Simulating the Anthropocene engine: Minimal models as analytic devices

The project aims at reconstructing building blocks of the Anthropocene engine by building a collection of reduced agent-based models that simulate key aspects behind the so-called great acceleration. This includes e.g. innovations in energy generation and transport, the scaling of global communication networks in space and time (from the printing press to the internet), evolving structures of societal (self-) governance or economic transport networks of finances and goods. The aim of this project is to find for each sub-model a middle ground of complexity that allows e.g. for heterogeneous behaviour of agents but also opens pathways to connect to mathematical abstractions of the model behaviour.