Word: simearth
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Wright says he has sold over 50,000 copies of SimAnt, which was released by the Maxis software company last November as the successor to best-selling SimCity and SimEarth...
...name of this computer exercise is SimEarth -- The Living Planet, a new $69.95 disk for Macintosh computers that offers something no other program can. It not only shows how life may have evolved on earth, but it also let me do the one thing I've always wanted to do: play...
...SimEarth, as in the real world, the great natural processes that shape the environment -- volcanoes, erosion, continental drift -- interact with one another. Climate, vegetation and geology are represented as interrelated systems, each with controls that can be adjusted. Animals multiplying too fast? Just crank down the reproduction dial. Tired of waiting for evolution to work its wonders? Just speed up the mutation rate. Earth getting too hot for its own good? Just turn off the greenhouse effect...
...most controversial aspect of the SimEarth model may be its reliance on the so-called Gaia hypothesis, a theory of evolution that views the earth as a single organism with various feedback mechanisms to maintain conditions suitable for life. In SimEarth this means that as the heat from the sun increases 25%, as it has during the past few billion years, changes will automatically occur in factors like the rate of cloud formation to keep the surface temperature relatively stable. The feedback loops appear most valuable when they are turned off, as they were when I played in the "hard...
Start with a lump of rock, add some flora and fauna and before you know it, your little planet's growing out of control. With a program called SimEarth, the whole world's in your hands...
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