so Im not saying i want creatures on a planet but what about creatures in the Info panel or will that be too much

Definitely would be way too hard since this simulator is based on realism. You'd need to understand the complex processes of evolution and create an algorithm for it, which I doubt is possible.

Heck I was even thinking of inorganic life, since NASA already has a device to detect for it.  Life out there is probably much stranger than we could ever even imagine- Hoyle predicts that we'll even find intelligent swarms of dust that exist in interstellar space.

so Im not saying i want creatures on a planet but what about creatures in the Info panel or will that be too much?

You have to consider that Earth is home to maybe billions of creatures, which would mean that such a tab would probably fill many millions of pages at best."

honestly i was thinking a bit of no mans sky amount of species like 3-15 different kinds depending on the planet. there could be different accesories and models depending on the biomes, atmosphere, planet, and temperature. like a cold terra ocean could have giant blubber creature or slow moving creatures

Hoyle predicts that we'll even find intelligent swarms of dust that exist in interstellar space.

Hoyle also predicted a lot of things that were wrong, and rejected a lot of things that are true.

Hoyle predicts that we'll even find intelligent swarms of dust that exist in interstellar space.

Hoyle also predicted a lot of things that were wrong, and rejected a lot of things that are true.

Yes- his "steady state" model didn't work out so well.  But considering how much organic hydrocarbons we've detected in interstellar space, I consider that prediction a viable possibility.
I've always had issues with the "life as we know it" philosophy since we only have a sample size of 1 so we don't really have any clue of what might- or might not- be out there (including inorganic life.)

so Im not saying i want creatures on a planet but what about creatures in the Info panel or will that be too much?

You have to consider that Earth is home to maybe billions of creatures, which would mean that such a tab would probably fill many millions of pages at best."

honestly i was thinking a bit of no mans sky amount of species like 3-15 different kinds depending on the planet. there could be different accesories and models depending on the biomes, atmosphere, planet, and temperature. like a cold terra ocean could have giant blubber creature or slow moving creatures

I was just watching this nature show about Africa and they showed Mt. Kenya where "every day is like summer and every night is like winter"-it's fascinating how life has evolved to survive there.
Hawaii itself has a dozen different climates all on one island- it could be a raging blizzard on the mountain tops and a tropical paradise at sea level!
And this doesn't even take into account the vast depths of the seas and the different kinds of biomes you can find there.  Vent organisms are some of the most exotic forms of life on our planet.  We've also found nematodes over a mile below the surface of the planet!

If you really want to model time, you could show how life was transported to a planet via asteroid or comet from a nearby world and how comets created oceans and how the simplest organisms changed the atmosphere of a planet and how life evolved from the seas to land, etc.  You could show different worlds in different stages of this development with life at a corresponding stage of evolution.

But considering how much organic hydrocarbons we've detected in interstellar space, I consider that prediction a viable possibility.

It certainly sounds tempting.  The raw materials are there, and there even exist chemical pathways for producing a variety of amino acids.  But more conditions are necessary for the development of life -- not just as we know it but for any system that could conceivably fit a working definition of life (e.g. something that propagates its own information via the principles of selection).  There must be a mechanism for self-complexifying behavior via a local reduction in entropy, and the formation of structures which can act to both retain and exchange information. Conditions in interstellar space are not very conducive for that... much like the interior of a star is a poor place to look for life.
The "sample size of 1" bias is important for our understanding of astrobiology, but so are the principles of chemistry and physics, which are universal.

But considering how much organic hydrocarbons we've detected in interstellar space, I consider that prediction a viable possibility.

It certainly sounds tempting.  The raw materials are there, and there even exist chemical pathways for producing a variety of amino acids.  But more conditions are necessary for the development of life -- not just as we know it but for any system that could conceivably fit a working definition of life (e.g. something that propagates its own information via the principles of selection).  There must be a mechanism for self-complexifying behavior via a local reduction in entropy, and the formation of structures which can act to both retain and exchange information. Conditions in interstellar space are not very conducive for that... much like the interior of a star is a poor place to look for life.
The "sample size of 1" bias is important for our understanding of astrobiology, but so are the principles of chemistry and physics, which are universal.

Yes, completely.  There is also the other side of the curve, which is, even if life is common in the universe, how common is intelligent life?  I consider animals like dolphins, great apes, african grey parrots, dogs, elephants, etc- to be highly intelligent (5 year old level) but certainly not on a technological scale.  Considering how many things had to occur for Earth to develop one technological species (having an unusually large moon for its size being among them), and it occurred so late in its history, how likely is it to happen elsewhere?  Also, if most life evolves around M type stars instead of G type stars, does that mean that evolution would proceed even more slowly?
Do you think that at the apex (or final stages) of evolution it could ever be possible for an organism to evolve from a material creature to a creature made entirely of energy?  I wonder about that sometimes- especially since matter is just another form of energy.
Would we even be able to recognize it as being "alive"?  Fire as an example, fills in many of the check marks of life- yet we do not consider it alive.

If the evolutionary history of life on Earth is representative of the evolution of life in general, then intelligence is much more rare.  But it is unsafe to assume that the example set by Earth is typical.  Evolutionary dynamics are complicated, and are driven by internal factors just as much as external ones.  Our understanding of these dynamics is not as good, let alone trying to predict them elsewhere.  Maybe intelligence generally develops quickly, and Earth is an outlier.  (I doubt it, at any rate.)

Also, if most life evolves around M type stars instead of G type stars, does that mean that evolution would proceed even more slowly?

I think the same problem applies.  I would be strongly hesitant to conclude anything about evolutionary rates from a single parameter such as the star's mass. 

Do you think that at the apex (or final stages) of evolution it could ever be possible for an organism to evolve from a material creature to a creature made entirely of energy?

Evolution has no inherent conclusion!  The game is never over and there are no winners.  There are only those who have not yet lost.  It might be possible for intelligent creatures like ourselves to upload our minds to a digital environment to live forever, but the principles of selection would still apply.

Anyway, I think creatures made of energy are pretty unlikely.  Energy is a term that often gets thrown around in a mystical woo sort of way, while in physics it has a specific meaning.  It is a quantity associated with change (e.g. kinetic energy describes how quickly a mass is changing position), or the potential to cause change (e.g. gravitational potential energy describes how a mass will move due to gravity, if it were to be placed at that position), and the energy is defined such that it is conserved even when transformed from one kind to another.  Neither of those examples are useful as a definition for life "purely as energy" because they require the presence of matter in some form.  Even if we think of a creature made of electrical energy, that energy is associated with the locations of charged particles.

One example of energy I can think of that could work is light, as "radiant energy".  I could even conceive of an entity meeting a working definition of "alive" being made up purely of photons, in such a way that those photons interact with each other (photons actually attract one another very slightly, because although they are massless they do have momentum, and momentum produces gravity).  Maybe a creature of light could exist such that those interactions carry information and that information evolves with time, in a similar manner as the Conway's Game of Life.  The biggest problem with this idea is that the interactions are weak to the point of absurdity -- such a creature would never arise naturally, but need to be created deliberately with the utmost care.

Would we even be able to recognize it as being "alive"?  Fire as an example, fills in many of the check marks of life- yet we do not consider it alive.

Right, this is one of the most important questions in astrobiology.

Defining life is difficult because life itself is a classification we impose on a universe which does not separate things into neat little bins for us.  There is no clear-cut boundary between living and nonliving, instead it is a matter of degree.

Early on people tried defining life by starting with the more obvious characteristics.  It moves!  It grows!  It adapts!  It consumes resources!  It reproduces! It responds to stimuli!  It is made of basic units (cellular)!

Yet there are examples of things which most everyone agrees are not alive that have some of these properties, and there are things that most people agree are alive that lack them.  Crystals grow, and rocks can move, but they're not alive.  Lots of living things can be sessile, and tardigrades can fail to grow or respond to stimuli.  Fire moves, grows, consumes resources, and arguably responds to certain stimulus.  Alive?  And what of viruses?

So scientists have built up some more rigorous, and better yet, more general "working" definitions for life.  Life propagates its own information via the principles of selection.  There is no reference to what it is made of or how it lives!  All it says is that the thing persists, and that persistence happens by a particular process -- that the information is subject to change from one generation to the next, and particular changes can be selected for or against by certain pressures, whether by the environment or internally.

Crystals fail the definition because they don't evolve by this mechanism.  They do not contains patterns of information which are selected for or against and propagated from one generation to the next.   Fire fails for the same reason.  It is simply a combustion reaction.  The quality of the fire does not arise from information contained previously in the fire, but simply by the factors in the environment.  Viruses?  They're still tough to classify! They're about as lifelike as non-life gets, or as non-living as life gets.

Other instances of life in the universe may be very strange and unlike anything we've imagined... and people have imagined quite a lot.  What we find, if and when we find it, could force us to totally rework what we think we know and reformulate our definitions.  There is also a principle that says that in order to find something, you must have some notion of what you are searching for.  How do you find life if you can't recognize it?  And in that sense we could be missing a lot without knowing it, although we can do the best we can with what we do know.

Can you please make a tool or a program for Space Engine, where you can create your own solar system and use it for your Space Engine and upload it to the Forum so that other can download it?

Space Yoshi, you can do it right now by using script mods, you can learn about it in the manual. I believe some method using a sort of GUI is in the TODO list, but modding will still require using scripts for quite some time.

If the evolutionary history of life on Earth is representative of the evolution of life in general, then intelligence is much more rare.  But it is unsafe to assume that the example set by Earth is typical.  Evolutionary dynamics are complicated, and are driven by internal factors just as much as external ones.  Our understanding of these dynamics is not as good, let alone trying to predict them elsewhere.  Maybe intelligence generally develops quickly, and Earth is an outlier.  (I doubt it, at any rate.)

Also, if most life evolves around M type stars instead of G type stars, does that mean that evolution would proceed even more slowly?

I think the same problem applies.  I would be strongly hesitant to conclude anything about evolutionary rates from a single parameter such as the star's mass. 

Yes, this is what makes it exceedingly difficult.  It is like trying to imagine what the flora and fauna in the rest of the world are like while only having 1 sq mile of the planet to examine.

Do you think that at the apex (or final stages) of evolution it could ever be possible for an organism to evolve from a material creature to a creature made entirely of energy?

Evolution has no inherent conclusion!  The game is never over and there are no winners.  There are only those who have not yet lost.  It might be possible for intelligent creatures like ourselves to upload our minds to a digital environment to live forever, but the principles of selection would still apply.

Anyway, I think creatures made of energy are pretty unlikely.  Energy is a term that often gets thrown around in a mystical woo sort of way, while in physics it has a specific meaning.  It is a quantity associated with change (e.g. kinetic energy describes how quickly a mass is changing position), or the potential to cause change (e.g. gravitational potential energy describes how a mass will move due to gravity, if it were to be placed at that position), and the energy is defined such that it is conserved even when transformed from one kind to another.  Neither of those examples are useful as a definition for life "purely as energy" because they require the presence of matter in some form.  Even if we think of a creature made of electrical energy, that energy is associated with the locations of charged particles.

One example of energy I can think of that could work is light, as "radiant energy".  I could even conceive of an entity meeting a working definition of "alive" being made up purely of photons, in such a way that those photons interact with each other (photons actually attract one another very slightly, because although they are massless they do have momentum, and momentum produces gravity).  Maybe a creature of light could exist such that those interactions carry information and that information evolves with time, in a similar manner as the Conway's Game of Life.  The biggest problem with this idea is that the interactions are weak to the point of absurdity -- such a creature would never arise naturally, but need to be created deliberately with the utmost care.

Yes photons! This is what I was thinking of.  It reminded me of a certain Star Trek (TOS) episode- one of the early ones- where a being made entirely of light existed on a planet and was able to change its shape to whatever it wanted to appear like.  It could even appear like a human if it wanted to.  It fed off salt content so you could imagine what happened when humans landed on that planet.  Something made of photons that can change its shape and even appear to look like us- is that possible?

I have also read about the possibilities of life at the quantum level- not sure if that is possible or not, but I do know of certain biological processes that depend upon quantum mechanics like photosynthesis and genetics.

Would we even be able to recognize it as being "alive"?  Fire as an example, fills in many of the check marks of life- yet we do not consider it alive.

Right, this is one of the most important questions in astrobiology.

Defining life is difficult because life itself is a classification we impose on a universe which does not separate things into neat little bins for us.  There is no clear-cut boundary between living and nonliving, instead it is a matter of degree.

Early on people tried defining life by starting with the more obvious characteristics.  It moves!  It grows!  It adapts!  It consumes resources!  It reproduces! It responds to stimuli!  It is made of basic units (cellular)!

Yet there are examples of things which most everyone agrees are not alive that have some of these properties, and there are things that most people agree are alive that lack them.  Crystals grow, and rocks can move, but they're not alive.  Lots of living things can be sessile, and tardigrades can fail to grow or respond to stimuli.  Fire moves, grows, consumes resources, and arguably responds to certain stimulus.  Alive?  And what of viruses?

So scientists have built up some more rigorous, and better yet, more general "working" definitions for life.  Life propagates its own information via the principles of selection.  There is no reference to what it is made of or how it lives!  All it says is that the thing persists, and that persistence happens by a particular process -- that the information is subject to change from one generation to the next, and particular changes can be selected for or against by certain pressures, whether by the environment or internally.

Crystals fail the definition because they don't evolve by this mechanism.  They do not contains patterns of information which are selected for or against and propagated from one generation to the next.   Fire fails for the same reason.  It is simply a combustion reaction.  The quality of the fire does not arise from information contained previously in the fire, but simply by the factors in the environment.  Viruses?  They're still tough to classify! They're about as lifelike as non-life gets, or as non-living as life gets.

Other instances of life in the universe may be very strange and unlike anything we've imagined... and people have imagined quite a lot.  What we find, if and when we find it, could force us to totally rework what we think we know and reformulate our definitions.  There is also a principle that says that in order to find something, you must have some notion of what you are searching for.  How do you find life if you can't recognize it?  And in that sense we could be missing a lot without knowing it, although we can do the best we can with what we do know.

Yes, this is what makes it exceedingly difficult.  It is like trying to imagine what the flora and fauna in the rest of the world are like while only having 1 sq mile of the planet to examine.

Yes photons! This is what I was thinking of.  It reminded me of a certain Star Trek (TOS) episode- one of the early ones- where a being made entirely of light existed on a planet and was able to change its shape to whatever it wanted to appear like.  It could even appear like a human if it wanted to.  It fed off salt content so you could imagine what happened when humans landed on that planet.  Something made of photons that can change its shape and even appear to look like us- is that possible?

I have also read about the possibilities of life at the quantum level- not sure if that is possible or not, but I do know of certain biological processes that depend upon quantum mechanics like photosynthesis and genetics.

Besides viruses we also have viroids, which seem to be on the border between life and nonlife.  I would expect such a border to exist, as the very earliest forms of pseudolife were probably like this.  Don't our own cells contains remnants of very early forms of life that were absorbed into our mitochondrial DNA (also I've read about there being seven or so different "mothers" we are all descended from that are reflected in our mtDNA.

Funny thing is, the property of natural selection, which is basic to life, may also be basic to the entire universe.  Lee Smolin has even conjectured that natural selection applies at the cosmic level and that universes that contain life are inherently more likely to give birth to other universes that have a propensity to contain life.
On some level, you could even consider the entire planet to be "alive"- not in the sense we're referring to of course, but in the sense that it is a self-regulating system.  I have often wondered about mass extinctions and if this is something hardwired into the system not just the result of collisions with other cosmic objects.  The planet may have a tipping point where when one species becomes too dominant, the planet self-regulates and proverbialls "smacks down" that species.  For example, humans have now become overabundant and overpopulated the planet and are now causing the sixth mass extinction in the planet's history (not to mention climate change by the usage of fossil fuels and other environmental hazards like pesticides, cutting down of trees and overfarming as well as livestock herding.)  Perhaps this happens on most worlds and there is a cosmic filter that prevents most species from becoming "interstellar."  If all species that dominate a planet eventually become extinct, then evolution may have a hardwired tipping point, where evolution eventually leads to the destruction of the evolving species.  The only way out of this closed system I can think of is space travel and space colonization.  It won't solve the human overpopulation problem but we can manage it better with space colonies.  It also gets us beyond the tipping point- of earth's ecosystem anyway.  Checks and balances on populations and limited resources govern how much we can accomplish here.
The ironic thing is the same carbon that is basic to organic life could eventually spell humanity's destruction.

Something made of photons that can change its shape and even appear to look like us- is that possible?

To the extent allowed by the laws of optics and electromagnetism, which are pretty strict.  It can change its shape and structure in ways that convey information or even intelligence, but it can't be like a creature walking around and interacting with people.  It must move at the speed of light, it must spread out (diffract) as light does and do all the other things that light does.  Also -- and this gets really fun -- its "actions" cannot arise by conscious thought in the way that we know it.  An entity made of photons cannot have thoughts, make decisions or reflect on memories, because in its frame of reference its whole existence unfolds in an instant. (Behold relativity).

I have also read about the possibilities of life at the quantum level- not sure if that is possible or not, but I do know of certain biological processes that depend upon quantum mechanics like photosynthesis and genetics.

There are macroscopic processes for which quantum mechanical principles have important effects, but life at a "quantum level" is probably a stretch.  Ultimately all the weirdness of quantum mechanics comes down to the behavior of wave functions, and I don't see a lot of room for things we could define as living in that realm.  Not saying it's impossible, but it's really difficult to see how it would work.

Funny thing is, the property of natural selection, which is basic to life, may also be basic to the entire universe.  Lee Smolin has even conjectured that natural selection applies at the cosmic level and that universes that contain life are inherently more likely to give birth to other universes that have a propensity to contain life.

This and the rest get very fun to think about, and we should really have a thread for it rather than continue in this one.  Maybe I'll do a thread split.  Also, I think you might enjoy this short story -- it provides a lot to think about in terms of what life and natural selection mean in a cold, uncaring universe doomed to heat death.

Sekhmet Hunts the Dying Gnosis

Something made of photons that can change its shape and even appear to look like us- is that possible?

To the extent allowed by the laws of optics and electromagnetism, which are pretty strict.  It can change its shape and structure in ways that convey information or even intelligence, but it can't be like a creature walking around and interacting with people.  It must move at the speed of light, it must spread out (diffract) as light does and do all the other things that light does.  Also -- and this gets really fun -- its "actions" cannot arise by conscious thought in the way that we know it.  An entity made of photons cannot have thoughts, make decisions or reflect on memories, because in its frame of reference its whole existence unfolds in an instant. (Behold relativity).

I have also read about the possibilities of life at the quantum level- not sure if that is possible or not, but I do know of certain biological processes that depend upon quantum mechanics like photosynthesis and genetics.

There are macroscopic processes for which quantum mechanical principles have important effects, but life at a "quantum level" is probably a stretch.  Ultimately all the weirdness of quantum mechanics comes down to the behavior of wave functions, and I don't see a lot of room for things we could define as living in that realm.  Not saying it's impossible, but it's really difficult to see how it would work.

Funny thing is, the property of natural selection, which is basic to life, may also be basic to the entire universe.  Lee Smolin has even conjectured that natural selection applies at the cosmic level and that universes that contain life are inherently more likely to give birth to other universes that have a propensity to contain life.

This and the rest get very fun to think about, and we should really have a thread for it rather than continue in this one.  Maybe I'll do a thread split.  Also, I think you might enjoy this short story -- it provides a lot to think about in terms of what life and natural selection mean in a cold, uncaring universe doomed to heat death.

Sekhmet Hunts the Dying Gnosis

Wow, the different time reference of photonic beings reminds me of another star trek episode where beings experienced time much different than we do.  They moved around so quickly that they were invisible to us (and we seemed still to them- like statues), it also reminds me of the common house fly which also experiences time much more quickly, thus when we try to swat it- we usually fail- from its vantage point our swatting is occurring in slow motion!
I wonder if such a photonic being can appear invisible.  I was reading before about light cloaking devices that the military are developing (this could also be used on spaceships.)  

I'm not sure the book is closed on oscillating, my friend- we have some newly emerging theories that argue for a cyclic universe based on dark energy- a universe "coming back empty" and a big bounce rather than a big bang.  Loop quantum cosmology also argues for a universe that was the result of a previously contracting one.  One of the arguments made for a cyclic universe is the curious value of the cosmological constant and the idea that with each cycle the universe slowly winds down and the value of the constant trends towards 0.  If a universe's dimensions reduce in a contracting universe, once the number of dimensions is down to 2, gravity is no longer an attractive force according to relativity and the universe can "rebang."  Don't know if M-theory or F-theory is right but having multiple dimensions of time as well as space would also allow for nested timelines that arise at the start of each cycle (perhaps from inflation) and converge at the end of each cycle.  I remember reading about a two-time universe model with two universes that have arrows of time opposite to each other, one expands while the other contracts and vice versa.  The funny thing is from the vantage point of one universe the other one would be superluminal and vice versa (but both are subluminal it's just the reversed arrows of time compared to the other that make the other one appear that way.) Since time is relative, time can be moving forward in each universe relative to the contents of that universe but opposite to that of the universe  (think of two conveyor belts moving in opposite directions relative to the other but both are moving forward relative to the passengers on each conveyor belt.)  I believe you could construct a time machine between the two universes with each universe having complementary dimensions to the other one (an analog would be the three additive primary colors as spatial dimensions in one universe RGB with time being the background black, while the other universe's dimensions could be analogged to the three subtractive primary colors CMY with the background white symbolizing the reversed arrow of time compared to the other universe.)  Light aka a "luxon wall" would form the boundary between the two universes.

Have you read Asimov's The Last Question? It's one of my favorite short stories.  Now going to read the one you wrote, the title already makes it sound intriguing!
Please let me know when the new thread is made

I just ran across this shader from iq @ shadertoy. It's pretty slick, no idea if it fits into the deferred rendering pipeline that's being implemented, but I'm guessing it might. Specifically, the suggestion of vegetation is convincing.

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ttSWf
[youtube]VqYROPZrDeU[/youtube]

Aaronsb, be careful, it's not good idea for pc less efficent.