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H.O.T EARTH

The honesty mandate

Every project has a rule it will not break. For H.O.T EARTH it is this:

Real physics and real data, no fake numbers. Anything illustrative is labelled. Every asset is licensed and credited.

This page explains what that means and why it is worth the constraint.

Why an honesty rule at all

Section titled “Why an honesty rule at all”

A digital twin is persuasive. A smooth globe with glowing cities and confident figures looks authoritative whether or not the numbers are real. That is exactly the danger. The moment a viewer cannot tell a measurement from a decoration, the whole thing becomes an aesthetic, not a model.

The honesty mandate exists so that trust is earned by construction, not by appearance. It is also what makes the project useful to learn from: you can read any world’s code and its notes and see precisely where each number came from.

What it means in practice

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  • Compute or measure, never invent. Positions come from ephemerides, terminators from solar geometry, forecasts from measured data. If a value cannot be computed or sourced, it does not appear as if it were real.
  • Label the illustrative. Some things genuinely cannot be photographed or measured (an exoplanet’s surface, a black hole’s lensing). These are rendered as clearly illustrative, in the UI and in the notes, never as data.
  • State the bounds. Each world’s physics note leads with what is real, what is illustrative, and where the limits are. Overclaiming is a bug.
  • License and credit everything. Only clearly usable sources ship, and the exact credit line travels with the asset.

What it costs, and why it is worth it

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The rule says no to things: no fabricated “trusted by” logos, no invented accuracy, no rendering an object that has never been imaged as if it had. Those noes are the product. A twin you can trust on the hard cases is a twin you can trust at all.

Where this shows up

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