Taz asks

 Can you do a rundown of Halo from a scientific perspective? I’ve really enjoyed your writing about Armageddon and would like to hear your thoughts on the game that has (since its début in 2002) become a phenomenon. Tanks in advance!

My answer to this one isn’t particularly scientific in any rigorous sense of the word, nor does it have much to do with the Halo universe itself, but I’m going to do it anyway because it’s still kind of fun. Or at least I think so, anyway.

Most elements of the Halo universe are conventionally sci-fi – magic spaceships, magic faster than light travel, magic anti-gravity, all the stuff you really need to hand-wave away in order to make possible the intergalactic space war that forms the background for the Halo story. I can’t quibble with any of that, in the same way that I don’t quibble with the existence of wizards and undead in the Myth series: it’s necessary for the setting. However, what I can quibble with is the thing they put front and centre of the Halo games: the Halos themselves.

The Halos are ring-shaped megastructures with a diameter of 10,000km and what looks like a width of around 300-400km. On the inner surface of the ring is a fully-functioning biosphere with a breathable atmosphere, water, plant life and weather regions. The ring is spun to provide enough faux-gravity in the form of centrifugal force to keep all this stuff stuck to the inside of the ring. This kind of space habitat is not a new idea; it was first popularised in Larry Niven’s Ringworld and became a common part of the late Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, with the Culture Orbitals being truly vast structures on the scale of millions of kilometres which dwarfed the comparatively titchy specimens on offer in Halo. If you’re trying to build somewhere for people to live in space and have access to ridiculously advanced levels of engineering technology, then a ring-shaped structure is not the worst idea in the world. While I can think of a lot of better ways to do it I can’t think of any reason why a ring wouldn’t work.

On the face of it setting Halo on a ringworld isn’t so terribly unscientific, then. They’d work as space habitats. But there are two problems with the implementation of ringworlds as seen in Halo. The first is rather prosaic: even the backwards human race is shown to have some form of artificial gravity system functioning on all of its spaceships. If you have artificial gravity then the primary – indeed the only – reason you would build your space habitat in the shape of a ring is negated; access to artificial gravity technology means that you no longer need to spin something to get the things on its inside surface to stay on, and so the question arises of why the hell you did that in the first place.

The second problem partially deals with the first, in that we discover during the course of the first game that the Halos aren’t actually intended to be space habitats at all. Instead the Halos are ancient superweapons designed to wipe out all sentient life within a large radius (I think a range of tens of thousands of light years is mentioned in the first game, with a network of seven Halos being enough to wipe clean the entire galaxy). Now, maybe the Halos weren’t built in a ring shape because the builders wanted people to live there. Maybe they have to be ring-shaped in order to carry out their function of galaxy-wide genocide. Who knows how these things work. Unfortunately this theory is somewhat sabotaged by the fact that there is a working biosphere on the inside surface of the Halo that is capable of supporting life, which would require the builders of Halo to go to a not inconsiderable amount of extra effort to get it all to work. If Halo is not supposed to be a space habitat then why the hell does it resemble one so exactly?

Of course the answer is that a ringworld is a pretty striking setting for an FPS which certainly seems to have done Halo no harm whatsoever; nobody who played it is going to forget booting it up for the first time and seeing the world curving up over their heads. That’s fine. The plot of Halo isn’t especially coherent anyway, so some inconsistency over what exactly the Halos are for versus how they’re designed is to be expected. However, the question did get me thinking as to what other useful things could you do with a ring-shaped megastructure. The resulting list was a fairly short one, consisting as it did of a single item: energy gathering via Dyson structures.

If you read or watch sci-fi at all you’ve probably heard of the Dyson sphere concept, at least in passing. A Dyson sphere is a shell of matter constructed around a star in order to maximise the amount of energy you can harvest from that star. Make the shell dense enough and there’d be practically no wastage; you’d  be able to gather 100% of the star’s energy output, which is a truly ludicrous amount of power. After the shell harvests all this power it would then be transmitted elsewhere so that the civilization that built the shell could do something useful with it.

Some misconceptions about the Dyson “sphere”: that it is a solid object, and that it has to take the shape of a sphere. A lot of sci-fi writers made the mistake of having their Dyson spheres be solid shells of matter enclosing their parent star. This is stupid for several reasons; if we’re considering structures on this scale we have to assume that the technology would exist to make the shell solid,  but a solid shell would be gravitationally neutral in relation to its parent star since it would envelope it uniformly at a constant distance. Each part of the shell would cancel out another part of the shell, which raises the interesting hazard of having the parent star drift into the side of the shell (or vice versa) since neither of them is gravitationally stable compared to the other. There’s also the minor niggle that there might not actually be enough construction material present within the star’s solar system in order to actually make a solid shell.

So solid Dyson spheres truly are science fiction, with no possibility that even a hyper-advanced race would be able to make one without circumventing a fair number of the laws of physics. Happily for us they are just a corruption of Freeman Dyson’s original idea, which was to have an orbiting array of satellites gobbling up a star’s energy output. While it would still be a massive engineering project this is much more plausible, and while not having a solid structure means the shell is going to be less than 100% efficient it does have the advantage that you can start the shell simple and work up from there. The simplest form of the shell is – you guessed it – a ring-shaped array of satellites all orbiting the parent star on the same plane. Scaling up would result in multiple interconnecting rings with very complex orbital characteristics, but if somebody could sit down and work out the maths there’s no real reason why it couldn’t be done.

Which does rather beg the question: why would you want to?

The answer to this is somewhat speculative and has to do with another commonly-referenced sci-fi concept called the Kardashev scale. The Kardashev scale isn’t any kind of absolute measure, but instead functions kind of like the Drake equation in that it’s supposed to jog us out of our stolid, Earth-based ways of thinking: assuming most technological barriers could eventually be overcome, then what would be the major limiting factor on a civilization’s progress? The answer is energy, and the Kardashev scale attempts to class a given civilization’s level of technological advancement by the quantity of energy it can harness/has access to. The scale as originally formulated by Kardashev goes like this:

• Type I Civilizations have the capability to utilise the entirety of the energy resources provided by their home planet.

• Type II Civilizations have progressed further and are capable of tapping into all or most of the energy generated by their parent star.

• Type III Civilizations have progressed furthest, and have found a way to harness the energy output of an entire galaxy.

Now, clearly that’s not remotely scientific in the least, and the concept of a Type III civilization in particular boggles the mind; we’re talking about completely utilising the energy of at least a hundred billion stars simply to service the needs of your civilization. Our own civilization can only make use of a fraction of the energy provided by the Earth – it doesn’t even rank as a Type I on the Kardashev scale — and from there it’s very difficult to imagine what the hell you’d need so much energy for. But that’s the point in the scale. It’s supposed to get us thinking about how large a civilization could grow if it were unconstrained by 20^th – now 21^st – century technology and modes of thinking.

It’s a fair bet humanity will make it to Type I status eventually, since this roughly corresponds to fusion power, nanotechnological capability and all that other World of Tomorrow stuff that never quite seems to turn up. We can just about envisage a Type II civilization, as while the idea of building rings of energy-gathering satellites around the Sun is quite outlandish it isn’t that infeasible either; we probably will be able to do that at some point if we don’t kill ourselves off through some kind of horrible climate catastrophe/Malthusian apocalypse. The sort of things a Type III civilization would get up to, on the other hand, are very firmly beyond our technological horizon, and the Kardashev scale is the only thing that’s really punched through that barrier to give us some idea of the scale and capability that a true far future civilization might eventually possess. It’s also acted as an enabler for dozens of hack sci-fi writers to produce oodles and oodles of poorly-formatted bollocks¹, but then no good idea ever went unsullied by that particular fraternity.

Anyway, Kardashev is one of those abstract things that’s supposed to drive other more scientific ideas, and this is something that it most certainly has succeeded in doing. You go to the Wikipedia page on the subject and you’ll find a dozen ways of reclassifying, improving on or extending the scale to incorporate this case or that case, but the sole warning on how seriously it should be taken is the line towards the end which states

It has been argued that, because we cannot understand advanced civilizations, we cannot predict their behavior. Thus the Kardashev scale may not be relevant or useful for classifying extraterrestrial civilizations.

I’d go farther than that, in that the Kardashev scale may not be that useful for classifying advanced human ones either. Most attempts to predict the future even fifty years down the line end up being laughable in hindsight, and it only gets worse as you get further and further away from our modern technological touchstones, so all this stuff I just said about ringworlds and Dyson spheres will probably end up being a load of old balls as well. Even scientists like to dream sometimes, though, and since using structures like these to gather practically unlimited quantities of power that are free for the taking would probably lead to post-scarcity societies like those seen in Star Trek and the Culture novels I’d say it’s a dream worth holding on to.

The post With This Ringworld I… Do What, Exactly? appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Ah, SMAC, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri is spoken of in hushed, reverent tones amongst a certain segment of the 4X gaming community, and for good reason: if you happen to like sci-fi, like I do, it is hands-down the best Civ-a-like game ever released. This isn’t down to how it plays, particularly, since if you suck away the sci-fi coating what you’ll find inside looks very much like Civilization 2 in terms of mechanics. Firaxis could have done much worse than base their game on Civ 2, but aside from a few bolted-on additions like the unit workshop and the social engineering interface replacing static forms of government, Alpha Centauri didn’t make any groundbreaking changes to the basic formula. What it did do was seamlessly weave that formula into a coherent sci-fi universe in a way that no other game has before or since.

The premise of the game is that a near-future humanity, locked in its final death throes, has built and launched a massive colonisation spaceship towards the Alpha Centauri trinary star system in the hopes of preserving something of the human race. Just as the ship – the ironically-named Unity — comes to the end of its decades long journey and approaches the Alpha Centauri system, factional infighting amongst the ship’s crew comes to a head and the Unity is sabotaged. Each faction escapes the ship in a landing craft and heads on down to the surface of the only inhabitable planet in the system. Displaying even less imagination than I do when it comes to naming things, the colonists dub their new home “Planet” and start scrabbling together the basic niceties required to start rebuilding human civilisation.

But not human civilisation as we know it. The different factions that formed on the Unity did not do so along national or organisational lines; instead they sprang up around charismatic leaders with their own personal ideologies about how future society should be run. This gives each of the seven factions a distinct thematic flavour in the way they play. Ironically for a big lefty like myself I’ve always been partial to Nwabudike Morgan’s ultra-capitalist settlements, where the enormous production outputs come at a cost of massive ecological damage and an increased upkeep cost due to pampered Morganite workers demanding the most opulent and wasteful settlements possible. The antithesis of the Morganites is Chairman Yang’s Human Hive, a totalitarian nightmare that combines the most extreme aspects of communism and fascism to great effect, where the population lives and works crammed into gigantic underground settlements that are basically massively upscaled versions of ant colonies. Then there’s Deidre Skye’s Gaian society, who aren’t your typical treehuggers because they have absolutely no qualms about siccing tame brain-devouring mindworms on you if you piss them off. Prokhor Zakharov’s University, Miriam Godwinson’s Believers, even Commissioner Pravin Lal’s wishy-washy remnant of the UN Peacekeeping forces – they all serve to give the opposing factions a level of personality above and beyond “Montuzema is a dick”.

The different factions are just one part of the rich background tapestry woven with loving care by Firaxis. They provide a political pretext for all the plotting and wars that take place before and after Planetfall, but the terraforming of Planet itself is also one of the key features of the game. Civilization games have always let you improve the areas around your cities, and the early ones hit you with nasty pollution penalties if you overexploited the land, but Alpha Centauri is the only one that I’m aware of that took it from being a major element of the gameplay to possibly the central tenet of the game. It’s to be expected given that the colonisation of an alien world would require a level of adaptation of the surrounding environment far above and beyond irrigating a few fields with water from a nearby river and calling it a day, but what strikes me about the terraforming in Alpha Centauri is the lengths Firaxis went to to create the illusion of an actual functioning ecology that you were disrupting with your “improvements”. Unless you take social engineering traits that reduce your ecological impact on Planet, screwing with it in a big way can have very unpleasant consequences because it is a living system and it will try to defend itself by zerging your bases with huge mindworm boils or reclaiming developed land by force-growing impenetrable fungus forests (thus incidentally providing a plausible rationale for the game’s barbarian units).

And of course because this is the future, and because you have magic future technology, the scale of the changes you can make dwarfs anything else seen in a 4X. The one thing that has always stuck with me are the Mohole mines; enormous holes bored all the way down to the bottom of Planet’s crust to extract valuable minerals that incidentally also happen to release vast amounts of heat from the planetary interior. Not only is this going to piss off the indigenous flora and fauna, but if you don’t want the sea levels to start rising you’ll have to counterbalance this extra heat with an artificial cooling mechanism like an enormous solar shade launched into space. It’s still all very simplified – mostly so that the player actually has a chance of understanding it – but it is nevertheless a system. It has domino effects that can lead to unintended consequences. Your ability to tamper with this system grows as you discover increasingly exotic future technology, as does the scale of the risk and the rewards.

Technology! I could genuinely write a short thesis just on how amazing Alpha Centauri’s technology tree is. Humanity starts out on Planet with only the most basic of resources, barely subsisting until you complete the first couple of tiers of the tech tree which focus on adapting to the new environment and recreating a functioning society out of nothing, as well as perfecting a few avenues of science that are works in progress today (string theory, anyone)? Researching these techs gives you the social engineering options, terraforming methods and base facilities to go beyond simple survival; improvement promotes growth and growth permits a larger industrial and scientific base, allowing you to tackle the near-future stuff like fusion power, mastering the quantum states problem inherent in photons and waves, and also the small matter of growing the industrial base to the point where you can start launching stuff back up into space again. And then after this intermediary stage comes the far-future stuff: stasis fields, unified field theory, controlled singularities and so on.

What I like about the Alpha Centauri tech tree isn’t just the way it flows smoothly from survival to prosperity to becoming a Kardashev Type I civilization, which is basically sci-fi catnip as far as I’m concerned. No, it’s the plausibility of the whole thing. Rather than somebody going “Right, we need a technology that will confer game ability X, let’s make something up,” this thing has instead been written by people who have at least a basic understanding of where science is likely to be going over the next few centuries. It gets rather speculative towards the end, and the timescale is rather compressed (if you ask me) in order to fit with the game’s one year per turn mechanic, but the underlying structure of it is perfectly sound. It first tackles the problems confronting scientists now, moves on to the things we think we might be able to do if we ever did solve those problems, and wisely leaves the hand-wavy space magic stuff towards the very end of the tree where it can’t concretely be ruled out because of all this other more believable tech that’s been researched. If you asked me for a roadmap of scientific progress over the next two centuries I’d probably just hand you Alpha Centauri’s tech tree. It’s like somebody managed to recreate the Civilization tech tree without the benefit of having actually had it happen so they know how it all turned out. Incredible.

Finally there’s the little atmosphere-building touches. The Secret Project (read World Wonder) movies have yet to be bettered, as far as I’m concerned. They’re not bombastic CGI experiences meant to reward the player for finishing the wonder; instead they’re far subtler pieces of work that, a lot of the time, actually give you second thoughts about whether or not the all-seeing AI policeman you just built was really a good idea. They rely on a lot of real-life camera footage that can occasionally make for genuinely uncomfortable viewing, and many of them focus on technological advance as a double-edged sword as we grow further apart from our squishy biological origins, in particular this one which is the only work of fiction I’m aware of to mention the probable downside of a “teleportation” device. The various quotes from faction leaders and other sources are scattered throughout the game, playing whenever you discover a technology or build a base facility for the first time, and these too tend towards being thought-provoking rather than the current trend of a cool/ironic one-liner about how awesome the thing you just researched is. As you play the game you’re getting this constant commentary that tells you about the world and also hints at the deeper sociological and ideological struggles that are going on behind the scenes as humanity struggles to adapt to an uncertain future on an alien planet.

I think limiting myself to just talking about Alpha Centauri’s world-building and atmosphere was a wise move, otherwise I could probably go on for ever. It’s a sci-fi 4X so it has to pay more attention to that side of things in order to get you invested in its universe, but what I really like about Alpha Centauri – and the thing that makes it unique, as far as I know – is how utterly the developers embraced the idea and wove it into the fundamental DNA of the gameplay. Galactic Civilizations 2 failed at building any sort of believable world whatsoever. Master of Orion 2 succeeded, which one of the reasons it’s so good, but it always treated it in a rather space opera-ish fashion as rather incidental to the actual process of playing the game. Alpha Centauri on the other hand doesn’t use a sci-fi universe to serve gameplay goals; rather, it is a sci-fi universe from top to bottom, and if you know nothing about planetary science and ecology you could do a hell of a lot worse for an education than playing a couple of games of SMAC on a medium difficulty setting. The base game is even on GoG now, look. Go and play it.

(Also you can occasionally throw out quotes from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathrustra thanks to having heard them so many times in the datalinks. Your friends will be impressed to bits, I promise you.)

The post In Praise Of: Alpha Centauri. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.