Ever desired to destroy entire planetary systems?
Now you can, with the online game Super Planet Crash, available (and playable) at http://www.stefanom.org/spc.
You may actually find that building a functioning system is more fun than just provoking celestial catastrophies. And here it’s where your problems start. It looks an easy task, but it’s not. Well, at least if you want to build something packed enough to resemble a real system, or what we think a real system is.
We have an idea precise enough about the birth of the solar system (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfOF0bRBFJ4) – even though discoveries keep adding a few details to this picture. For example, we’ve just found evidence that the Moon is slightly younger than the surroundings, most likely formed by the dramatic impact of an asteroid with a still-forming Earth (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140402-moon-formation-earth-age-space-science).
Moreover, we are aware now that a planetary system can orbit not one but two stars – and that’s good news indeed, because binary or even multiple systems account for more than half of whole stellar population (and maybe more: http://www.space.com/22509-binary-stars.html). Yes, Tatooine was not so far-fetched as it was considered at the beginning (http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-09/kepler-spots-planet-orbiting-two-suns-just-star-wars-tatooine). Another proof, if needed, that sci-fi often gets it right before science discovers it. An inspirational tool – this is what many of us believe about (good) sci-fi.
Back to the game. Developed in a series of different flavours and platforms by Systemic Console at the UC Santa Cruz, “it is used around the world by research groups and classrooms to analyze radial velocity datasets and derive the orbital properties of putative planetary systems. It includes a large array of tools for error estimation, orbital stability, plotting and animation” (From the website: http://www.stefanom.org/systemic).
It has already been used as an educational tool in many universities – MIT and Columbia, just to mention two – and it can get as complex as necessary by adding layers and databases (http://news.ucsc.edu/2014/04/systemic-console.html).
I followed the instructions, installed the Linux version on my Alienware and start gaming.
As shown in the console, I can choose among a variety of celestial objects – from super-earths to gas giants and even smaller types of stars like brown-dwarf. The constraint: 2 AU all in all, with a 1 Au = Distance Sun-Earth. A tiny space indeed.
In just half a hour, I managed to crash a few times before getting, rather humiliated, back to my astrophysics notions to get something stable out of it. (Warmly recommended to sci-fi writers. Don’t even try to put together too many planets in irregular orbits in your books – they won’t last twenty pages, I promise!)
So, at the end, what can be learnt from crashing planets and designing unlikely orbits?
A few things. First of all that, as all good games, this kind of simulations are not just fun, but damn serious, and they are about life and death. They are models of reality, sometimes alternate versions, and they always help players understand and clarify what it is about. Even though in this specific case they can’t be used as a decision making tool (we are not Gods, after all, and we don’t control creation) they can test nonetheless our own ability to comprehend the universe around. In a far future, when humans will live in space, they will maybe give us the opportunity of building artificial systems and orbiting – stable – colonies like in many sci-fi scenarios (http://io9.com/5702556/space-colonization-in-three-histories-of-the-future).
Consider my own results, I hope for the greater good I never get called for this job, in this life or in another…