Chiara Di Leone

In the 1970s, scientists built the first computer models to simulate the impact of human activity on planet Earth as a whole. This dissertation reconstructs one of the earliest, most ambitious, and least studied simulations: the 1976 Latin American World Model. Built at Fundación Bariloche in Argentina, it was a 'socialist and utopian' challenge to the Limits to Growth, the 1972 MIT model that predicted civilizational collapse. Where Limits to Growth modeled scarcity as a law of nature, the Bariloche treated it as political. The reconstruction relies on the model's original FORTRAN IV code, archival sources, and oral histories. Reading code as historical evidence reveals how Cold War debates on population growth, natural resources, and inequality were built into the very equations of the earliest tools of planetary forecasting. Situated within a network of global modeling efforts across MIT, Europe, and the Soviet bloc, the project asks what can be learned by reconstructing and re-running a utopian computer program.