Earth.

Nothing hidden. Nothing guided.

This world begins at Year 0 with warm water over submerged crust, minerals, heat, and no organisms. Matter is assumed; cosmology is omitted. What follows is a deterministic, deliberately compressed model, not a forecast of Earth.

01 — The ground beneath possibility

The substrate is a 128 × 64 cylindrical equal-area grid, wrapping at the longitude seam. Ten seeded crustal plates move along fixed great-circle rotations. Overlapping continental kernels, boundary ridges, and three scales of seeded 3D value noise form the terrain. This produces coherent, moving continents without pretending to solve mantle mechanics.

Cooling increases the fraction of solid crust, allowing land to rise from a global ocean. Elevation relaxes toward the moving plate field. Rain erodes exposed rock and deposits part of it downstream. Plates have prescribed velocities, rather than forces or conserved momentum. There are no earthquakes, impactors, or scripted catastrophes.

02 — A restless atmosphere

Latitude, four seasonal samples per year, altitude, residual planetary heat, an abstract carbon reservoir, and ice feedback set local temperature. Prevailing winds move a moisture field inland. Latitude-dependent rain belts, changing weather, and orographic uplift set rainfall. The weather wave and rendered clouds are procedural approximations, not fluid dynamics.

Runoff travels to the lowest of four neighbors; accumulated flow wets and erodes the land. Sinks retain a bounded local flow signal. There is no complete lake, groundwater, ocean-current, or water-mass budget. Sea level responds to mean temperature and ice cover. Edge rows reflect transport at the poles; polar distances are approximated.

03 — Life has to earn its place

In warm, illuminated shallows, mineral availability and boundary heat let an abstract chemical precursor accumulate. Crossing a local seeded threshold founds a photosynthetic lineage. This is a hypothesis for a simulation, not a chemical explanation of life's origin. Further origins can seed the surviving basal lineage, or begin again if it is lost.

Each lineage has a population density in each cell. Producers use sunlight and a finite local nutrient pool. Grazers consume producers; predators consume grazers. Trophic transfers retain 32% and 27%, respectively, before habitat penalties. Mortality and unassimilated material return nutrients. Weathering supplies minerals, so the material budget is intentionally open.

Temperature preference, aquatic affinity, and dispersal vary through mutation tied to actual reproduction. New branches are founded in the parent’s most productive local patch. This sampling shortcut favors already successful habitats and can make terrestrial colonization difficult. Mutations can change feeding guild where prey exists. These discrete jumps approximate much longer evolutionary paths; they are not genetic or anatomical evolution.

Competition, habitat mismatch, limited food, and mortality decide persistence. Diffusion conserves transported population on the equal-area grid, but does not model individual movement. Producer priority rotates each tick. A lineage older than eight years with total biomass below 0.001 is counted as extinct. Twenty-four living lineages is the computational limit; new branching waits when the limit is full. No lineage is killed to make room.

04 — Two seconds, four years

One real second corresponds to two model years. Each simulation step is exactly a quarter-year: eight steps per real second. Generations and geological processes are compressed independently; these years are model units, not literal terrestrial years. The observer orbits about once every 105 seconds. Rotation is visual; there is no resolved day–night biological cycle.

Elapsed time only schedules fixed steps. Frame rate and window size never enter ecological or geological decisions. Missed steps remain queued and are computed in order after a tab is throttled or suspended. A long absence may require visible catch-up. Reloading always returns to Year 0; nothing is saved.

05 — The same first cause

The seed is the fixed unsigned integer 0x5EED2026. Mulberry32 supplies pseudorandom values. Plate initialization uses that seed; life uses an independent stream seeded with seed XOR 0xB105F00D. A seeded integer hash supplies terrain noise and local chemistry thresholds. There is no unseeded randomness, network, storage, or external asset.

Rendering uses separate deterministic noise and cannot consume the simulation's random stream. The same tick sequence reproduces the same state in a given JavaScript engine. Transcendental rounding may differ between engines; shader appearance may vary between GPUs.

06 — Witness, not author

The log records observed threshold crossings: emergence of land and life, trophic establishment, ice advance and retreat, drought, branching, extinction, and biomass loss or recovery. No historical event is assigned a year in advance. Hysteresis limits repeated climate notices. The most recent 120 events and 240 telemetry samples are retained to keep memory bounded.

The globe uses WebGL lighting, extra visual terrain detail, cloud shading, ice, and an atmosphere. A Canvas renderer is available if WebGL fails. Colors represent aggregated biomass, not individual trees or animals. The atmosphere, star field, and orbital line are visual context. The manifest and log can be read and scrolled; they never alter the world.

07 — What was left outside

There is no intelligence, civilization, technology, sexual reproduction, genome, individual animal, real taxonomy, or calibrated biogeochemistry. Lineage names are labels. A food web can form, simplify, or disappear, but this model cannot discover societies. “Forever” means a continuing bounded computation while the page is able to run, not an infinite archive.

The unanswered question

What does this world not yet understand about itself?

It cannot tell whether persistence is progress. It cannot know whether its apparent complexity is a discovery or an echo of the rules that made it. It has no experience of its own oceans, no reason to prefer life to silence, and no knowledge of the observer. Its deepest unknown is how much of a world lies outside every model of one.