Mm..cool but the last part where any civilization that has night lights would by definition burn all the fossil fuels and turn the place into a desert seems like an assumption based on only one possible trajectory of our own civilization, let alone all other possible alien civilizations. There's nothing to make death by warming and desertification any likelier than nuclear war or the development of clean fusion, or a plague or an invasion from another nearby procedurally generated earth-like planet.
Basically it's a cool sim when it's trying to simulate stuff that actually happened, and before it gets opinionated.
Moreover, it apparently equates heat with dryness, and also doesn't take into account the effect of additional CO2 on plant life. It is called a greenhouse effect for a reason. It's quite possible the equatorial belt could heat up to where it's uninhabitable by humans but overrun by jungle rather than desert.
While I have some doubts some of your statements your comment still resonates.
Unfortunately, we live in an “Excel world”. The predominant thinking is that our highly complex world can be modeled into an excel sheet. And based on the outputs we should make decisions.
This approach mostly ignores the second order effects you describe.
For what it's worth, the simulation does account (in a crude manner) for the heat causing increased water vapour uptake from the ocean and accelerated plant growth (which in turn increases the rate of carbon sequestration). I admit that the desertification at the end is a bit of artistic license to make the storytelling easier to visually convey, realistically things would be more complex than that. And it is just that, a story of one particular possible scenario, as I've written about elsewhere:
> “The final section is intended to illustrate a possible future, though perhaps an improbable one,” Roberts said. “I wanted it to be dramatic, so it is an illustration of a particularly extreme outcome where literally all of the fossil fuels are burned, but I tried to keep the effects realistic otherwise, based on scientific articles I've read about such a hypothetical.”
Back in 1996/1997 I worked on a CD-ROM game that simulated movement of the tectonic plates, as well as temperature, elevation, and precipitation, over millions of years. Amazing to see how evolution (heh!) of computing hardware and software have come so far in 28 years: https://www.kmoser.com/evolution/
I think you are the first person I come across that knows that game and you were an actual dev on it! So thank you! I played it when I was around 13(I think) and I loved it. The whole concept of simulating a planet and the animals on it was pretty much mind blowing for me at the time(it still is). I should have kept the poster that came with it...the different sapien evolutionary branches were really interesting.
Cool! It's admittedly an obscure game. My main contribution included the random generation and movement of the cratons. This involved mapping Cartesian to spherical coordinates but harder because each row of tiles was offset by half a tile's width from the rows above and below, like a brick wall.
We wrote an in-house editor that let us create and animate the different cratons, starting with the Pangaea configuration (basically all cratons stuck together as a giant continent) all the way through to how they are arranged now, to simulate how they moved historically. That was also difficult!
I also worked on the initial placement of some visual elements that dotted the landscape, and the serialization of the different data structures for loading/saving games.
After it shipped they gave each of us devs a couple of shrink-wrapped copies of the boxed final product but weirdly they were not the US version. I still have an (unopened) Portuguese version that probably has the poster.
This is rad! I recently read Assembling California by John McPhee[1][2] - highly recommended BTW.
Anyway, I was musing that I'd love to see a 3D globe with a time slider that I could play around with and visualize the (projected of course) movement of the plates to get us to where we are now.
There is an excellent hard science fiction book called permutation city that very related to this topic…it made me feel like i was in a dream when i read this post’s title
Egan is one of those rare writers where reading his book made me realize just how much smarter he is than me. Not even in a negative way, it's simply like listening to a lecture by a brilliant, brilliant man.
Only tangentially related, but the lovely (quite) short story "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility" is fantastic and kind of hits on simulating worlds, in a sense:
I've been thinking about writing a story with a very similar plot for a couple of years, but it had a big plot hole: computation overhead between the universes, and I hadn't thought about quantum computers as a way to solve it.
The other main difference with the story that I had in mind is that the characters would write a story about it, which would be "my" story, and they'd find a way to make it so that the ending would tell the reader the universe depth they are in, by creating a variable whose value is incremented by 1 for each universe.
For anyone reading this on HN, you're 8474771628371839 levels deep.
To deepen this tangent, I'll recommend Philip K. Dick's The Trouble With Bubbles which imagines 60s cocktail party guests showing off their miniature planet-scale terrariums.
I’m not sure I really know how to handle this. Do I just read the latest version linked at the top of the page? Or is the one offered by this like somehow more canonical or something? I’m not sure I’ve ever been faced with different versions of a fiction before. Just textbooks.
I really love thought pieces like this if you refrain from poking holes in the logic or physics. I love the idea of a multiverse where they’re all actually just identical so it’s mostly moot.
I just love how a world-class quantum computer scientist who just made a discovery that just blows up everything known to mankind is up to the very end is worried about missing a bus.
I remember watching a (wonderful) T.V. show[0] that came out within the last couple decades, and feeling like a certain scene was definitely a nod to this story. The drama, and physics (and resolution) was done differently, but it left me in a similarly, pleasantly pensive state. [0] I almost made the mistake of naming it, or the director - but caught myself, realizing the context of this comment alone could be a major "spoiler".
Maybe I've encoded the name in this comment (honestly though, I tried, and it's late - maybe search engines are good enough for it these days :) )
One of my favorite courses at university was energy policy analysis, where we played around with the EPPA model (developed at MIT) [0]. We made changes to certain parameters to see how things might work out, e.g. if cost of energy storage is reduced 10x.
Lots of fun, but I unfortunately never managed to find anything similar to do in my job.
Not sure why, but all the shadertoy examples embedded in the page play at like 0.6 FPS for me. When I open the linked "final shader" on the shadertoy website I get 60fps just fine ...
Well you are in a way, what is a simulation ? It's just a set of rules you follow that are simpler than the more complex environment that it runs in: I suppose if we could "see" "outside" the "universe", we'd understand that maybe our reality is very simple and limited compared to the "reality" outside. Maybe this would be true infinitely, or maybe the outside reality would be much more logical than ours, and we'd accept it's finite.
But since we have a beginning, and a flow of time, we probably also have a birth, a mother, and maybe even a purpose... but that's a very human way to think, might all just be random soup.
But imagine there's a self-aware agent in a simulation we create, he starts thinking the same thoughts, everyone mock him "we're all just random, there is no God, no design, how could so much energy be spent on such a useless giant block of empty space for any reason", he would have to sort of agree, but he would be sort of wrong. And discovering us, would bring him no solace: we can't tell him of our own designers ourselves. Discovering them, would bring us no solace either, for the same reason. That's why the concept of God is stupid: God has a God too, so what do we do now, solved no problem to accept His existence.
That concept of God is stupid, some are tautological, and some are experiential. Eg the concept of God is love (if you have faith in the concept and reality of love being real).
I think modern people have so much faith in this reality, they'd have little chance accepting that it is other than it seems. Any evidence would have to be stark.
When thinking about this one, I always wonder if it even matters.. playing both "Yes" and "No" scenarios doesn't really offer any insight for me. Maybe it's a degree of nihilism but it makes me not get overwhelmed.
Readit News
Basically it's a cool sim when it's trying to simulate stuff that actually happened, and before it gets opinionated.
Moreover, it apparently equates heat with dryness, and also doesn't take into account the effect of additional CO2 on plant life. It is called a greenhouse effect for a reason. It's quite possible the equatorial belt could heat up to where it's uninhabitable by humans but overrun by jungle rather than desert.
Unfortunately, we live in an “Excel world”. The predominant thinking is that our highly complex world can be modeled into an excel sheet. And based on the outputs we should make decisions.
This approach mostly ignores the second order effects you describe.
> “The final section is intended to illustrate a possible future, though perhaps an improbable one,” Roberts said. “I wanted it to be dramatic, so it is an illustration of a particularly extreme outcome where literally all of the fossil fuels are burned, but I tried to keep the effects realistic otherwise, based on scientific articles I've read about such a hypothetical.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgx7nq/watch-four-billion-ye...
We wrote an in-house editor that let us create and animate the different cratons, starting with the Pangaea configuration (basically all cratons stuck together as a giant continent) all the way through to how they are arranged now, to simulate how they moved historically. That was also difficult!
I also worked on the initial placement of some visual elements that dotted the landscape, and the serialization of the different data structures for loading/saving games.
After it shipped they gave each of us devs a couple of shrink-wrapped copies of the boxed final product but weirdly they were not the US version. I still have an (unopened) Portuguese version that probably has the poster.
Anyway, I was musing that I'd love to see a 3D globe with a time slider that I could play around with and visualize the (projected of course) movement of the plates to get us to where we are now.
Do you know of anything like that?
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19898.Assembling_Califor...
[2] excerpt: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/09/07/assembling-cal...
https://qntm.org/responsibility
I've been thinking about writing a story with a very similar plot for a couple of years, but it had a big plot hole: computation overhead between the universes, and I hadn't thought about quantum computers as a way to solve it.
The other main difference with the story that I had in mind is that the characters would write a story about it, which would be "my" story, and they'd find a way to make it so that the ending would tell the reader the universe depth they are in, by creating a variable whose value is incremented by 1 for each universe.
For anyone reading this on HN, you're 8474771628371839 levels deep.
Unless you're going hard sci-fi, you can do what this story did. Give them by fiat "infinite processing power and infinite storage capacity."
"Do you know how big the average positive integer is?"
888 412 1289018?
I really love thought pieces like this if you refrain from poking holes in the logic or physics. I love the idea of a multiverse where they’re all actually just identical so it’s mostly moot.
You probably have, but haven't thought of it like that. Ever seen a Director's Cut version of a movie? :-)
Maybe I've encoded the name in this comment (honestly though, I tried, and it's late - maybe search engines are good enough for it these days :) )
[0]: https://pastebin.com/raw/gA4aRc0T
Deleted Comment
Lots of fun, but I unfortunately never managed to find anything similar to do in my job.
[0]: https://globalchange.mit.edu/research/research-tools/eppa
Taking a look, the CSS throws warnings about being ignored; adding "position: absolute" fixes that and makes the button fully visible.
But since we have a beginning, and a flow of time, we probably also have a birth, a mother, and maybe even a purpose... but that's a very human way to think, might all just be random soup.
But imagine there's a self-aware agent in a simulation we create, he starts thinking the same thoughts, everyone mock him "we're all just random, there is no God, no design, how could so much energy be spent on such a useless giant block of empty space for any reason", he would have to sort of agree, but he would be sort of wrong. And discovering us, would bring him no solace: we can't tell him of our own designers ourselves. Discovering them, would bring us no solace either, for the same reason. That's why the concept of God is stupid: God has a God too, so what do we do now, solved no problem to accept His existence.
Nobody said the simulation had to be run on semiconductors.
If we are, we're in a sandbox that cant be escaped. live your best life and get on with it
If we aren't Live your best life and get on with it.
I've never seen the point of the question.