Out of curiosity...why?
Most of the time, when I manage my empire and do what emperors do, I run five day turns. When there is hostile contacts around I run all kinds of short turns, depending on the situation. Normally I only turn on auto-play when invisible aliens battle each other somewhere off the screen.
But the game is not slowing down to 5 sec increments only because of far away aliens. Some times it is because an alien is very, very near!!!!
So what happens in this situation is, that when suddenly this contact lights up on my screen, I am as always very careful to make everything ready for the coming battle, so I go check a lot of information on a lot of different screens to achieve full situational awareness. And when I am satisfied that everything is ready for the coming fight, I proceed very cautiously in very small time increments. One click at a time.
Unless of course if I forgot to un-tick auto-play. In which case I can watch my ships steadily move forward, I can watch the enemy ships launch 150+ missiles without my ships lifting an eyebrow, I can watch my valiant warriors carry on and on and die a multitude of heroic deaths, in very small unstoppable increments.
Instead of just watching I did a lot of frantic clicking the auto turn box, but found it somewhat ineffective. I also pushed the escape key a lot. Then I remembered good old ctrl-alt-delete.
I remember earlier versions of Dwarf Fortress, there was no way to quit from inside the game. The official way to quit was to use the job manager. So nothing wrong with that, actually.
Anyway, Aurora doesn't seem to mind, she is very robust. Even if I kill her in the middle of computing a 30-day turn, she just continues when I turn her back on.