It’s something that would probably need addressing pretty soon across all places where it may be applied. It’s important to be consistent for changes this massive as soon as we are able to.
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I see. Is this planned to happen before 0.8.1 releases?
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Personally not sure. Macroscopic as a stage is definitely concrete conceptually, but the actual work to rename it everywhere it is seen (which is a lot of busy work) depends on Hh’s plans.
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Depends on if anyone is willing to help me but, I’ll probably do the rename tomorrow as it’ll take a few hours, I think.
Actually, I’ll create the macroscopic forum category now so if someone wants to help (and has high enough trust level), they can move threads that aren’t related to the multicellular stage anymore from this category to that.
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There aren’t that many threads in the multicellular category, so this shouldn’t be too hard or time-consuming…
I think Macroscopic fits perfectly as the stage name. The only problem I can think of is that the organism’s starting scale might not necessarily be macroscopic. I mean, there are some very tiny bugs out there* - do you fall out of the Macroscopic stage if you’re literally microscopic but otherwise fit with the mechanics?
*I am mentally envisioning those tiny red ants that look more like grains of dust. Technically not microscopic, I think, since you can see them with an unaltered eye.
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Fairyflies are itty bitty, they, however, aren’t macroscopic stage, they’re in aware stage. I’d say you couldn’t shrink down much until you have enough of a brain that you’re using aware stage editors and stuff.
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Isn’t aware and macroscopic editor supposed to be pretty much the same?
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yeah, but if you shrank too much your macroscopic editor would make sense to be placing individual cells. That’s multicellular.
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Yes, but pretty sure it was said that going back stages in certain stages won’t be possible…
Another name could be sessile stage. The only reason to have a nervous system is moving your body.
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You can also you see to detect signals I guess… But macroscopic won’t be all about “sessile” organisms.
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Jellyfish and comb jellys are reasonably macroscopic, their nervous system are utterly pathetic, and they can move about. If that’s too much aware for you, ig, but I think it works okay.
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Aware already has set-in-stone boundaries of requiring a “brain structure”.
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Ediacran (635 million years ago) is when macroscopic stage begins. I don’t know if there were macroscopic species beforehand. Cambrian (541 million years ago) is when the aware stage begins. This is a very short window of time. Macroscopic would be a stage primarily for trees and mushrooms/decomposers. If you’re an animal, you wouldn’t remain on that stage for long.
Cell and multicell: 3500 million years
Macroscopic: 94 million years for animals, 635 million years for plants
Aware : 541 million years
Awakening: 70 thousand years
Society: 10 thousand years
Industrial: 500 years
Space: 1000 years?
If I google “jellyfish evolved when” it again says cambrian.
Macroscopic stage lasts 5,7 times shorter than aware. It’s not just the early version of aware stage where you still move around but have a small brain or something. Even jellyfish are contemporary with the… um… worms… probably.
Think about it. Lets say you want to be a macroscopic. You merge a few cells. What happens?
You need to move around. You can use cillia or flagella. But if you get too large, these can’t move you anymore.
Also, you’d get too heavy. You’d sink to the bottom of the sea, and you’d need to become an ediacran biota. Something like a starfish. Or a coral.
To move macroscopically, you need to have muscles and limbs and neurons. But to have muscles and those stuff, you are already supposed to be macroscopic. Its a chicken and egg problem. You are already supposed to have different types of tissues. You should be experimenting with hox genes. You can’t decide to merge with your few microbe buddies and say, you be the muscle, you be there, you go over there
You can’t keep the lump you made floating in the water. There are two options. You either need to make it so light that it swims like a portugese man o war, which never happened before, except one species called the portugese man o war, the salty water can dry under the sun and damage your tissues
Or you need to make it denser. You would chose this option. There is already lots of glucose on the see floor. The marine snow forms the microbial mat. The next step would be movement. You would evolve something like a snail or a worm. Eat the mat as you move over it. And sometimes dig.
Or, you can make your sperm do the evolving for you. You can be a coral, and once you master how to have different types of tissues, you can let your sperms have active swimming in the water, multicellulary, with limbs and stuff. They would become sessile after mating. You can then ditch the sessile part of your lifecycle, and just live like a sperm, I mean, fish. Or jellyfish.
If you are a ground dweller, a benthic organism, you can notice that you can eat the species that are still sessile. When species start moving, this would cause a lot of the sessile one to go extinct. And to move you need a neuron. Neurons and muscle cells are similar. As far as I remember, they evolved at a similar time. When I google it, one result says " Interestingly, muscle cells appeared to have evolved in parallel with neurons, with smooth muscles appearing before striated muscles." Early evolution of neurons So we can say
Macroscopic sessile => No movement, Macroscopic aware => Movement
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Comb jellies can still move somewhat with their cilia, but otherwise yes.
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You never have to leave a stage. Sponges and jellys (not necessarily jellyfish, those are a Cambrian animal) and Placozoans and other animals are still in macroscopic to this very day. Many of them are motile, many aren’t. The player should leave this stage within 1-3 hundred million years or the AI will overtake them and they’ll be doomed, but that’s reasonable. Aditionally:
Heh? We’ve been using fire for well over a million years, I’d say that’s a much better cutoff for awakening than, what I can only assume, is the Toba Supervocano crushing our genetic diversity. That was a random freak occurrence that only happened on earth, other planets have no such issues. If you’re going by our species it’d be somewhere around 200,000 years.
True, that is the most common estimate, but it’s also the most conservative estimate. The other common estimates tend towards them being closer to 700 million years old, which makes them early Ediacaran animals, and comb jellies are often argued to be the oldest or second oldest form of specialized animal life after sponges, which are 800 million years old!
The worms they were contemporary with had no true brain. They were often just flat sheets of cells with a hole through them for eating.
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Comb jellies still have muscles and a nervous system, and they evolved 525 million years ago, during the cambrian. Ctenophora - Wikipedia
If they didn’t had benthic origins, they could have evolved before the ediacran explosion. The ediacran started when the oxygen levels rose so much that even the sea floor had enough oxygen, therefore cells in the sea floor could become macroscopic Neoproterozoic oxygenation event - Wikipedia
Normally, as the marine snow is sinking, the microbes eat it, which leads them to consuming the oxygen around them. When the oxygen runs out, they can’t digest anymore, so they would need to do anaerobic respiration, which doesn’t give much energy, they can’t be multicellular. If the oxygen levels are low, only the top portion of the ocean would be oxygenated. Oxygen needs to reach the bottom of the sea.
The boring billion lasted so long. It had oxygen, great oxygenation happened 2400 million years ago, but the ediacran happened 600 million years ago. During this interval, macroscopic life didn’t happen, because I claim that the macroscopic life can only happen on the sea floor, and it has to start off as sessile
Neoprotozoic oxygenation is between between 850 and 540 million years ago. It still holds that no macroscopic species existed before that.
If I need to update numbers, I should place ediacran at 850 million years ago, maybe only the fossils from later periods were discovered. If we say that life appeared 4200 million years ago, then
Cell and multicell: 3350 million years
Macroscopic: 310 million years for animals, 850 million years for plants
Aware : 540 million years
This makes the aware stage only 1,7 times longer than the macroscopic stage, if the cambrian didn’t began earlier as well.
edit: wait. I said Jellyfish are aware. That would make macroscopic stage 50 million years. Uh. Maybe aware should start a bit later than jellyfish. Maybe you need to have an eye or a sensory organ? That would be more aware of its surrounding
They can move back and forth between macroscopic and aware stages. Are there species that are mobile but don’t have neurons or muscles? I assume not controlling where you go could be a problem.
They still need nerve cells to make the muscles contract.
The earliest fossils for macroscopic life is actually from 2100 million years ago, not 850 Francevillian biota - Wikipedia
These species are probably not animals. They convergently evolved macroscopic bodies. They were even digging in the soil. But then they went extinct, probably when the oxygen levels decreased.
Why is there no fossils between 2100 million years ago and 850 million years ago? Why did macroscopic life dissapear, even though there was oxygen in the atmosphere? Whey didn’t it went to land, when the high oxygen period didn’t last sufficiently long enough? Why can’t they become multicellular, above the sea floor?
There are lots of algae. Have you ever thought that, life in sea is the opposite as life on land?
On land, trees constantly try to get longer than each other, becoming more macroscopic. But in water, algae don’t become multicellular. The closest thing to a macroscopic algae is a jellyfish that has photosynthetic symbiotes. And even that isn’t a frequent scene in every ocean. You can already move vertically if you’re in water, you don’t need to be larger.
In the seas, the pressure to become larger every generation, only applies to animals. Big fish eats the small fish. Big worm eats the small worm. You can’t have the fish before the worm, because of the weight, so, until you get a worm, you have a boring billion. Once you get a worm, evolution can progress again. Go to land as soon as you can, that should be the mission, otherwise, it becomes the microscopic era again.
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ehh, barely. think about what your competition is. You can have some comically simple logic: if there isn’t much food, move. There. Done. Also, I think aware starts once your brain thing can make decisions, not once you have a single neuron.
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The reason why they might’ve though that could be because of how macroscopic-aware transistion is handled in the game (or rather, how the two stages are pretty much one in the prototypes).
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