[HN Gopher] Epitaph - Fermi Paradox Simulator
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Epitaph - Fermi Paradox Simulator
Author : throwup238
Score : 203 points
Date : 2024-01-31 05:05 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mkremins.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mkremins.github.io)
| underyx wrote:
| Surprisingly fun for how simple it is. But also, actually very
| frustrating. It's almost like a tamagotchi but with lots of
| random deaths.
|
| Also, pretty funny to see civilizations that figure out rockets
| before e.g. steam engines and electricity.
| nickff wrote:
| Humans figured out rockets before steam engines and
| electricity. Rockets being invented in 13th-century China,
| while the steam engine was only invented in 1606 and made
| useful in 1712. Electricity has a much more complicated
| history, and you could make the case that it was discovered
| before either of the other two, or invented later.
| underyx wrote:
| Ah, fair point! I guess I was unaware of the range of things
| that are covered by the name 'rocket'
| noduerme wrote:
| Before electricity, yes. Not before steam. The principle of a
| steam engine existed in ancient Greece.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
|
| Most likely the reason it remained a toy, rather than being
| put to productive use, was the abundance of slave labor.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Most likely the reason it remained a toy, rather than
| being put to productive use, was the abundance of slave
| labor.
|
| This is something that get said a lot, but it misses
| technological and socio-ebergetic factors as well:
|
| 1. at that time metallurgy was very rudimentary, compared
| to how it was in the late 18th century. Most they wouldn't
| have been able to craft an efficient steam machine back
| then even if they tried very hard.
|
| 2. They also didn't use coal (I don't even know I'd they
| knew it), which makes fuel (wood) really expensive and also
| removes the self-reinforcing retroaction where you can use
| the steam machine to mine more coal and really contributed
| to the exponential nature of the industrial revolution.
| baq wrote:
| They must've known coal and oil, it was present naturally
| close to surface or straight up on it in places, still
| is.
|
| The whole digging and drilling business, though - that's
| something else entirely.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| And pumping out the water, helpful to have a steam engine
| to lift all that mass out of your mine.
| z3phyr wrote:
| And metallurgy support to actually build something more
| than a toy.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| If by steam engine you mean 'kettle with no pressure valves
| mounted on an axle', yes. But the aeolipile was in no way a
| functional engine that could do useful work.
| Leszek wrote:
| 13th-century Chinese rockets weren't landing on the moon
| either so both are simplifications.
| bluGill wrote:
| 13 century Chinese rockets were useful weapons or war
| though.
| eigenket wrote:
| Other people have mentioned that the metallurgy that was
| known in Britain at the time useful steam engines were
| developed was dramatically more advanced than what the
| makers of ancient stuff like the Aeolipile had.
|
| A fun fact is that the _reason_ we developed the metallurgy
| required to put high pressure gasses to work inside
| cylinders was in large part due to work on improving cannon
| manufacture.
|
| Early cannons exploded a lot, but a cannon which
| occasionally explodes is a lot better at being a cannon
| than a steam engine that occasionally explodes is at being
| a steam engine. Having a "minimal viable product" for a
| cannon is much simpler than for a steam engine so they were
| able to iterate on the technology.
| idlewords wrote:
| A fun thought experiment is to try to re-imagine human history
| if U-235 were the sole isotope of uranium.
| elliotec wrote:
| This is super fun. I've been playing for 40 min now. I have seen
| civs wiped out by military AIs, nuclear war, volcanoes, forest
| fires, and more. Others seemingly continuously prosper. Cool
| stuff, thanks!
| tudorw wrote:
| No C-Beams?
| pfdietz wrote:
| You could ad lib those like Rutger Hauer.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| This is a space version of owning pet hamsters.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| My hamsters live longer than 15 clicks :)
| ttr2021 wrote:
| Addictive!
| whythre wrote:
| It's fun, but some of the Civilization deaths are kinda dopey. I
| mean, sure, a Gamma ray burst from a local supernova is gonna
| wipe 'em out, fine. But an old culture that has mastered
| metallurgy dies because of an out of control cooking fire? Lol
| ok.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Flammable atmospheres are dangerous to live in...
| whythre wrote:
| Yeah, but wouldn't the sparks from lightning or other natural
| causes preclude any civ (or even life) from forming if the
| atmosphere is highly flammable?
| HenryBemis wrote:
| and I like the name.. Epitaph. Because when I switch tabs and I
| go back to it after 10mins, there are civilizations that came and
| went and I/we didn't even notice.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitaph
|
| An epitaph (from Ancient Greek epitaphios (epitaphios) 'a funeral
| oration'; from epi- (epi-) 'at, over', and taphos (taphos)
| 'tomb')[1][2] is a short text honoring a deceased person.
| Strictly speaking, it refers to text that is inscribed on a
| tombstone or plaque, but it may also be used in a figurative
| sense. Some epitaphs are specified by the person themselves
| before their death, while others are chosen by those responsible
| for the burial. An epitaph may be written in prose or in poem
| verse.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Thinking of Jean-Luc's hobby (alien archaeology) it would be
| interesting to discover planets that were already dead (?). I
| mean once we have fast-enough probes roaming the galaxy, it could
| happen that we discover a long-lost civilization.
| dtx1 wrote:
| If they life in an athmosphere similiar to ours wouldn't that
| civilisation be burried?
| pugworthy wrote:
| Always a fan of Andre Norton's Forerunner stories. Ancient
| space faring civilizations and mysterious artifacts and such.
| x-complexity wrote:
| Played it until I got at least 2 civs into being space-faring.
| Pretty fun :)
|
| Although, if you want to keep playing the game without constantly
| going through a bunch of already dead civs, then you'll need to
| hide them (Did this via Tampermonkey):
|
| https://gist.github.com/SteveHere/1a19df5242802df3edcc7d34d5...
| g19fanatic wrote:
| excuse my javascript inexperience... since when did JS get a
| lambda style definition?! Am I just living under a rock! (hitl
| flight sims in c++ for my day job w/ no real JS exposure)
| elteto wrote:
| Interesting job! Would one of the HITLs you work on be named
| after a rock band by any chance?
| seanw444 wrote:
| They call them "arrow functions" and were apparently added in
| 2015 with ES6.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| can you make a "spawn civ" cheat button as well? please
| 93po wrote:
| I'm not the parent commenter, but it's open source and on
| github and easy to run localy, unfortunately it requires
| installing Java and some deprecated Java application to even
| build it to have changes reflect and I'm not doing either of
| those things. I also don't know enough about un-minifying
| javascript to just change variables in the browser directly.
| maybe someone else here does.
| xeyownt wrote:
| Muuuuuuch too many deaths, and none you can do anything about.
| You just watch the civilizations rise and die at random, then you
| restart.
| deely3 wrote:
| Also, some deaths are questionable. Death of domestic crops
| results in death of civilization that know algebra,
| metalworking, chemistry and medicine?
| EasyMark wrote:
| that's what you get when you're a god and decide to evolve
| koalas instead of omnivores and generalists :D
| idlewords wrote:
| It nearly happened to Ireland.
| number6 wrote:
| Wow, this game is 6 years old.
| hojinkoh wrote:
| This is pretty fun :D
|
| .... and at the same time endearing (?) to see all these
| fictional civilizations make similar mistakes ours did in the
| past...
| spacecadet wrote:
| Very cool, I love how simple this is. I really enjoy simulators
| and spent some time last year building a universe simulator using
| pygame.
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| I love stuff like this. Is your universe simulator something
| you've shared publicly? I'd be interested in playing with that
| as well, and seeing how you put it together!
| SirFredman wrote:
| Fascinating and horrible at once.
| bluGill wrote:
| Fails to simulate the speed of light, at least from what I can
| tell.
|
| Should be some million years ago civilization starts, lives for
| thousands of years, goes extinct - but we never become aware of
| them. Most never send signals (radio or otherwise) strong enough
| for us to detect. Others did, but the signal hasn't reached us
| yet. Still others did, but the signals passed by before we
| developed the ability to detect them. Still others are reaching
| us now, but are so far below the noise floor we can't detect
| them.
|
| The universe is large. You have to account for how slow the speed
| of light is when talking about the Fermi paradox.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I wonder how much that changes the final probability. I think
| the biggest piece is instead of both able to detect each other
| only one will (the other will probably be dead by the time the
| information gets back the other way) which halves the chances
| of detecting another civilization. Beyond that, given
| sufficiently short civilization lifespans vs the age of the
| universe they can randomly appear in and a relatively uniform
| rate of random occurrence, I don't think "a random civilization
| appeared x years ago x light years away for the timing to work
| out" actually ends up being any less likely than "a random
| civilization appeared at the same time". It feels like it
| should but really if you just take the chance it'd happen
| normally and say "well, there is an equal chance a civilization
| could have developed x years prior" you correct for the time
| for traversing the distance without changing the probability.
|
| The main thing the speed of light prevents is a single
| civilization staying together as a galaxy sized empire.
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| >The main thing the speed of light prevents is a single
| civilization staying together as a galaxy sized empire.
|
| It seems to me that, in principle, a ruling class could set
| itself apart from humanity and conduct the business of a
| galactic government -- ahem, a galactic enlightened
| dictatorship, with its own timing.
|
| For example, Alice and Bob live on Trantor, and are employees
| of the Galactic Federation. They constantly travel [at the
| same fractions of the speed of light] to clusters located in
| different galactic hemispheres, and, thanks to almost
| identical rates of time dilation in their [perhaps carefully
| chosen] travels, they meet every weekend of their proper
| time. They live happily as a family in the headquarters of
| the government, to the rhythm of the passing of countless
| generations on the myriad planets of the federation.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The main issue with this is a week to the traveller
| crossing the galaxy near the speed of light still requires
| civilization to stay together for 100,000 years without
| them.
|
| The second issue is it's not as attractive as it sounds.
| Travelling 1/10th the galaxy in a proper time of 5 days
| requires a trip of a constant 2400 G's. Maybe solvable once
| your civilization has already overcome the Fermi paradox
| (probably don't need bodies at that point) though.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Exactly. Life may not be unusual in the universe. But
| technologically advanced civilizations could be rare enough
| that we don't detect them due to distances in space and time.
| goatlover wrote:
| Fermi wasn't talking about detection when he came up with the
| paradox. There was no SETI yet. He did a back of the napkin
| calculation that a civilization could colonize the galaxy in 1
| to 100 million years with sublight speeds. The galaxy is much
| older than 100 million years, so where is everyone? There's
| been plenty of time for many civilizations to show up here.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| marvelous, sad game
|
| I remember being frustrated/saddened enough to dive into source
| code to find optimal strategy, and I found that even with this
| knowledge game kept my interest:
|
| - each "year"(second) each death reason rolls its probability. If
| civ survives, there's also per year chance of developing tech on
| its own. It's optimal to advance tech asap
|
| - technologies and a couple of lategame events change these
| probabilities - usually by removing small chance of early reason
| and adding new higher chance for later reason. It's mostly
| optimal to develop techs in clusters that cancel most of each
| other out and advance self-tech chance.
|
| - tech tree roughly separates into 3 ages: early (up to and
| including sailing), middle (up to and excluding "modern times"
| with biology, transistors and newspapers) and late
|
| early tech has (1)writing+math+astronomy techs that don't give
| additional death chance in any combo, but increase tech chance -
| research first (2)agri+fish+tools and fire+construction,
| metal+sailing that have higher death chance when you have all but
| 1 or 2 of them than if you have full cluster - focus if self-tech
| triggers (also agri and fish before tools)
| (3)architecture->plumbing decreases death chance - focus
|
| middle tech doesn't change death chance, so you have a breather
|
| late tech is most deadly - (1)taxonomy->germ->genetics tech
| branch has great death decrease on 2nd step, but last one gives
| high chance of bioweapon death (so don't. you'll fear self-tech
| doing it too); (2)exploding nukes event increases world war death
| chance, world peace event decreases it; (3)Ai is great danger but
| necessary - do it as late as possible (iirc there's like 1/3
| chance of death on these last 1-2 steps)
|
| When you learn all the numbers it becomes a great "tension -
| breather - tension" game, but still not with that high of a
| winrate. Nearby supernova death having a chance all the way
| through is kinda funny
|
| ---
|
| fun fact - I learned math behind Markov Chains just solve this
| game. Civs have like 1e-12 or 1e-15 chance of survival on their
| own, iirc (it was something very small, I don't remember now)
| Supermancho wrote:
| > marvelous, sad game
|
| Only sad when you can seriously believe the various scenarios
| that play out...like teaching fishing could cause a
| civilization to cease to exist. It's a silly game that has no
| bearing on reality.
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| Why do you need to teach any of these civilizations fire and
| toolmaking? These are pre-civ capabilities. Toolmaking is natural
| for the species you even not considering being sentient. Like
| birds for example. Usage of fire is somewhat different but it
| would be learned naturally by the any sentient species.
|
| Also, where are the probabilities for mass-extinction-event-
| volcanic-eruptions are coming from? It looks like they are very
| likely to happen ... I have 8/10 so far...
| rando77 wrote:
| It'd be interesting if there was an energy model in the back end
| of this. With fire making more energy available to the the Civil
| until it ran out of fire wood etc
| pk-protect-ai wrote:
| I'm depressed. They all die. I suppose due to the name of this
| game, there are no chances of surviving for any of them.
|
| ... permanent colonies on worlds other than Fratlat. Although
| still largely unable to travel outside of the Latbuut system, the
| distribution of Fratbac civilization across multiple worlds
| greatly reduces the risk that they will collapse due to any
| crisis of merely planetary scale.
|
| In 3904, a swarm of self-replicating Fratbac nanobots began to
| replicate uncontrollably, devouring vast swaths of Fratlat at a
| rate which Fratbac scientists had formerly deemed impossible.
| After several days of rapid expansion, the swarm seems to have
| become dormant, but not before consuming approximately 5% of the
| entire mass of Fratlat and rendering Fratbac civilization
| completely extinct.
| nepeckman wrote:
| Fun game! My personal answer to the Fermi paradox is that multi
| solar system civilization is very very hard, and multi galaxy
| civilization is functionally impossible. Speed of light is slow,
| space is big, and resources are concentrated. If there is a
| species with the capability to spread through their entire
| galaxy, they aren't in this galaxy and they aren't close enough
| to reach us.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Mine is they got too advanced and went multidimensional.
| Sticking to 3D is very primitive thinking when you can
| manipulate higher dimensions. Primitive 3d species will always
| think to conquer 3d things.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Common formulations of such theories that might be imaginary
| have additional spacial dimensions as microscopic not
| someplace you can really go.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| That's what primitive 3D species always rule out. No
| offence, we are all so obviously primitive just by how much
| we don't know.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| We know enough to know that macroscopic higher demential
| spaces connected to our apparently 3 dimensional space
| aren't a thing.
|
| Having limits to our understanding doesn't mean all
| things are equally possible.
|
| For instance there aren't any 2 dimensional beings
| because it's impossible to slice a mathematical pure
| plane and have macroscopic objects exist in that plane
| even fields surrounding a singular atom exist in 3d.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| For sure, what I mean is they could be playing with
| different universes. Or found a way to manipulate time.
| It's crack pot stuff but it all looks like it till it
| happens. Show a cave man an DJI drone being controlled
| and sending back live videos, they will also say it was
| impossible due to their understanding
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| My answer is that the values we multiply are too uncertain to
| give meaningful prediction [1]
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
| omgJustTest wrote:
| Dark forest ending, anyone?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Let's teach these guys optics, what could go wrong? They fight
| over precious materials and wiped itself out.
| AlexGood wrote:
| There is hope for reaching the stars: at a constant acceleration
| of 1 g you could reach 0.9999c in 5 years of proper time,
| covering a distance of 83 light years.
| https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/...
| idlewords wrote:
| That's a great way to get cooked inside your rocket by
| blueshifted cosmic rays. You'll arrive at your destination
| ready to eat, a kind of cosmic jerky sent by the gods.
| devwastaken wrote:
| How does this work?
| idlewords wrote:
| Space is filled with cosmic rays, mostly protons, going in
| all directions. Most of them have energies under 10 GeV
| (99.6% _c_ ). But if you start racing through that flux at
| a very high speed yourself, their velocity relative to you
| will be boosted in the direction you're traveling, and
| you'll briefly see a high-energy particle beam coming
| through the windshield before your eyes are cooked.
|
| If you get going really, really, _really_ fast, a similar
| thing happens with the blue-shifted cosmic microwave
| background.
| idlewords wrote:
| These planets sure are volcanically active.
| all2 wrote:
| There's also no chance that civs fracture and some elements of
| a civ survive.
| geph2021 wrote:
| I enjoyed the game! There was a whole lot of civilizational
| collapse due to food-borne illness. Maybe throw in a comet
| strike, or more varied geological changes (flipping magnetic
| poles, ice-ages, tsunami, sea-level rise, etc...).
|
| It's incredible to think about how many cataclysms humanity has
| lived through, yet also how many we have been lucky to avoid (so
| far...)
| guybedo wrote:
| would be great to tweak a bit the UI:
|
| - display news top to bottom to quickly see what's to do next
|
| - keep the live civilizations on the left and push the collapsed
| ones to the right / bottom
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