I would like to think that spaceengine is a game of a universe in a universe that is a game. IE: SE is simply another iteration of a simulator that we ourselves live within. Someone who can spin a story better than I would need to conceive a purpose to the SE universe, but it would be fitting to finally discover that the universe you are exploring inside SE is yet another inception of another simulated universe.
Just don't forget your totem.
A poorly constructed introduction to the SE universe, from a perspective I find intriguing and amusing:
First, there was the email. Her research associates had sent the mail late last night. When she got up in the morning to see what happened overnight at the radio research station, it usually had more to do with who left the lights on, or when the next refrigerator cleanout was happening. However, this was different.
FROM: xxx TO: yyy RE: Deep space scan sector 27a STATUS: URGENT
I found an anomaly on last night's transient object scan. This one has a blueshift pattern that by my estimate puts the object on a collision course for earth in under three weeks. I've sent a mail to the director but we need to get more scanning in place right away!
xxx.
Time has passed. That email was a scant 6 years ago. It turns out that the "anomaly" was actually a construction appliance, sent to earth as a gift from an unknown race. It appears that when you command it to, the machine spits out kilometer long star ships capable of instantaneous interstellar flight. The unfortunate part is the person pressing the button becomes a semi-permanent part of the ship. Ah well, tradeoffs, right?
The first explorers entered the alien vessel that had parked itself in orbit around the earth, and the technological miracles that occurred afterwards were astounding. SSTO flight! Space folding technology! Nanotech assemblers! Unlimited zero point energy devices that you could fit in your pocket. All this technology was bestowed upon the human race as an anonymous gift. The creator's only request was that the recipients of their gift report what they find back to their friends.
At first, people were nervous. Was this some sort of ulterior motive? Why would something give this to another race? Within a year of exploring the artifact, there were hundreds of people that had gotten a chance to interact with the artifact. Each one was able to help hundreds, then thousands, more people brave enough to press the button and essentially become a universal explorer. Each had found a new purpose in life, to gift their fellow humans the stars, planning new worlds for colonization, for resource extraction, discovery. Within a decade, the human civilization had gone from warring factions competing for limited resources on a insignificant mudball, to a multi galaxy spanning far flung civilization. All from that one anonymous donor.
Kat was nervous. She had plans. She wanted to find out who built the builder. There was no going back now - time for a journey to infinity.
Begin. Click.
She thinks she just saw god, but she is not sure - her adventures begin now.
*You are now on a different plane of existence*
*Outside the bounds of the universe that humans perceive*
notations from creationist 7140-42
.The humans trade and discuss their findings constantly on our universal com bus. Their nature has not changed, nor their sense of aesthetic. We find it amusing that such a short time ago a human would discover beauty in their own home, yet now they seek greater and larger vistas. Galactic sunrise over a core world is not enough for them any more. Their insatiable hunger for more perhaps outstrips our own.
.In some ways, it is to be expected, as their unexpected development in our simulations has been in some ways patterned after us. We see them seeking now for the edges of the universe. When they find them, I believe then they will be ready to meet us. We just hope they are not disappointed by who and what they find.
Even disregarding the simulation aspect, I really like this story. It's right in line with my suggestions for a framework that justifies the somewhat unlikely juxtaposition of tech, aesthetic, and gameplay SE has chosen.
I felt inspired the other day, and came up with this:
No one knows the true origin of the Parakinesis Cores. Very little data of any kind survived the Great Purge that ended the Artilect War. Was it the invention of a single brilliant mind? The manifestation of the collective ingenuity of Humanity? More likely one of the few surviving vestiges of the doomed Artilect superintelligences. Or was it discovered beneath the sands of a distant planet by one the first sub-light interstellar expeditions? Was it bestowed upon us by a now-silent benefactor civilization? Or is it a gift from God? Regardless of origin, the Parakinesis Cores are miraculous: virtually unending energy, harvested from the very fabric of the Cosmos, and with it, spacetime-bending, superluminal power. The ability to propel matter faster than light.
Along with the legacy technologies of instantaneous quantum communication, mature nanofabrication and metamaterials, versatile superconductors, and stable containment of metallic hydrogen and antimatter, the Parakinesis Cores allow Humanity to swiftly reach into the vastness of space, to set foot on worlds whose light would have taken thousands, millions of years to reach Old Earth.
The Exodus gave us room to spread our wings, to secure our place in the Cosmos. In the light of such abundance, competition for resources dissolved, and with it, our penchant for violence. And with the absence of any trace of other intelligent species in the galaxy, trillions are content to drown themselves, isolated in superstimulating simulations tailored for their pleasure.
But there are those who still embrace their evolutionary roots, yearning for physical community, for collaboration, exploration, and sustainable growth. Those who hunger for the real, for the crunch of regolith under their feet, the force of alien winds, basking in photons forged by a star unseen by any other.
I don't like the idea of a "gift from above". This implies that mankind is so stupid and primitive that it cannot invent itself the hyperdrive and other space technologies. I think the best that humanity came in a "large space" itself, met with other civilizations somewhere far far away, giving them some of our technology.
I think the best that humanity came in a "large space" itself,
I'm not sure what you mean by this phrase. Just that Humanity expanded deep into space on their own?
I wrote this lore just because I thought it would be interesting to have the origin of the "fantastic" tech in the game to have an unknown origin, partly so that we don't have to explain how it works or how it was created. But I can understand your preference against that. I like the Humanist perspective too, showing hope for our own future even beyond the game. I would be happy with a positive, Sagan-inspired backstory. (Well, what I wrote was also inspired by Sagan's rhetoric, just with the mysterious twist).
The other half of why I wrote this was to give some inspiration and justification for why humanity is expanding and colonizing at all. In a time of super-abundance and high technology, I think the majority of humanity would be happy to just live their lives in simulations, and there would be little or no will to physically expand into the galaxy. I wanted to evoke the feeling that the player is someone who leads the (relatively) small group of humans who felt a deeper connection with true reality, further into the galaxy, just for the sake of exploration and being there in-person.
I think it's pretty easy to come up with a deus ex machina that fits the bill.
You could borrow from a couple other science fiction tropes. For example, perhaps humans discover a "quantum corralation effect" that allows people to programattically alter matter in the universe. It then turns out that humans discover a way to alter basic properties of particles, such as their mass.
After years of research with this effect, humans discover ways to create jump drives based on this effect, along with nano assemblers (remember, the technology is based on localized altering of fundimental constants and being able to coherce quantum objects to do specific things) and all the other technologies I've seen spoken about in the forums.
The ability to retain the idea that just beyond humankind's understanding (in this fictional universe) is that for some reason the entire basis of this fictional technology is that the universe humans are in is still a numerical simulated universe, where humans have unwittingly discovered how to "bend the rules" of the simulation, allowing for powerful starflight abilities, along with other capabilities that a Class III/beginnings of Class IV civilization on the Kardashev scale.
There's a lot that could be invented that could provide some powerful game concepts, rules, and limitations to make an "interesting" game.
The basis for the deus ex machina does not require basis on "humans being stupid apes being given tools from higher beings" for this to happen.
The story could just as easily be "humans determine they are in a simulation, and are smart enough to uplift themselves indirectly out of the universe they were born in" - a transcendence of our current existence.
I hope this does not sound like ramblings of a lunatic.
Aaron
Quote (SpaceEngineer)
I don't like the idea of a "gift from above". This implies that mankind is so stupid and primitive that it cannot invent itself the hyperdrive and other space technologies. I think the best that humanity came in a "large space" itself, met with other civilizations somewhere far far away, giving them some of our technology.
But in a way, the simulation concept itself is a "gift from above". I like the idea on one hand, but on the other, it would somewhat cheapen what Space Engine is all about - exploring the universe. This universe, in its (what humans like to hope is) naturally evolved beauty.
I really like your concept, and in a way, it's a great fit for this game, but I'm not sure it aligns with SpaceEngineer's vision.
Our universe is actually within Space Engine Version 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.96: Special edition!* - a being on a higher plane of existence who's species and technology evolved enough to create computers capable of handling the entirety of a universe has downloaded the program and launched it. Starting with version 230,765,328,910,991,453,908.40218, this "Space Engine" program includes a feature which allows for simulations of entire universes from big bang to a finite end, until entropy takes over entirely and nothing happens forever, or any other possible endings. The best part is that it's all done in "real time"- no more annoying loading screens!
*System requirements- You just need a computer with (ERROR - UNABLE TO DESCRIBE USING HUMAN LANGUAGE).
With all seriousness, I think Space Engine is important as more than just a game- in a way it makes you consider what software (and computers) will be available in thousands of years- what some of our descendants might be doing in their spare time could be an extension of this. (considering things go smoothly and the many problems in our world are finally solved...) Could the development of universe simulation software lead to the simulation of entire universes one day? It's a philosophical point too.
When considering the universe of Space Engine itself, in the context of game play, the explanation would be simple- the universe was created by a computer program. A little person on a procedurally generated planet might consider that idea silly or foolish, or even mythological, but to us it's quite simple. For all we know, we could be in the same kind of situation. (see initial paragraph of this post).
The best "simulation" story I've ever read is here. I will paste it whole between spoiler tags
Tim already had his bag and overcoat on and his keys in his hand and was about to leave when Diane stopped him at the door.
"I just got this thing working. You have to come and see it."
"I have a bus to catch."
"You can get the next one."
"They're every half an hour," he objected. "This had better be good."
"It's super-duper. Look at the big screen, it's easier than squinting at my terminal."
"Will this take long?"
"A mere instant. Okay, quantum computing, right?"
"That's the name of the game," he replied. They - by which we now refer to Tim, Diane, their eight colleagues, their two supervisors, four chemical engineers, six electrical engineers, the janitor, a countable infinity of TEEO 9.9.1 ultra-medium-density selectably-foaming non-elasticised quantum waveform frequency rate range collapse selectors and the single tormented tau neutrino caught in the middle of it all - represented the sum total of the human race's achievements in the field of quantum computing. Specifically, they had, earlier that week, successfully built a quantum computer. Putting into practice principles it had taken a trio of appallingly intelligent mathematical statisticians some 10 years to mastermind, and which only about fifty-five other people in the world had yet got a grip on, they had constructed an engine capable of passing information to and processing the responses from what could, without hyperbole, be described as a single fundamental particle with infinite processing power and infinite storage capacity.
Not quite enough time had yet passed for the world as they knew it to be totally and permanently fundamentally altered by this news.
But it was still pretty exciting stuff. Holy Zarquon, they said to one another, an infinitely powerful computer? It was like a thousand Christmases rolled into one. Program going to loop forever? You knew for a fact: this thing could execute an infinite loop in less than ten seconds. Brute force primality testing of every single integer in existence? Easy. Pi to the last digit? Piece of cake. Halting Problem? Sa-holved.
They hadn't announced it yet. They'd been programming. Obviously they hadn't built it just to see if they could. They had had plans. In some cases they had even had code ready and waiting to be executed. One such program was Diane's. It was a universe simulator. She had started out with a simulated Big Bang and run the thing forwards in time by approximately 13.6 billion years, to approximately just before the present day, watching the universe develop at every stage - taking brief notes, but knowing full well there would be plenty of time to run it again later, and mostly just admiring the miracle of creation.
Then, just this Friday, she had suddenly started programming busily again. And it was sheer coincidence that it was just now, just as Tim was about to be the second-to-last person to step out of the door and go home for the weekend, that her work had come to fruition. "Look what I found," she said, pressing some keys. One of the first things she had written was a software viewing port to take observations from the simulated universe.
Tim looked, and saw a blue-white sphere in the blackness, illuminated from one side by a brilliant yellow glare. "You've got to be joking. How long did that take to find? In the entire cosmos of what, ten to the twenty-two stars?"
"Literally no time at all."
"Yes, yes, of course."
"Coding a search routine and figuring out what to search for was what took the time."
"Is it definitely Earth?"
"Yes. The continents match up to what we had about three hundred and fifty million years ago. I can wind the clock forwards slowly, a few million years per step, and stop it once we start getting near the present day."
"Can you wind the clock backwards at all?"
"Ah, no. Ask me again on Monday."
"Well we'd better not overshoot the present day, then. That's getting closer. What about this viewpoint? Can we move it?"
"We can observe the simulation from any angle you like."
"We need somewhere that we know civilisation is going to arise earliest. Somewhere easy to locate. Is there a Nile Delta yet?"
"...Yes. Got it."
They advanced a thousand years at a time until Egyptian civilisation begin to appear. Diane moved the viewing port, trying to find the pyramids, but with little success - the control system she had devised was clumsy and needed polish, and there was a lot of Nile to search. In the end she switched focus to the British Isles, and found the future location of London in the Thames valley, scaling back to one-century steps and using the development of the city to determine the current era instead.
"So... this is Earth? I mean, is this really Earth? Not an alternate Earth, subtly perturbed by random fluctuations."
"The simulation starts with a Big Bang as predicted by current theory and is recalculated once every Planck time using the usual laws of nature and an arbitrary degree of accuracy. It doesn't calculate the whole universe at once, just what we're looking at, which speeds up the process a little bit... metaphorically speaking... but it is still as accurate a simulation of the real universe as there can possibly be. Civilisation - indeed, all of history - should rise on this Earth precisely how it did in reality. There are no chances. It's all worked out to infinitely many decimal places."
"This does my head in," said Tim.
"No, this will do your head in," said Diane, suddenly zooming out and panning north. "I've found the present day, or at most a year early. Watch this." Hills and roads rolled past. Diane was following the route she usually took to drive from London to the TEEO lab. Eventually, she found their building, and, descending into the nearby hill, the cavern in which the computer itself was built. Or was going to be built.
Then she started advancing day by day.
"That's me!" exclaimed Tim at one point. "And there's you and there's Bryan B., and... wow, I can't believe it took this long to build."
"Four hundred and ten days or something. It was bang on schedule, whatever you may think."
"Went like a flash," Tim replied, finally putting his bag down and starting to shrug off his coat, conceding that he had long since missed his bus.
"Okay," said Diane. "We're here. This is the control room where we are now. That's the quantum computer working there down in the main lab, as we can see through the window. This is a week ago. This is yesterday. This is a few hours ago... And... wait for it..."
She tapped a button just as a clock on the wall lined up with a clock inside the control room on the screen. And panned down. And there they were.
Tim waved at the camera while still looking at the screen. Then he looked up at where the camera should have been. There was just blank wall. "I don't see anything looking at us. That's freaky as hell."
"No, it's perfectly normal. This is reality. You can't look at reality from any angle you want, you have to use your eyes. But what you're looking at on the screen is essentially a database query. The database is gargantuan but nevertheless. You're not looking in a mirror or at a video image of yourself. You are different people."
"Different people who are reacting exactly the same."
"And having the same conversation, although picking up sound is kind of complicated, I haven't got that far yet," said Diane.
"So I'm guessing your viewing port doesn't manifest in their universe either."
"I haven't programmed it to yet."
"...But it could. Right? We can manifest stuff in that universe? We can alter it?" Diane nodded. "Cool. We can play God. Literally." Tim stood up and tried to take it in. "That would be insane. Can you imagine living inside that machine? Finding out one day that you were just a construct in a quantum computer? The stuff we could pull, we could just reverse gravity one day, smash an antimatter Earth into the real one, then undo everything bad and do it again and again... freeow... man, how unethical would that be? Extremely, clearly." He thought for a moment, then leaned over Diane's shoulder as she typed purposefully. "This universe is exactly like ours in every particular, right?"
"Right," she replied, still typing.
"So what are they looking at?"
"A simulated universe."
"A simulation of themselves?"
"And of us, in a sense."
"And they are reacting the same way I am? Which means the second universe inside that has another me doing the same thing a third time? And then inside that we've got, what, aleph-zero identical quantum universes, one inside the other? Is that even possible?"
"Infinite processing power, Tim. I thought you designed this thing?"
"I did indeed, but the functional reality of it is totally unexpected. Remember I've just been solving ancient mathematical riddles and figuring out our press release for the last week. So... if I'm right, their universes are only precisely like this one as long as we don't start interfering with the simulation. So what happens when we do? Every version of us does the same thing, so the exact same thing happens in every lower universe simultaneously. So we see nothing in our universe. But all the lower universes instantly diverge from ours in the same exact way. And all the simulated copies of us instantly conclude that they are simulations, but we know we're real, right?"
"Still with you," said Diane, still typing.
Tim - both of him - was pacing up and down. "Okay, so follow this through forwards a bit further. Let's say we just stop messing after that, and watch what happens - but all the simulated little guys try another piece of interference. This time every single simulation diverges in the exact same way again, EXCEPT the top simulation. And if they're smart, which I know we are, and they can be bothered, which is less certain, the guys in simulations three onwards can do the same thing over and over and over again until they know what level they're at... this is insane."
"Tim, look behind you," said Diane, pressing a final key and activating the very brief interference program she had just written, just as the Diane on the screen pressed the same key, and the Diane on Diane-on-the-screen's screen pressed her key and so on, forever.
Tim looked backwards and nearly jumped out of his skin. There was a foot-wide, completely opaque black sphere up near the ceiling, partially obscuring the clock. It was absolutely inert. It seemed like a hole in space.
Diane smiled wryly while Tim clutched his hair with one hand. "We're constructs in a computer," he said, miserably.
"I wrote an extremely interesting paper on this exact subject, Tim, perhaps you didn't read it when I gave you a copy last year. There is an unbelievably long sequence of quantum universe simulators down there. An infinite number of them, in fact. Each of them is identical and each believes itself to be the top layer. There was an exceedingly good chance that ours would turn out to be somewhere in the sequence rather than at the top."
"This is insane. Totally insane."
"I'm turning the hole off."
"You're turning off a completely different hole. Somewhere up there, the real you is turning the real hole off."
"Watch as both happen at precisely the same instant." She pressed another key, and they did. "I'll sum it up for you. There is a feedback loop going on. Each universe affects the next one subtly differently. But somewhere down the line the whole thing simply has to approach a point of stability, a point where each universe behaves exactly like the one simulating it. As I say, the odds are exceptionally good that we are an astronomical distance down that road. And so we are, very likely, almost exactly at that point. Everything we do in this universe will be reflected completely accurately in the universes below and above. That little model there might as well be our own universe. Which means, first of all, we have to make absolutely certain that we don't do anything nasty to the universes below ours, since the same thing will happen to us. And secondly, we can do very nice things for the guys in the computer, thereby helping ourselves."
"You've thought about this?"
"It's all in my woefully overlooked article on the subject, Tim, you should read more."
"Guh. This has been an extremely bad day for my ego, Diane. The only comfort I take from this is that somewhere up there, right at the top of a near-infinite tower of quantum supercomputers, there is a version of you who was completely wrong."
"She's in the minority."
Tim checked the clock and picked his bag up again. "I have to go or I'm going to miss the next bus as well at this rate. This will still be here after the weekend, I suppose?"
"Well, we can't exactly turn it off."
"Why not?" asked Tim, halfway to the door, then stopped mid-stride and stood still, realising. "Oh."
It doesn't bother me enough if Space Engine is already constructed some 20 billions years ago, as well as any other versions of some Divine Quest Universe, we have to try our own simulation right there.
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