This is one of the best articles I've ever read in Medium, I kid you not. I am a long Term practiced Model Based Systems Engineer, and find this story incredibly useful, thanks very much for posting it. Model Based Archeology sounds like a great idea.
I've found myself immersed lately in the global energy problem. it's huge, and and actually existential. My biggest ever project. I've spent longer working on this now than any other project in my earlier career working for bosses and clients. Six years now and counting.
I don't have any clients or bosses for this work, unless we consider the stakeholders as all people, and actually the planet. Nobody pays me to do it, as yet.
I won't tell you the outcome directly, but you can probably guess if I make a suggestion on what to try simulating, to see the systemic outcome (Emergent property).
I would try simulating Earth populated by all people operating for profit. Add in the environment which reacts by a tiny rise of temperature for every profitable transaction, and the environment beginning to burn at a critical temperature.
We can justify setting the simulation to act like this, by noticing money is energy, always, and when a little money is put out, and more is received back than put out, the energy gained had to come from somewhere, the only possible source is the Earth, because only the Earth can be "Tricked" into supplying more energy out than it received put in.
It isn't possible to trick the sun like this, it gives what it gives, we can't trick it to somehow give more.
The energy that would have been heat from the sun, had it not been used by nature in the first place from the sun, to create the materials and non heat energy fields lost to heat by Earth, for every Joule of energy we take out of it like this, far outweigh the energy taken out. This is the first driver of the rising temperature happening because of profit, and can be computed (simulated!) using E=MC squared.
We know what the outcome will be, because this is what we are seeing in the real environment around us right now.
Try changing the simulation by removing the need for profit by every human, to every human having effectively a direct share of the solar energy received by all solar farms, to supply not only the 150 or so Joules per second each human needs to metabolise per second 24/7, but an additional undisclosed margin, enabling the human to achieve all the ambitions they might have in life that might require more energy than they metabolise. In other words enough energy that the human never experiences shortage of energy in their life.
The mechanism we might use in reality to achieve this is issue of a solar indexed UBI to all people.
We don't know the outcome of that simulation, because we haven't seen it sustained in reality yet.
Of particular interest is the extra margin required by each human, to maximise the creativity of each human, that is the ability of the human to put maximum amount of energy to use from the sun, therfore reducing the amount of energy remaining from the sun, which heats the planet, if not otherwise used by nature.
Again E=MC squared is useful in computation of this, but a reasonable prediction will probably require many iterations of the simulation.
A further detail of the simulation is that the human has available to hand the technology of domestic and community based solar hydrogen. They will be incentivised and empowered to use this, expanding it to whatever capacity is necessary to provide the extra margin, since this will maximise the stipend of the solar indexed UBI, dumping all energy of the margin into hydrogen which would then fuel all transportation with no pollution, even air transportation (something batteries can't do).
So far, science, mostly for profit lately, does not appear to accept formal systems Engineering evidence as "proof", so we are unlikely to see science supporting our conclusions so far, unsimulated.
Maybe simulating it will make a difference.
I hope so anyway, it's our only chance, it seems to me.
Thanks so much for writing your story, I will probably try the programs you suggest, but here is another suggestion for you, which has become apparent to me playing around with ChatGPT; it loves to role play.
The recently identified discipline of prompt Engineering ("Character forming!), looks like a pretty powerful means of creating agents.
It might be that LLMs like ChatGPT could be used to perform the kinds of simulation you've identified.
Hey-ho, exciting times, whatever the outcome :)