rocks that had been dug up and transported to the city from who-knows-where. At sunset, the dying light would reflect off thousands of glass windows, turning them to gold.

I liked the city, but as someone who was almost always inside of it, my curiosity grew about the world beyond. I would leave a few times a year for family trips, but usually to locations tailored and sanitized for travelers. The mountains we hiked, for example, had concrete stairs built all the way to the peak. Instead of climbing trails and scrambling over boulders, I was walking up the equivalent of several hundred flights of stairs. On those trips, I was surrounded by trees, plants, insects, and birds, but it felt artificial. I wanted to learn more about the real nature, not the one made for us, but the one that existed on its own terms. As a kid, though, I had little opportunity to physically be in natural environments. So, I turned to simulations.

Simulations are commonly defined as imitations of situations or processes, representing one thing as another. A photograph, for example, is a simulation of what is depicted at the moment its light was captured. A heart-wrenching poem about saying goodbye to a close friend is a simulation of the actual emotions experienced by the poet. We are surrounded by simulations through the books we read, the videos we watch, the games we play, and the tools we use. In math class, I learn about systems that are abstractions of the fundamental truths of our world - how one plus one makes two. When I read an article in English class, I encounter representations of topics as crafted by the author. When I watch a travel video at night while lying in bed, I experience a facsimile of the joy of exploring interesting far-off places. Considering how much I rely on my computer these days, I would not be surprised if I spend more time every day with simulations than interacting with the world directly.

I surround myself with simulations because they allow the world to unfold before me, even when I cannot step into it directly. I see nature in screensavers and desktop images - sunlight filtering through leaves in a forest, pristine beaches with not one footprint in the sand. I see it in documentaries, with meerkats standing guard over the savanna and penguins waddling across Antarctic snow. I see it in Minecraft, whose procedurally generated worlds give me the wondrous experience of discovering never-before-seen landscapes, exploring winding caves, and building castles on picturesque cliffs. These images, movies, and games are all simulations of the world. They allow someone who has never been in those places directly to nevertheless enjoy them.

Yet simulations are, by definition, deceptive. Through them, I came to believe that the world was full of untamed nature. I thought it surrounded us, even though I couldn’t see it. After all, the forests in documentaries stretched beyond the horizon, and books told of explorers braving the dangers of the wilderness. Most influentially perhaps, Minecraft - the game I played almost every day as a child - consisted entirely of natural landscapes. Anything the player constructed was reduced to mere specks on the canvas when compared to the scale of the world. I knew this all too well, having lost multiple homes after wandering too far down untrodden paths and being unable to find my way back. These experiences, both explicitly and subconsciously, led me to believe that nature was the norm and humans were the exception.

This misconception met its timely end on a sunny afternoon eight years ago. I was sitting in front of my computer, procrastinating on my studies. Instead of solving algebraic equations or memorizing Tang dynasty poems, I browsed Google Earth, a miraculous toy that I had recently discovered. Using this astonishingly detailed simulation of our planet’s surface, I explored the world from the comfort of my desk - jumping from my 29th-floor apartment in Beijing to the orange rooftops of Istanbul to the Diomede Islands located satisfyingly in the exact middle of the Bering Strait. Hopping from place to place, I marveled at how much we humans have managed to build. After zooming out once more (this time from the water-drenched city center of Amsterdam), I decided to find some destinations off the beaten path - somewhere natural and wild. There seemed to be a lot of choices - after all, apart from the yellow sands, white snow, blue water, and gray cities, the rest of our little globe was green. So, I picked a random spot in my home country of China, flicked my scroll wheel, and zoomed in.

However, instead of seeing natural grasslands or forests, I saw a patchwork grid consisting of various shades of green, yellow, and brown - Farmland. Huh, I hadn't expected agriculture to look so geometric from the top down. Undeterred, I clicked and dragged my cursor, flying across hundreds of kilometers of land. No matter which direction I went, all that I encountered was the same patchwork of fields dotted with towns here and there. Even when I teleported to Europe or the US, I was greeted with the same grid, only with slightly different shapes and shades of color. It was as if a quilt had been draped over the earth. Slowly, I realized that the green I thought was pristine, undeveloped nature was, in fact, made up of millions of pixels of fields. There were no natural plants to be seen, only the ones we decided should be there.

Of course, I eventually did find green that was not farmland in disguise - in the mountains of southern China, the frozen taigas of Siberia, and the rainforests of South America. There, I could see the wild. I was grateful that the harshness of these places had deterred us from them. But I couldn’t help but feel sorrow for the rest. Where were the original ecosystems of the mild and calm places? The grassy field by the river, and the deciduous forests that stretched on and on? They were too good to last, too arable, too undeveloped. I am reminded of the famous lines of the Tang dynasty Chinese poem “Farewell on the Ancient Grassy Plains:” 离离原上草，一岁一枯荣。野火烧不尽，春风吹又生。 Lush grass grows on the ancient plain, Each year it withers and flourishes. Wild fire can’t burn it out, It re-grows in the spring breeze. The purportedly invincible grasslands were perhaps exaggerated, as they no longer exist. I will never be able to see the central plains as described in the poem. Instead of vast windswept grasslands, there are now farms producing industrial quantities of food that feed billions of people.

But was this new conception of the modern relationship between nature and humans also borne out of the misrepresentations of simulations? For example, however impressive the technology behind Google Earth is, it still restricts you to a top-down god-like perspective. It forces you to view the world from a high level, ignoring the individuals that actually inhabit it. From above, a village is a mere cluster of rectangles, and farmland is nothing more than a repeating grid. Yet on the ground, those rectangles are homes where families gather for dinner, and those fields are places where generations of farmers have lived and worked. What appears from the sky to be a geometric conquest of nature by humans can, at eye level, be personal - a patchwork not just of crops but of cultures, stories, and lives that bind people to their landscapes.

In her New York Times Article, “Are We the Cows of the Future,” Esther Leslie explores the relationship between humans and nature in two parts. First, she presents a common utopian representation of nature. In these interpretations, nature “plays a familiar role,” as a “haven to guarantee human well-being” (Leslie). So, while we often describe nature as everything we are not - eternal, cyclical, serene, and balanced - we are still representing it in ways that suit us and our ideals. In our simulations - our books and paintings - we project our utopian aspirations for harmony and predictability onto nature, avoiding its uncomfortable truths. For example, the focus of the Tang dynasty poem, “Farewell on the Ancient Grassy Plains,” is not actually the natural landscape of the central plains. Instead, it only includes the cyclical grasslands as a useful metaphor for the feelings of saying farewell to a friend - hoping that the parting is never final, but merely another turn in the endless cycle of meeting and separation. But like how we all eventually must say our final goodbyes, Leslie points out that nature, too, is subject to irreversible change. Nature is “always in flux” and “what seemed more or less eternal is now undergoing extinction, unstoppable melting” (Leslie). So, instead of interpreting the effects of humans on this planet as introducing change to something that was previously in perfect homeostasis, perhaps we could think of it as another stage of nature’s evolution, albeit a rapid and dramatic one. After all, we are a part of nature and a product of its history, taking part in deciding what it wants for itself.

In the second part of her article, Leslie pivots to exploring the dangers of human intervention in nature. Specifically, she presents a dystopian view of simulations, highlighting how cows on Russian megafarms were fitted with VR headsets so that they could imagine themselves “wandering in bright summer fields, not bleak wintry ones.” Leslie argues that this is not far removed from our own experience, as we too “submit to emotion trackers,” “sign up for tracking and tracing,” and willingly let advertisers and mappers monitor us at all times (Leslie). Leslie fears that, like the cows, we may begin to confuse manufactured images of freedom with freedom itself, mistaking artificial pastures for genuine ones. In this way, simulations not only shape our perceptions but also risk pushing us into delusion and complacency.

Would it be better, then, to turn away from simulations altogether and seek out our answers through direct, unmediated encounters with nature? The promise of standing in a forest or by a river is that such moments feel unfiltered, pure. But even these experiences are not entirely neutral. Our senses highlight only what evolution has trained them to notice, ignoring the majority of what is present. We cannot feel magnetic fields, hear the low hum of seismic waves, or see the ultraviolet patterns guiding insects across flowers. What we call “direct experience” is itself a kind of simulation - our brains selecting and translating fragments of the world into something we can process. And history reminds us how easily such perceptions can mislead. For centuries, observers trusted their eyes and believed the sun orbited the Earth. And we once divided the universe into earth, air, fire, and water, mistaking simplicity for truth. What we perceive directly, then, is only one version of nature, not nature in its entirety.

If all perception is partial, perhaps the value of simulations lies not in reproducing the world exactly but in refracting it in ways that make us see differently. Misperceptions can be useful, allowing us to notice patterns we overlook. After coming from China to New York, one of the first places I went to was the Brooklyn Bridge. I have always possessed a kind of reverence for infrastructure. To me, these monoliths of stone and steel are monuments to human ingenuity and represent our need to conquer all obstacles of nature and craft a world that suits us rather than simply adapting to it. So, when I saw a photo of Olafur Eliasson’s 2008 Brooklyn Bridge Waterfall (Public Art Fund), I was immediately intrigued. In the photo, the Brooklyn Bridge tower rises as a silhouette against a deepening purple sky, its shape traced by strings of warm yellow lights that arch mathematically over the East River toward Manhattan. Below, the glow of windows and street lamps scatters across downtown Brooklyn.

In this sea of yellow and orange, a glowing rectangle of blue emerges at the base of the bridge tower: a waterfall, luminous and uniform, cascading with such precision it appears almost like a shimmering sheet of fabric. Behind it, scaffolding faintly peeks through, revealing its construction. This artwork combines a waterfall - something that normally exists only in nature, with no practical human function - with the Brooklyn Bridge - an entirely functional construction that literally sits atop the natural world. This juxtaposition highlights the artificiality of the surrounding environment and how little exists in New York City that wasn’t specifically designed for human convenience. I think about how the rivers might be the only remnants of a natural landscape long gone, and I am filled with the same sense of loss I felt looking at Google Earth, a grief for something I never truly had. Of course, the waterfall in this photo is also artificial - a simulated representation of a quintessentially natural phenomenon. Still, it succeeds in prompting real reflection within us about our relationship with the world.

Similarly, our scientific models - from planetary diagrams to the periodic table - have revealed truths about forces and matter that our senses could never grasp unaided. Simulations are never complete or transparent, but their unique distortions can guide us toward deeper understanding. I’ve come to understand this through the places I’ve visited that never quite existed - the endless terrains of games, the green continents that dissolved into patchwork quilts, the grasslands preserved only in lines of verse, the waterfall that shimmered beneath a bridge despite being nothing more than scaffolding and spray. Each simulation, in its own way, refracted reality rather than replacing it, revealing what I might not have seen otherwise. The danger of becoming like Leslie’s cows in VR headsets arises not from simulation itself, but from narrowing our vision to a single one. Walking along the East River at night, I am often mesmerized by the shimmering and ever-changing surface of the water. The river reflects the world in broken fragments, each wave catching just a sliver of light. Only by taking in all the fragments can I piece together the picture of the skyline it's reflecting. And only by engaging with a diversity of simulations - while remaining aware of their artificiality - can we come closer to piecing together the puzzle that is the nature of our world.

Works Cited