Galactic simulator

What is this page and why does it exist? The short answer is just the goofiness of life. There's a smart guy behind this project, but he's very sick and this project is dormant and he's not dormant but he's not active in political affairs right now. He's trapped in a deteriorating body that won't let him assay out into the world to interact with people like he used to, so he's retreating inwards into his own mind, and trying to create new spaces to envision within the inner realms that he can reach.

So, the genesis of the galactic simulator idea was a self-improvement project while I was decompressing from a particularly intense political cycle, way back in 2013. As we began learning that extrasolar planets are very probable, thanks to better telemetry, I began wondering what exosolar planetary atmospheres would look like. And of course it turned out that the answer is "who knows?" There were experts thinking about it, but I tried to go down to the first parameters of consideration and what I discovered was that we don't really have the basis to know.

Most chemistry is done at "standard pressure" - which is to say, under the circumstances of exactly one earth atmosphere pressing down on it. So the potentialites of what life would be like on other worlds hinges entirely on questions about exotic chemistry in high or low pressure environments where we don't actually know what is happening to the substances that we are interested in.

And then, of course we know what we look like and how our history has transformed the climate of our world. Not just global warming, but believe it or not, evolution managed a bigger clusterfuck than that with the Great Oxidation Event. I began to realize that while it makes perfect sense to look for atmospheric signatures of biological activity, if we are our only model for what life looks life, the only life we can detect will be life like our own. But what if that's not the case? What does exotic life really look like?

So in 2013, I was decompressing from the Obama campaign, and my political work that cycle had gotten me fascinated in the question of what labor looks like in a post-scarcity economy. I turned to science fiction to investigate that question, and discovered it is very hard to find non-dystopian science fiction about post-scarcity futures. Star Trek and Iain M. Banks' Culture Series were the major embodiments of the class that I could find. Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series is arguably in the class, but the characters ARE "working stiffs" in a way that was ancillary to my question. At any rate, all the sci fi just got me wondering about the interplay of plausibility and imagination and the ways in which art and science collaborate.

So I started building this simulator that was designed to model solar systems and then calculate what their composition would be on the basis of interaction between core environmental variables (stellar temperature) and randomized seed conditions (mostly intial distributions of available elements). But once I could successfully model the generation of a proto-earth atmosphere, I ran into the problem that life has radically transformed the atmosphere we have. Any time you get an earth-like world you don't get an earth-like atmosphere. I was generating tons of proto-earths and they seemed to work right. And my model predicted that Pluto would have an atomsphere just before NASA discovered one. It also predicted there should be another gas giant further out, and NASA also seems to be moving in that direction too. So I dunno, I'm not saying I built a model that's better than the one real experts use. But I tried to take the available expertise and build a model from it and I got predictions that were empirically verified shortly thereafter. That made me very happy, even though I am in no danger of mistaking simulations for reality. I don't even mistake knowledge for reality. What you know is not perfectly co-extensive with what is real, and I think it's a grade-school epistemological error to believe so.

My great frustration, however, was that life changes the constitution of planets. You don't get free oxygen or fluoride or chlorine in an atmosphere unless some kind of self-sustaining chemical process is unlocking it (yes, I realize this is a definiton of "life" that would theoretically apply to many cosmic phenomena we can already observe operating on cosmic scales, and I'll hopefully get to that point downstream). And you don't avoid an ecological catastrophe unless that initial life spawns a mirror-image predator who translates its finished life product back into ingestible materials. But imaging alternative biochemistries is such a challenging project that I bogged down on it and then work got busy again and the whole thing fell by the wayside and laid dormant for nearly a decade.

So anyways, I got covid in 2019 and I never got better and as my life is collapsing, my mind moves on to other things, and I rediscovered this unfinished project. It's not technically "unfinished" in that it answers my basic question of what atmospheres *should* look like. But it doesn't answer the much wilder question of what life *could* look like.

And so I've been moving it away from the baked in assumptions. I've outsourced all the chemistry defintions into a readable .csv file, so you can basically change the foundational parameters of reality with a spreadsheet program. I'm literally moving towards a simulator that can answer questions like "what would the galaxy look like if a major element like oxygen were critically deficient?"

And it's all still in very rough stages. The basic constraints I am asking of the simulator is that it be able, at a minimum, to generate earth-like conditions for Earth and its solar system under the conditions from which we have emerged, even if those results are not *required* by the simulation engine. (Hopefully that would then allow you to manually set the likelihood of us being the dominant strain of life, testing every degree of the "anthropocentric principle" hypothesis that evolution is "biased" to produce life that looks like us) I feel like any simulator that excludes the possibility of us coming into being is simply beneath the dignity of holding my interest. But of course, if you ban oxygen from the galaxy you do hold open up the possibility of imagining worlds that follow the same rules as ours, but with subtle tweaks to the founding conditions that render us an impossible outcome. The model has to prove itself by *encompassing* the world as we know it. And if it can do that, then I'm personally willing to see what it has to say about alternative realities in which founding circumstances were substantially different. How to translate any of this into something anyone else will care about is still kind of out on the event horizon. Right now it's just something to work on that helps me test my lucidity as it waxes and wanes with the flaring of my symptoms. If I ever get to a point where I can actually advance this thing with the rigor and dedication that I bring to anything I can do, I will probably also be ready to set this whole thing aside and return to work.

Anyways, it sure looks like America's political class is fucking things up in a way that is going to make the core purpose of this whole project relevant again. So if you're here looking for stuff related to that, I'm happy to answer your questions about the actual topic of this place if you're sharp enough to follow the breadcrumb trail that leads to my contact info. But here, I'm just going to be talking to myself and dumping private geek thoughts that hopefully will be indistinguishable from madness without buckets of context that you'd have to solve the "how to contact me" puzzle to understand.