Epitaph – Fermi Paradox Simulator

https://mkremins.github.io/epitaph/

by throwup238 • 2 years ago

225 73 2 years ago

mkremins.github.io

underyx2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

underyx2• 2 years ago

Ah, fair point! I guess I was unaware of the range of things that are covered by the name 'rocket'

noduerme• 2 years ago

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.

idlewords5• 2 years ago

A fun thought experiment is to try to re-imagine human history if U-235 were the sole isotope of uranium.

elliotec• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

No C-Beams?

pfdietz• 2 years ago

You could ad lib those like Rutger Hauer.

Modified3019• 2 years ago

This is a space version of owning pet hamsters.

b3lvedere• 2 years ago

My hamsters live longer than 15 clicks :)

ttr2021• 2 years ago

Addictive!

whythre2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Flammable atmospheres are dangerous to live in...

whythre2• 2 years ago

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?

HenryBemis2• 2 years ago

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 ἐπιτάφιος (epitáphios) 'a funeral oration'; from ἐπι- (epi-) 'at, over', and τάφος (táphos) '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.

HenryBemis2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

If they life in an athmosphere similiar to ours wouldn't that civilisation be burried?

pugworthy• 2 years ago

Always a fan of Andre Norton's Forerunner stories. Ancient space faring civilizations and mysterious artifacts and such.

x-complexity• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Interesting job! Would one of the HITLs you work on be named after a rock band by any chance?

seanw444• 2 years ago

They call them "arrow functions" and were apparently added in 2015 with ES6.

NooneAtAll33• 2 years ago

can you make a "spawn civ" cheat button as well? please

93po• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Also, some deaths are questionable. Death of domestic crops results in death of civilization that know algebra, metalworking, chemistry and medicine?

EasyMark• 2 years ago

that's what you get when you're a god and decide to evolve koalas instead of omnivores and generalists :D

idlewords5• 2 years ago

It nearly happened to Ireland.

number6• 2 years ago

Wow, this game is 6 years old.

hojinkoh• 2 years ago

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...

spacecadet2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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!

spacecadet2• 2 years ago

https://github.com/derekburgess/simcraft

SirFredman• 2 years ago

Fascinating and horrible at once.

bluGill2• 2 years ago

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.

zamadatix2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

UncleOxidant• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

NooneAtAll33• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

NooneAtAll33• 2 years ago

a) empathy has no reason to only work in reality - or whole genres of fiction wouldn't exist

b) it's hard to judge what's possible or not without experimental data (on otherworldly civilizations), nor we're even explained the mechanisms of "us teaching others". But it's a schematic way of showing Great Filters in a simplified, gamified manner - and that's still a possible, valid and argued for answer to a Fermi Question

pk-protect-ai2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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-ai2• 2 years ago

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 Latbûut 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• 2 years ago

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.

m3kw94• 2 years ago

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.

michaelmrose2• 2 years ago

Common formulations of such theories that might be imaginary have additional spacial dimensions as microscopic not someplace you can really go.

EvgeniyZh• 2 years ago

My answer is that the values we multiply are too uncertain to give meaningful prediction [1]

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

omgJustTest• 2 years ago

Dark forest ending, anyone?

m3kw94• 2 years ago

Let’s teach these guys optics, what could go wrong? They fight over precious materials and wiped itself out.

AlexGood• 2 years ago

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/...

idlewords5• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

How does this work?

idlewords5• 2 years ago

These planets sure are volcanically active.

all2• 2 years ago

There's also no chance that civs fracture and some elements of a civ survive.

geph2021• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

freilanzer• 2 years ago

I don't get it, I never get past 2-3 clicks. Doesn't seem to make a lot of sense imo.

Epitaph – Fermi Paradox Simulator

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