Is there TOO much life?

[Turjan]

It's the goal of every space explorer, right? To find another Earth, with trees and oceans and critters...

Or maybe something more exotic, something so alien that it would never have occurred to you to that you'd find life where you did.

I remember in Elite II: Frontier that whenever I found an Earth type world beyond the fringe of explored space I'd land on the planet, have a look around, and make a note of the system and all its planets in a little notebook I kept in the game's box.

Fast forward to Elite Dangerous, and...

Oh look, a planet with life! That's cool.
Wait, what's this next to it - a gas giant that has life too! That's even more cool. Let's try the next system, see what's there...

Hey, another planet with life. Hm.
And more life-bearing gas giants.

This next system, well it has no planets, no life there...let's try the next one.
Four gas giants, that's fancy. Let's see...this one has ammonia based life...so does this one...the third has water based life, and the last one has carbon-ammonia based life.

Hm. Is it just me, or does anyone else think this is a bit overkill?

I thought life would be a rare and precious thing to find, more like it was in Frontier. Shouldn't it be the pinnacle of a long, hard deep space exploration trip to find even ONE Earth-type planet to brag about and sell the data to the big corporations eager to exploit its potential?

For all I know of course, life-bearing planets really are cheap as chips out there...but I personally don't think it adds to the thrill of exploration ingame if every other system has either a planet with "a human-breathable atmosphere and indigenous life" or a "gas giant with ammonia based life".

So what do you reckon, Commanders? Is there too much life in the E-D Milky Way to be remotely credible? And would you perhaps like to see the number of Earth-type planets cut, and have a bigger exploration payout granted when an Earth planet system is actually found?

 

[Iskariot]

Your critique is something to consider, but perhaps FD has inside information .
I suppose it will be much more difficult to discover higher lifeforms, and discovering intelligent life will be neigh impossible.

 

[TheProdigy]

Well apparently life is supposed to be extremely common in the universe.

 

[Morbad]

Hm. Is it just me, or does anyone else think this is a bit overkill?

I will let you know if I think it's overkill or not once humanity has explored enough of the galaxy to have the foggiest clue as to how common or not life actually is.

As it stands, neither you nor I (and I'm a lab tech in an astrobiology program married to a woman with doctorates in planetary science and biology) have any factual ground to say the ED prevalence is too prevalent.

 

[JeffRyan]

I will let you know if I think it's overkill or not once humanity has explored enough of the galaxy to have the foggiest clue as to how common or not life actually is.

As it stands, neither you nor I (and I'm a lab tech in an astrobiology program married to a woman with doctorates in planetary science and biology) have any factual ground to say the ED prevalence is too prevalent.

We know one solar system well. That solar system has life. Ergo ALL solar systems have life.

(PS. I know the logical fallacy there, just leg-pulling.... For now).

 

[Zenicetus]

I think it's okay... maybe a wee bit too abundant, but if they're going to err on one side or the other of a reality we don't really know about yet, I'd like it to be on the abundant side.

For one thing, it will affect planet landings later on, and I'm interested in seeing what they do with alien life. A steady stream of lifeless rocks won't be much fun to land on, as much as it might actually be what it's like out there. Although, I hope it's mostly the less developed kind like lichen on rocks, algae-covered seas, the occasional analog to trees and invertebrates. Aside from the Thargoids, it would be nice to see life somewhat plentiful but not terribly advanced.

Lots of dead civilizations and artifacts though, because the timescale of the Galaxy favors rapid rise to civilization and then collapse.

 

[Gibbeth]

It's already been said that ED sacrifices reality when playability will benefit more. I think this is one of those cases. More worlds to explore that aren't barren wastelands benefits everyone.

 

[Gibbonici]

I guess most of the life we're discovering isn't much more than microbial.

 

[trekman]

Finding life on alien planets is one thing. Finding sentient intelligent life is quite another thing altogether. In a galaxy containing approximately 400 billion stars I would like to think that there is some other intelligent life forms. I don't think the game should have life on every planet and I don't think it will. Nor am I suggesting that there should be thousands of intelligent lifeforms but finding say 2 or 3 dozen scattered across the milky way to interact with would be nice. I think most of the life that we will encounter in the game initially anyway will be animal based and there will be very few humanoid type species and I'm fine with that.

 

[Turjan]

Part of my worry does actually stem from concerns for the future planetary landings aspect.

We all want to see weird alien worlds full of equally weird alien critters, but how much variation is there likely to be in the procedural generation of such beasties before they start to become generic?

From a purely gameplay perspective, I'd personally get more satisfaction from visiting a thousand star systems and seeing just a handful of wildly different, very memorable aliens than travelling through a mere hundred systems and seeing several dozen similar critters that quickly begin to blur one into another.

Statistically of course, most of what we're likely to meet will be little green slime rather than little green men anyway, and one slimeworld would indeed look much like another, so I'd not really mind a lot of life if the majority of it was just ooze. But I feel that in order to prolong the game's interest and ensure there's always that drive to push just one system further out, the really cool funky lifeforms should necessarily be rare.

But if life is going to be everywhere...at least let us harvest it from a gas giant's atmosphere with a slime sccop and sell it as space algae

 

[Ʃsh]

There are a lot of microbial life gas giants, which to a degree might hint that at one point we may be able to "scoop" off algae to sell off for a profit. I have yet to personally find an earth-like planet, though I haven't been looking, however from what I've heard, they are mostly savage worls with only basic fauna/flora kindof like earth 60+ million years ago. That being said, those planets would likely not be all too profitable, simply bumping up their discovery value by a bit. HOWEVER, sentient life isn't exactly abundant, but there are other space faring species, though not at all as widespread as humanity is, atleast in this neck of the woods. If you read up on lore, you'll find that The Empire was actually first condemned by the federation for terraforming a planet and driving an indigenouse population to extinction. There is no mention of the physical characteristics of that species, or really any information at all, however it does continue to hint that the empire went on to do this to many other worlds.

On a side note, the only known space faring race (to my knowledge) are the Thargoids, an insect-like species... Which are ofcourse EBIL!!!

 

[Zenicetus]

Part of my worry does actually stem from concerns for the future planetary landings aspect.

We all want to see weird alien worlds full of equally weird alien critters, but how much variation is there likely to be in the procedural generation of such beasties before they start to become generic?

From a purely gameplay perspective, I'd personally get more satisfaction from visiting a thousand star systems and seeing just a handful of wildly different, very memorable aliens than travelling through a mere hundred systems and seeing several dozen similar critters that quickly begin to blur one into another.

I agree that's a concern, especially with procedurally generated systems. I think the answer might be that we're not going to be landing on just any planet.

If it's a "walking around" first person thing, then that automatically filters out planets with gravity too far from Earth mass. I don't see us walking around in exoskeletons for high-G worlds... maybe for a much later expansion, but not the first one. Earth-normal gravity, more or less, is a narrow range of planets where they have to generate lifeforms to see up close. And for the smaller and larger mass planets, we'll skim the surface with our ships and investigate lifeforms from a distance, because it's not a good place to take a stroll.

 

[Lost Cipher]

I can't speak to professional degrees or interest, only personal.

Now as far as we know from the study of the solar system, there are lots of places close to home that could have been teeming with life. Lake beds on Mars point to water, one point Venus was probably like Earth a long time ago, etc... But the big clincher for many researchers and institutions, will be when/if we go fishing on Europa. Through extremophiles we have learned that life can thrive in the harshest of conditions. And of course finally, or firstly depending on how you look at it, once life springs forth... evolution is the most powerful force in the universe.

So are we alone, No. Will we get together for tea and crumpets... that all depends.



p.s. Game wise in this regards, I am not too worried. As long as it's interesting and fun.

 

[Hellhawk666]

...at least let us harvest it from a gas giant's atmosphere with a slime sccop and sell it as space algae

NOT THE GREEN SLIME!!!!

[video=youtube;0HJlJL6m4aU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HJlJL6m4aU[/video]

... wait for the song :biggrin:

 

[Mephane]

I guess most of the life we're discovering isn't much more than microbial.

That and a lot of life-bearing planets are actually terraformed, it even says so in the text description.

 

[Defacto]

Groombridge 1618 actually has three life-bearing rock planets, of which only one is terraformed.
I'm not sure if the problem is the frequency of life, though. I think that when the Stellar forge generates a planet that can support life, life will appear there. Maybe what we need is more factors that can make a planet into a venus-like hellhole. Many of the planets that are generated seems to be pretty pleasant as long as they are at the right distance from the star and large enough to mantain an atmosphere.

Also, I would really like if we mortal non-devs would get to know more about how the stellar forge operates, because I am really itnerested in procedural world-building.

 

[JosiahD]

I'm not fussed and voted accordingly. Having a lot of life-bearing planets is fine as most will be 'primitive' lifeforms anyway I would expect. Now if there was 'intelligent' and technologically developed indigenous life around every corner that would be another matter I reckon.....

 

[Noogillim]

When you bump into the Thargons let me know

 

[Turjan]

I agree that's a concern, especially with procedurally generated systems. I think the answer might be that we're not going to be landing on just any planet.

If it's a "walking around" first person thing, then that automatically filters out planets with gravity too far from Earth mass. I don't see us walking around in exoskeletons for high-G worlds... maybe for a much later expansion, but not the first one. Earth-normal gravity, more or less, is a narrow range of planets where they have to generate lifeforms to see up close. And for the smaller and larger mass planets, we'll skim the surface with our ships and investigate lifeforms from a distance, because it's not a good place to take a stroll.

Good point, that's certainly true - anything over about 2G is going to be a major headache for the devs to plan for in terms of landing. There's no "anti-gravity" technology of any kind in Elite lore, so there'd be no way to mitigate any effects of high gravity on human beings. And then there's the matter of atmospheric pressure. The majority of "human-breathable" worlds I've seen have several atmospheres pressure or more, and while such worlds could theoretically support human life, you'd need to acclimatise in a very hi-tech hyperbaric chamber first before even setting foot on such a world. The pilot suit we get to wear in our ships just ain't going to cut it.

(btw, add to that the fact most of those high atmosphere worlds also have the wrong composition of other gases, and you have an atmosphere that's toxic to anything that breathes at all...but that's a different topic, maybe for another thread)

Groombridge 1618 actually has three life-bearing rock planets, of which only one is terraformed.
I'm not sure if the problem is the frequency of life, though. I think that when the Stellar forge generates a planet that can support life, life will appear there. Maybe what we need is more factors that can make a planet into a venus-like hellhole. Many of the planets that are generated seems to be pretty pleasant as long as they are at the right distance from the star and large enough to mantain an atmosphere.

Also, I would really like if we mortal non-devs would get to know more about how the stellar forge operates, because I am really itnerested in procedural world-building.

I agree entirely - I'd love to know a little more about the life criteria of the stellar forge! I recently started looking into exactly what kind of parameters could support human life, and was quite surprised at some of the extremes. It would be interesting to see how E-D's algorithms decide what works and what doesn't.

But your other point is the kicker for me - I think you're bang on right there. When the stellar forge produces a world that COULD support life, it automatically concludes that life has indeed developed there.

I'm wondering if this might have something to do with oxygen.

The presence of oxygen in an atmosphere is a very good indicator of life...if we use Earth thinking, because almost all the oxygen in our atmosphere came from photosynthesis. If the planet-generating algorithms do use oxygen in that way, it would explain a lot : if the program generates a planet with oxygen it might then automatically also flag it as being life-bearing.

However, life isn't the only way oxygen can be present in an atmosphere!

Short of it is, there's no hard and fast set of observable parameters that conclusively says "this atmosphere means there's life".

 

[Ttaskmaster]

No different to explorers back in history seeking new land to colonise.
If you think about it, corporations in the 3300s will likely want huge swathes of land, perhaps entire planets, upon which to build their spaceship factories and everything. So finding a new bit of real estate will be worth loads of cash to them, even if they have to go terraform it first.