元地球与数字孪生：思想突破、技术变革与范式转换

Digital Twin has been used in aerospace and industrial manufacturing for more than 20 years, but it is only introduced into marine science recently. Here we adopt Digital Twin technology to realize the integration of real- and virtual-Earth, and build a virtual-real, symbiotic community of real- and digital-Earth which we call "meta-Earth." We first summarize the essential differences between meta-Earth and the early proposed digital-Earth, virtual-Earth, glass-Earth and smart-Earth, and then highlight the great breakthroughs in the concept or idea of "meta-Earth." The core idea is that under the current metaverse BIGANT technic system we can realize gapless, cross-sphere dynamic simulation of the Earth system, which allow to build a global, multi-sphere, real-time, all-weather, three-dimensional Earth observing system, reconstruct the deep-time Earth beyond the present-day Earth, and realize space-time travel. By doing so we can integrate all previous Earth models-digital, virtual, glass, smart, present and deep-time-into a community called meta-Earth. This novel concept should bring a technological paradigm shift surpassing real-and virtual-Earth, thus opening a new way for mankind to understand, explore and develop the Earth. Promoting multi-tier application of meta-Earth while making research paradigm shift shall advance the development of new trillion-RMB industries in the future.