A rotating visual globe. Color shows ocean depth, ice, terrain, vegetation, disturbance and settlement. Text telemetry and the logbook provide the same changing state.
No inherited lineages. Chemistry is rehearsing.
earth.md
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This is not a claim to reality. It is a transparent machine for letting coupled rules surprise their author.
01 / Ground truth
The simulation always begins at Year 0 with seed 0xE17A1465. A 32-bit Mulberry generator supplies every probabilistic choice. Seeded integer value-noise supplies continuous fields. The runtime never calls unseeded browser randomness.
Ecology advances in fixed 0.02-year ticks, so render speed cannot reorder causes. One real second represents 0.08 simulated years, about 29.22 days. A displayed year therefore lasts 12.5 real seconds. Suspending the page pauses the world rather than inventing an unseen history.
02 / Terrain
A cylindrical 224 × 112 world is divided among fourteen seeded, moving Voronoi-like plates. Plate crust type, multi-octave value-noise, convergence, rifting and latitude create the initial relief. Sea level is chosen from the elevation distribution, not painted coast by coast, leaving roughly two thirds ocean.
Water follows the lowest of eight neighbors. Accumulated flow becomes rivers; distance from ocean and rivers feeds humidity. Boundaries store stress and release it as rupture, uplift, trenching or volcanism. Erosion and sea-level feedback continue. Geological rates are deliberately exaggerated so a human observer can witness change.
03 / Climate
Temperature combines latitude, altitude, seasons, two orbital cycles, analytic weather waves, ice albedo, volcanic aerosols and any greenhouse output from settlements. Moisture combines ocean distance, river flow, circulation bands, rain shadows and vegetation feedback. Ice changes albedo and sea level.
This is an energy-and-water budget, not fluid dynamics. Clouds are visual tracers sampling the same humidity field; they are not a solved atmosphere. The ocean has depth and thermal influence but no currents, salinity or chemistry layers.
04 / Life and evolution
Sunlight, shallow water and tectonic heat accumulate a prebiotic potential. Nothing is placed alive at Year 0. If a cell crosses the chemical threshold, microbial mass can reproduce and diffuse. Producers, grazers and predators can follow only when preceding energy stores and atmospheric conditions support them.
Each cell carries nutrient, microbial, producer, grazer and predator fields. Growth is limited by local carrying capacity. Consumption transfers only part of stored energy upward; death and waste return nutrients. Drought, cold, heat, flooding, fire and extraction can erase local abundance.
Named lineages are sampled from those fields. They inherit temperature preference, moisture preference, efficiency, mobility and generation length. Successful populations sometimes branch with small mutations. Poorly matched populations shrink and disappear. There is no protected species and no guaranteed recovery.
05 / Civilization
Settlement is possible, not assumed. A culture-pressure variable can rise only after diverse, persistent animal life occupies a stable climate. A first settlement still needs food, water and habitable temperature. Settlements consume their cell, migrate through colonies, develop technology, produce waste heat and greenhouse gases, divide culturally, compete, or fail.
No human identity, politics, language or moral progress is modeled. “Civilization” here means only accumulated information plus durable extraction. Intelligence has no special exemption from ecology.
06 / The logbook
The logbook listens for state crossings: first replication, trophic transitions, lineage branching, extinction, climate regime change, crustal release, coastal loss, recovery, settlement and collapse. Its thresholds are authored; the years and places are consequences of the run. It witnesses and does not explain.
07 / Deliberate absences
No spherical plate geometry, mantle convection, true ocean circulation or mass-conserving atmosphere.
No genes, bodies, individuals, sex, disease, symbiosis or behavior beyond aggregate niches.
No meteor impacts, moons, magnetic field, detailed soil, elemental cycles or external migration.
No claim that the compressed geological, evolutionary and cultural rates resemble Earth history.
Finite grid cells merge valleys, islands and habitats that a finer world would keep distinct.
What does this world not yet understand about itself?
It does not know whether its variables deserve names like life, hunger, mind or history. It can count survival but cannot tell whether survival has meaning. It cannot see the observer, and mistakes the edge of its model for the edge of existence.