Well our presentation for a second round of funding from Greystle finally happened. Only 5 or so months late (oh but they’ve been good months).

We need more horse power and we need it fast. We want the servers to keep Alpha going, but also to take our simulations program to a whole new level.

We were not going to grow just another planet, we were going to grow an entire solar system. Start with just the “star stuff” and see it form a star with an accretion disc. Watch the planets form and jockey for position, watch life occur not just once but perhaps multiple times in multiple places in our new solar system. We’d learn incredible amounts about our own sol system and even about the Milky Way. And we’d stare at the beauty of our comets whizzing by our planets.

Greystle wanted to give us the funding; they were positively excited on that count. They just didn’t want to take the project in the logical direction that we had planed (and documented and charted and diagramed), they wanted to go a different way. A way that kind of freaks me out, though an interesting freak out.

They want to make history diverge. They want to take a snapshot of Alpha, put it on a new server set and run it from the time of the snapshot but with just a modest variation. They then want to see how the two Alphas become different from each other.

They want to see how they diverge, how quickly and how much. They didn’t seem interested in us discussing the lack of real science at play here and how this takes the project from observation to manipulation.

Our project is now taking an almost philosophical path now, where we actively play God. This new direction for the team didn’t go well in the staff meeting, but there was the unspoken understanding that if we didn’t take the money then Alpha itself would be turned off. Then someone said we were taking blood money, but that was met with groans. I can safely say that no one is happy about this.

Though I know I’m not alone in also thinking this will be kind of cool.