“Look at the stars. It won’t fix the economy. It won’t stop wars. It won’t give you flat abs, or even help you figure out your relationship. But it’s important. It helps you to remember that you and your problems are both infinitesimally small and conversely, that you are a piece of an amazing and vast universe.” ― Kate Bartolotta
So this week I have been working on transferring my galaxy simulation into C++ from Python. C++ is a compiled language and therefore estimated to be around 10 too 100 times faster and because Python generates some subroutines in the background to do garbage collection (stops memory leaks) it takes around half the space in terms of memory.
In my Python version of the Galaxy simulation really can't be scaled past 300 or so objects before it slows down and has to wait. In C++ I am at 2500 planets, moons and stars and it has yet to slow down. With 300 objects it doesn't do much of anything interesting but at some point between 300-2500 objects it collapses back to something like a black hole and spins out again.
I used SFML to do the window and the rendering and also set it to take a stop motion shot every 10 minutes so you can see a gallery of a galaxy simulation.
The Photos
FI haven't figured out the time 10 minutes represent I am cautiously guessing it represents 40-50 million years of simulation. I could figure it out later if it is important. The below is a initial seed produced from seed 4756546 and used a procedural random number generator thus while using 4756546 on same computer I will always get the same galaxy.
4756547 would be different possibly massively so. The yellow dots represent suns and they emit heat. The other planets are then coloured red if they would be too hot for water, blue if too cold and green if just right. I have cheated a little bit I don't actually try to figure out the boiling point of water in this universe instead i calculate a guestimate of where the goldilocks zone should start or end by temperature mapping the galaxy and figuring out where should be.
The thing with procedural random generation is it looks fairly like a galaxy from the beginning.
The below is 1 hour and 10 minutes later (so 350 million years by my estimation). You can see from the edges that it has shrunk.
This gets progressively faster the below is around 150 million years later. You can notice that the corners are pulling in less slowly starting to create a "arm of the galaxy". You can also see that as the galaxy pulls in on itself the average heat increases so more red planets and less green planets.
After 3 hours or 900 million years it is really clear what is happeningg.
There is maybe 1 habitable world left in the galaxy (in hindsight I should have got it to print the count of things to the screen).
The below 1.15 billion years after start. There is almost certainly no alive civilisations in the galaxy.
At 1.25 billion years it really does look like a black hole (as in a super dense amount of mass in a a concentrated point).
Though at 1.45 billion years it has started to slowlt expand again.
At 1.7 billion years it has transformed into a circular object and it has largely started to spin. Strangely as it spins back out it will increasingly again resemble a galaxy. There might be 1 or two habitable planets forming any civilisation developing at this time would rightly conclude they are if not the only living species then very few of them exist.
At 1.95 billion years a number of habitable planets will increase and begin to increase over time. A interesting thing that I observed here is that the galaxy as it expands will follow the principle of as it contracts the average heat will increase destroying the habitable planets in reserve in that as it expands it will cycle through the temperature gradients naturally meaning planets in the goldilocks zone have to form somewhere at some point because as it expands in the galaxy slow expansion all the heat levels should happen at some point in its expansion at least somewhere.
A interesting point is during this project I was reading up about carbon based life for simulation and its alternatives. Something that strikes me is maybe the dominant form of life most best fit to survive in a galaxy changes with its heat level (we have after all had discussions that ammonia based life maybe much better adapted to cold temperatures). Hey maybe when the galaxy was hyper condensed before this metallic hydrogen suspended in plasma was the dominant life form...who can say...
Though it has to be remarked that the galaxy in expanding and contracting rather than being hostile to formation of life would seem to inevitably create life; though in answer to "where are all the aliens then ?" there are many points in this simulation where only one or two habitable worlds exist and they tend to form first either on the edge and far away from each other.
Civilisations that develop in the below timeframe often aren't that far away from each other they probably intercept each others radio signals; maybe they invite each other over for discussions.
After 2.5 billion years it looks like this; strangely more of a galaxy than the one produced by random number generation, it is also very slightly spinning at this point though still expanding albeit slower. Lots of voids and blank spots have formed in places, stars have clumped together in places or wander on there own in others. There is very clear gradients of hot zones and colder zones.
Interestingly you can see it is very alive with life. Lots of greens lots of things close together. Civilisations at this time probably definitely know that aliens exist and even without faster than light travel can probably send sleeper colony ships to other worlds.
Then at 3.25 billion years it begins its starting collapse again. This time no longer quite so ordered, a few planets and stars less ejected from previous expansion to float outside the galaxy. In this age the remaining habitable planets are on the edges. The first civilisations are dying from and there are less green habitable planets.
A civilisation that develops in these ending times are increasingly more likely to be very distant from other habitable worlds. Increasingly begin to think of themselves as the only life form, older civilisations may scoff at this but they are now far enough out of radio range for there opinions to matter.
Conclusion
There is a idea with the Fermi Paradox that we ought to need a explanation of why have we not seen any. You can see from the above that there seems a reasonable argument to think the lifecycle of a galaxy or universe if not cyclic may have different stages of development. There are also both a reason to think both very early and very late developed civilisations would be more likely to evolve outside radio signal range of alien life.
That the fact by expanding and contracting means it is likely somewhere and at some point if life can evolve it will do and thereafter it will become more prevalent and then less so. If more than one form of life (i.e. non carbon) is possible there might be able to overlap but if only carbon life is possible you could solve the fermi paradox by saying life evolved fairly early or fairly late due o expansion and contraction of the galaxy.
I cannot say the appearance of arms in a galaxy say it must be in a collapsing stage but it is hard to see how they would develop otherwise. Therefore that should give you some indication at what point in a galaxy lifecycle we find ourselves. You could be the first in the galaxy but factoring in life probably becomes less common as a galaxy collapses we might be more likely to be exploring a galaxy in ruins than one resembling star wars.
Therefore it can be argued that the Fermi paradox is not a paradox we ought to expect there to probably be less life in our type of galaxy. What's depressing is the though we are either based on this more likely simply by not being in radio range to be very early or very late to the party; and more likely very late. Either way I hope there will be a party...
Final picture 3.5 billion years after start.
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