Gaseous life

I know that this is veeery far fetched, but how about a species that developed out of a kind of gas and then gained sentience? Could that be possible? If yes, then it would be very exciting to play as.

Reminds me of a doctor who episode i watched, but i would doubt anything like that could develop unless if its atmosphere was thick and large cells grouped together. Even then they wouldn’t be able to achieve sentience in any way i could imagine.

I think it will be highly unlike to be added to the game (if it is it would be heavily non-LAWK territory and also low priority). Maybe someone makes a mod for it. But it’s probably such a huge change that they would be very useful in the team rather than making mods…

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In order for life, especially sentient life to exist, there has to be a balance between chaos and order. This is true on multiple levels:

  1. Maintaining a physical structure that is not too static (you need a metabolism going on) and not too chaotic (in a gas, you can have no controlled reactions).
  2. For information processing, you need something that is not too static (you need to change the states of something to process information) but also not too chaotic (you could not store information long enough)

There is a lot of research in biology, mathematics (artificial life and cellular automatons) and other fields that point to the concept of a “habitable zone” where this balance is in a range so that something resembling life can occur. It also points to water (or fluids with similar features) to be in that range. This is why liquid water is so important in the search for extraterrestrial life.

That said, sentient gas clouds are really far in the realm of science fantasy. I know of no serious research that indicates that a metabolism or some kind of information processing is possible with only gases.

In addition, most of those sentient scifi gases are gas clouds in space. With the low density and therefore no real interaction between the molecules, this seems even more unlikely.

I really enjoy scifi series, movies and books, but there was a notion somewhere, that you want to keep it scientificly accurate when possible.

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what does LAWK stand for when I googled it I got “The act or though of Laughing At White Kids”… and I dont think that is what you meant… or is it :thinking:

At least in the thrive community, LAWK stands for “Life As We Know it”.
LAWK mode would mean that life uses mechanisms we can observe in reality.
Non-LAWK would include concepts that fit more into fantasy as they have not been observed or are extremely unlikely to happen in the real world.

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oh ok thanks
I like my version more

http://thrivegame.wikidot.com/thrive-abbreviations-dictionary

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