An old Indian proverb says: If you know the present, you can know the future.

Today, digital twin technology promises us to know what is going on in our world every moment, so will it reveal the secrets of the future to us?

The explosion of oxygen tanks on the Apollo 13 spacecraft launched in April 1970 would have been catastrophic, had NASA not created a similar twin for this craft at the Earth station, allowing engineers to test the best possible solution more than 300,000 km away. from the spacecraft.

This can be considered an early application of the concept of twinning, although it was not digital at the time.

Lessons learned from this event led to the idea of ​​creating a high-resolution digital version of the spacecraft, to facilitate troubleshooting.

But this idea was not clearly crystallized except in the 2010 roadmap report, issued by NASA researcher John Vickers, using the name “Digital Twin”, which was started 8 years ago by the American academic Michael Graves.

Interest in the digital twin has begun to increase after Gartner Research Corporation (Gartner) placed it in its list of the top 10 future technology trends in 2017.

The spread of the fifth generation (5G) networks that are 100 times faster than the fourth generation, and the spread of Internet of Things (IoT) devices played a key role in the rapid development of digital twinning projects, as the number of installed Internet of Things devices and sensors globally at the end of 2021 reached about 12.2 billion, and it is expected that The number will rise to about 27 billion by 2025, according to IoT Analytics, an Internet of Things research company.

Interest in the digital twin has increased after Gartner Research ranked it in 2017 among the top 10 future technology trends (Shutterstock)

Digital Twinning Possibilities

In theory, a digital twin can be created for any physical or service body or system.

A digital twin can be created for a car, any device, an integrated plant, a company, a city, a government, a family, an individual or a human member.

In order to create a digital twin of an entity, that entity must continuously transmit all the changing information associated with it to its digital twin.

This has become possible in many cases, due to the billions of sensors and smart video cameras that have been deployed in many developed cities and institutions as well.

For example, it is possible to create a digital heart for a heart patient and place sensors in the human body that send in real time all the conditions and changes that occur in the organic heart to the digital heart (digital twin), which allows predicting possible heart attacks in advance through intelligent analysis programs.

This also applies to industrial products, companies, cities and governments, which improves the chance of predicting the future.

He also predicts that by the world of 2050 it will be possible to create a complete digital twin of humans.

Human digital twin

There are two different perceptions of the concept of the digital twin of the human being currently being circulated. The first talks about creating a digital copy of the 2045 initiative launched by Russian billionaire Dmitry Itkov, which aims to spread the data of his mind and personality on a supercomputer, in pursuit of digital immortality by 2045.

This means that the nascent digital twin can act and act independently of its biological twin, doing their work while the original person is playing somewhere else.

The digital twin in this scenario can live forever, and there is currently talk about the possibility of this digital twin living in the world of metaverses that is currently being created.

The second scenario, which is closest to the concept of digital twinning, as it revolves around connecting the human body with sensors that transmit everything that happens in the body, moment by moment, to a supercomputer, equipped with smart programs that allow analyzing the flowing data and predicting the future behavior of each member of it, which necessarily leads to a noticeable increase in the healthy lifespan. for human being.

The question is: How can so many sensors be implanted in the human body?

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised an uncomplicated scientific method to shrink objects more than a thousand times in size.

The new method allows, for example, the creation of very small robotic particles that roam the human body, sending all the events that take place in it.

Predicting the future of the Earth

In late 2021, Nvidia began working on creating a digital twin of the Earth, which receives, through smart sensors covering the Earth, continuous real-time information about light, gravity, magnetism, temperature, humidity, rain and many other indicators, which leads to the production of a huge amount of data that requires a giant computer to store it and smart programs To process it, which is what the company is currently developing under the name "Earth-2", so that this digital twin can predict the future of the Earth with much higher accuracy than the accuracy of current predictions.

Will man's success in completely digitally twinning his environment lead to the birth of the magic crystal ball that allows us to know the future?

Digital twinning will certainly allow us to see the future much better than we can today.

But according to the “Uncertainty Principle” theory formulated by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927, we cannot predict the future accurately, no matter how far scientific progress is, because “we simply cannot, in principle, know the present fully.”