Sculpt the Winds and Steer the Currents
Suspended in space, driven by the vast energy of the Sun, your planet swirls with winds and currents of immense power. They are yours to guide, and shape your planet's climate - if you dare.Can you bring the monsoon to the deserts? Or... will you end up melting the ice caps?
A Whole-Earth Garden
It's a trilobite-eat-trilobite world. From the simplest cyanobacteria to the tiger at your throat, everyone's out to win the game of Natural Selection. Strike a balance between plant and animal, predator and prey, and build your planet's ecology. But whatever you do... be good to the fungi.There are dozens of predefined species at your disposal to fill, exploit, and dominate every ecological niche. And if there is no pleasing you, then evolve one of your own.
Step Into the Unknown
Your planet has its own, relaxed logic, measured in centuries and millennia. But life can't stay in the cradle forever. Will you take the leap and set one of your species on the path to sapience?Are you prepared to guide them through the long, perilous journey from animal to Antiquity? And is your planet prepared for the power they will wield, and the dreams they'll have?
The Science
Inspired by Maxis' 1990 SimEarth, and its legendary capture of deep ecological theory in a "software toy", pan?gaia draws on methods and algorithms from established research circulation models, like UVic EMBM, MOM5, and DieCAST. It simulates the Earth system (or other planets, if you want) as a set of interconnected spheres:- The atmosphere, the envelope of air and moisture that stretches from the ground to space, that circulates from the Tropics to the Poles in jetstreams and hurricanes, that nourishes forests and scours away at mountains.
- The hydrosphere, your planet's water - from the smallest stream to the vast ocean deep - turning over in cycles from days to millennia, and mediating all life on earth.
- The cryosphere, your planet's icecaps and glaciers - locked in a delicate cycle with heat and the Sun, whose fate can tip the entire climate from greenhouse to ice age, and back again.
- The geosphere, the rock, soil and mountains beneath everything, which give shape to the oceans, and create rainforests or rain-shadows.
- The biosphere, the teeming masses all fighting for survival, bending and yielding with the flows of water and nutrients, making dams in your forests - and creating vast algal blooms that can even cool your planet down. Gaia help you if one of them learns how to make a spear...
Everything - the sea, the sky, the rock, the living things - pulls and pushes on everything else. Your world is not just a silent rock or a pale blue dot - it's alive!