Space Monster?

Just like my Machine race thread, here is another exotic idea.

Space monsters.

You can guess that a space monster is a large creature, that lives in space. But how does it evolve?

It would be very difficult for biochemistry to start in deep space. However, an asteroid with exactly the right conditions might be able to spawn life provided that said life used light as its source of energy. The asteroid (or perhaps comet) would also have to remain close enough to a star to provide regular doses of sunlight to whatever might evolve.

I don't think that such a lifeform would ever evolve to be a free-floating space traveler of the kind that one usually thinks of when one thinks of a "space monster", however. It would probably take the form of a kind of "space moss" that blankets its home asteroid, likely never to leave and to die out when the asteroid does.

Xenopologist wrote:

It would be very difficult for biochemistry to start in deep space. However, an asteroid with exactly the right conditions might be able to spawn life provided that said life used light as its source of energy. The asteroid (or perhaps comet) would also have to remain close enough to a star to provide regular doses of sunlight to whatever might evolve.

I don't think that such a lifeform would ever evolve to be a free-floating space traveler of the kind that one usually thinks of when one thinks of a "space monster", however. It would probably take the form of a kind of "space moss" that blankets its home asteroid, likely never to leave and to die out when the asteroid does.

Actually, Nebulas are being dfound to be excellent places for life to form, because they can create many different organic compounds. It's not unlikely for life to evolve in a nebula outside a planet.

~sciocont wrote:

Actually, Nebulas are being dfound to be excellent places for life to form, because they can create many different organic compounds. It's not unlikely for life to evolve in a nebula outside a planet.

I'm liking this.

See, even I'm not much of a scientific person and when I came across this thread I felt a bit iffy about including the subject in-game. But nebulae is one of the things I think about when I think "Life in Space", having heard it on many a documentary, also discussed on teh internetz here and there.

But then, taking into consideration the fact that this game will be a little simpler than life (not as simple as Spore of course, but it would be a pain to simulate every particle lag-free), how will this affect its.. nebulae-ness?

Will it be able to drift about on its own? Change colors? Will a sentient race or an asteroid of sort be able to send it back to a planet to somehow nurture it into something we can recgonize as life?

Noitulove wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

Actually, Nebulas are being dfound to be excellent places for life to form, because they can create many different organic compounds. It's not unlikely for life to evolve in a nebula outside a planet.

I'm liking this.

See, even I'm not much of a scientific person and when I came across this thread I felt a bit iffy about including the subject in-game. But nebulae is one of the things I think about when I think "Life in Space", having heard it on many a documentary, also discussed on teh internetz here and there.

But then, taking into consideration the fact that this game will be a little simpler than life (not as simple as Spore of course, but it would be a pain to simulate every particle lag-free), how will this affect its.. nebulae-ness?

Will it be able to drift about on its own? Change colors? Will a sentient race or an asteroid of sort be able to send it back to a planet to somehow nurture it into something we can recgonize as life?

All valid questions which should be discussed.

But then, taking into consideration the fact that this game will be a little simpler than life (not as simple as Spore of course, but it would be a pain to simulate every particle lag-free)

ALOT simpler than life.

Okay, lets actually ook at the numbers here.

This is an important addition to the devblog too, scio, btw


there are ~10¹⁴ atoms in an ordinary human cell.

That is:

100,000,000,000,000


or 100 trillion atoms.


Okay, lets assume that to simulate two particles interacting with an accuracy to one second..
which in particle physics is EXTREMELY innacurate. in reality you want accuracy to be as close to the planck time as you can get, which is

5.39*10^-44s

which is
0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000539 of a second (give or take a zero or two I think)

anyways, for the sake of argument, we're accurate to one second.

lets say we need to do 27 floating point operations per particle, modifying the positions according to the position and velocity of both particles, and some attraction constant, for each particle, making that 54 FLOPS, or FLoating point OPerations per Second, to simulate two particles interacting (with very little accuracy. I mean, 24 floating point ops can barely scratch the surface of classical physics.

which means, that to calculate a single cell in the human body, withwith just enough accuracy to have a physics teacher laugh at you, we've reached..

Five thousand, four hundred trillion FLOPS

Thats five thousand teraFLOPS

now, the core i7 980x (Retail on this cpu is $999 at the time of writing. That's the cpu by itself, not the whole computer) can barely do 100GFLOPS. in fact, many people testing the 980x are averaging about 66 GLOPS

thats 66 billion FLOPS, or 66 gigaFLOPS


66,000,000,000

versus..


5,400,000,000,000,000


I think we're a bit short of calculating ANY particle interactions on a home pc.


and that's just simulating the data on a pc. if this were a game, what about the rst of the game?

Nobody's suggesting we do particle interactions like that. i'm just pointing out that nebula life seems to be quite possible. And i'll keep that in mind for the devblog.

I think we found the idea of nebular life to be impractical or impossible on the old forum (or was it in a discussion on the Sporum?). Wherever it was, the idea was dismissed because movement would be difficult (how does one move in space?) and nutrition would be very difficult to come by, unless an arganism can somehow be hydrogen poweded. Not to mention the dangerous UV, X, and γ rays that you would have to deal with, constantly bombarding your organsim which likely is not able to be shielded from them, unless this organism was fortunate enough to evolve some sort of lead shielding. And then reproduction. Remember that you need an entire species of these things, enough to reproduce and keep the species going without inbreeding too much.

Sorry, I don't think it will work. At least not naturally.

I'm just making a point that computing resources are alot more limited than what some people expect, before what i can se happening happens. That due to this limitation, there can be no "if its possible itl happen automatically cause of the simulation" Like the chemistry thread. Or the "life in xyz situation" threads.

They always end with "the game will handle this guys!" No, it wont.

Everything in every game is smoke and mirrors. Even physics engines like HAVOK fudge the numbers alot, in order to run fast.

We can't look at these threads in the sense of "yeah will this be posible in the game cause you know its not realistic and so will not happen?"

cause the game won't be realistic anyway. Not in the real sense of the term.

Something like life in nebulae, wont be determined by the engine. it wil be determined by US. If we have a concensus that it should be in there, we put it in. otherwise it wont go in at all, regardless of wheither it happens in reality. because we're not creating reality. A program needs to be very discreet and specific.

Hell, if you don't tell the game to put creatures on your starting planet, it won't even do that.

The game won't be able to tell if life can form under certain conditions. We have to select specific conditions, and set those limits and conditions manually.

If life can't form in less than say, 14 degrees celicius, then we need for example a variable like "min_temp_for_life"..

And if we don't all decides on things like this spefically, then I am left with deciding these things, and if i get it differently from what people expect, then people go "oh the simulations not realistic enough" when in fact they are getting the completely wrong idea.

</rant>

Poisson wrote:

I think we found the idea of nebular life to be impractical or impossible on the old forum (or was it in a discussion on the Sporum?). Wherever it was, the idea was dismissed because movement would be difficult (how does one move in space?) and nutrition would be very difficult to come by, unless an arganism can somehow be hydrogen poweded. Not to mention the dangerous UV, X, and γ rays that you would have to deal with, constantly bombarding your organsim which likely is not able to be shielded from them, unless this organism was fortunate enough to evolve some sort of lead shielding. And then reproduction. Remember that you need an entire species of these things, enough to reproduce and keep the species going without inbreeding too much.

Sorry, I don't think it will work. At least not naturally.

Space whales

So should someone add a poll?

I understand your concern completely, Bashi. I usually say that spo that it gets determined later when we actually have a game to work with.

To contribute
Evidence
More evidence

I understand that there are plenty of organic compounds in space, Scio. What I have a problem with is the gut melting radiation, lack of a method of movement and thus no way to obtain nutrients.

Also, macroscopic life has a tough time dealing with the lack of atmospheric pressure, as circulatory systems require a decent amount of positive pressure in order to work

Guess it would have to be a "drop true realism for the sake of gameplay" deal. But then again, we don't know anyway, and it's possible for a creature to develop some form os exoskeleton to hold it's guts in so to speak.


On the thought of realism, an that evolves in zero gravity would probably most likely end up symmetrical on most, if not all, planes

(OFFTOPIC)

Bashinerox wrote:

</rant>

So, in other words, we should kind of lower our hopes in terms of the game being entirely realistic, and that nebulae life shouldn't exist in-game, and also that the game won't have everything pre-programmed so that you can get all sorts of results procedurally?

I'm actually not surprised.

I never really thought the game wasn't going to be THAT realistic, but everyone thought that it would, and it had something of an influence on me. So I had kind of a mixed opinion, that the game was still going to have some game-like elements but that many things besides your creature could happen procedurally, and that the game would determine it.

And on topic now, I was sort of thinking we'd take Infinity: The Quest for Earth's approach and not simulate every particle in a nebulae, just some pre-set, high-res facemes, and some.. um, what is it called when you have those strings that always seem to face you? I've seen them in Spore: Galactic Adventures, actually. But they were rather jittery.

Anyway, you might have the facemes and faceme-string things drift around a bit, that is if we do include this feature, you get stuff like this.

Well, actually, looking back it's noted that it's volumetric. On the site, though it's also listed as procedural. It's almost too good to be true.

Bashinerox wrote:

Also, macroscopic life has a tough time dealing with the lack of atmospheric pressure, as circulatory systems require a decent amount of positive pressure in order to work

Guess it would have to be a "drop true realism for the sake of gameplay" deal. But then again, we don't know anyway, and it's possible for a creature to develop some form os exoskeleton to hold it's guts in so to speak.


On the thought of realism, an that evolves in zero gravity would probably most likely end up symmetrical on most, if not all, planes

Excellent points (read the second link I posted, poisson)

Zero-G life would most likely be symmetrical on three axes unless it developed a method of movement, in which case, it would probably drop to one or two axes to streamline the shape. Also, if it became cephalized the axes of symmetry would drop.

Bacteria are extremely resistant to the harsh conditions of space (i believe living bacteria have been found on lunar mission equipment after years in an atmosphere-less environment, bombarded by radiation).

My point of movement still remains. How does one move in a near vacuum? I suppose excrement could be used...ew.

Poisson wrote:

My point of movement still remains. How does one move in a near vacuum? I suppose excrement could be used...ew.

plasma Belgium!

EDIT: you can't say Belgium?

can i at least say bum?

EDIT EDIT:
ah ha!
yeah other three letter word for bum starts with an a ends with an ss

Bashinerox wrote:

Poisson wrote:

My point of movement still remains. How does one move in a near vacuum? I suppose excrement could be used...ew.

plasma Belgium!

EDIT: you can't say Belgium?

can i at least say bum?

EDIT EDIT:
ah ha!
yeah other three letter word for bum starts with an a ends with an ss

Ass HA! I laugh at your pathetic censor!

So that is a possibility. A gross one, but it is something to think about. Seems like one of the few plausible ones, seeing as firing just about anything else would be a waste of possibly valuable resources in an environment with almost nothing to use.

Poisson wrote:

Bashinerox wrote:

Poisson wrote:

My point of movement still remains. How does one move in a near vacuum? I suppose excrement could be used...ew.

plasma Belgium!

EDIT: you can't say Belgium?

can i at least say bum?

EDIT EDIT:
ah ha!
yeah other three letter word for bum starts with an a ends with an ss

Ass HA! I laugh at your pathetic censor!

So that is a possibility. A gross one, but it is something to think about. Seems like one of the few plausible ones, seeing as firing just about anything else would be a waste of possibly valuable resources in an environment with almost nothing to use.

I read somewhere that in curved space it is possible to 'swim' in a vaccumm, by a series of stretching motions (the example used a simple alien 'swimmer' thing that could literally stretch)

So could that be a possibility for motion? An energy-consuming one, but a possibility?

The Uteen wrote:

Poisson wrote:

Bashinerox wrote:

Poisson wrote:

My point of movement still remains. How does one move in a near vacuum? I suppose excrement could be used...ew.

plasma Belgium!

EDIT: you can't say Belgium?

can i at least say bum?

EDIT EDIT:
ah ha!
yeah other three letter word for bum starts with an a ends with an ss

Ass HA! I laugh at your pathetic censor!

So that is a possibility. A gross one, but it is something to think about. Seems like one of the few plausible ones, seeing as firing just about anything else would be a waste of possibly valuable resources in an environment with almost nothing to use.

I read somewhere that in curved space it is possible to 'swim' in a vaccumm, by a series of stretching motions (the example used a simple alien 'swimmer' thing that could literally stretch)

So could that be a possibility for motion? An energy-consuming one, but a possibility?

But we don't know if space is indeed curved. And it was also stated that this would take eons to move any noticeable amount. Not to mention that like you said: it's tiring, and you don;t want to tire out in a place with minimal food.

yes, but in space, the speed loss is quite small. I think that organic compounds and small bacteria should form, but nothing else.

Bashinerox wrote:

Poisson wrote:

My point of movement still remains. How does one move in a near vacuum? I suppose excrement could be used...ew.

plasma Belgium!

EDIT: you can't say Belgium?

can i at least say bum?

EDIT EDIT:
ah ha!
yeah other three letter word for bum starts with an a ends with an ss

another classic for the devblog. That would work though.

I don't quite understand the vacuum concept... T_T

EDIT : And I don't quite het why it woul be impossible for multicellular organisms to form.

Albalrogue wrote:

I don't quite understand the vacuum concept... T_T

EDIT : And I don't quite het why it woul be impossible for multicellular organisms to form.

Explosive decompression.

For anyone who doesn't understand that, I'll write it simply:

Your organism would explode, but without the heat and sound etc. of a regular explosion.

And to put it plain and simply:

Roflmao!!!! My dude just blew up!!!!!!! I luv dis game!!!!!!!!!!!!!11

By the way, ROFLMAO stands for Roll On Floor Laughing My Bum Off, but it isn't bum, it's the one that begins with a and ends with ss. I wonder if the one that other one is censored, let's see: Arse.
EDIT: Nope. Quick! Censor before it catches on, or face the wrath of my Belgium! Wait, what? Nooooo!!!!!!!!