“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds..” – Carl Sagan

Conway’s Game of Life, or simply the Game of Life, has fascinated me for a long time. There’s an expansive Wikipedia article on this unasuming little game, so I’m not going to go into some of the more Gee Wiz aspects of it, such as how it is Turning complete and you can run the entire game of life within itself. Click the link to find out about that stuff.

I’m going to focus on one thing only, then I’m going to completely blow it all out of proportion and then settle on what I believe is a truth about myself.

The game board and rules of Conway’s Game of Life, and from here on out I’m going to refer to it as CGoL, are simple.

You have a grid of squares, of any size, that doesn’t matter. This is an infinite two dimensional grid. The top wraps around to the bottom, the left side wraps around to the right, and vice versa. Each square on the grid has two states, alive (filled), or dead (empty). This makes up the CGoL universe.

There are 4 rules in the CGoL universe:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

You can start a game of CGoL with randomness or you can start with a blank universe and fill/draw the squares yourself, but I like to start with a random universe.

Here’s an example using a version for Linux available on Flathub.

Playing the game is accomplished by just starting the simulation.

As the simulation runs, the computer calculates each subsequent generation based on the rules and as squares on the grid live or die, patterns begin to emerge from the noise. If you have a universe big enough and watch carefully, you’ll notice something escape clusters of chaos and walk, or glide, across the board.

Meet the glider:

I personally like to refer to it as a walker, but for the sake of standard I’ll call it the glider.

I never focused on the glider much, I was more interested in the fact CGoL seems to mirror our own univrerse and its eventual demise by heat death, as the game winds down to either a sate with no movement whatsoever, or lone oscillations, it seems almost depressingly real that these little dots in the game come to represent our own pale blue dot (Earth) and it’s place in a universe where we seem to be alone, maybe, maybe not.

I know that CGoL doesn’t quite get to the point of “heat death” as most games settle out with at least some filled squares, but it’s shockingly prophetic regardless.

While letting the game run in the background, and looking at the gliders that would occasionally emerge, I decided to conduct a little experiment.

I ran a game and let it settle to a state where it only has oscillators and dots, also known as still lifes.

I then drew three gliders on the board.

I then hit play. The gliders, which can also be called spaceships, began moving down the board and to the right. Where they collided with oscillators or dots. Some chaos sprung forth and eventually the universe settled on a new state, with new dots, and new oscillators.

I had been expecting a whole new level of chaos with new subsequent generations of drama, but it didn’t last long. There’s probably a lesson somewhere in there. But that’s not what drew me towards trying this, and then finally away from it into a realization.

I have to wonder, in that vast space of low gas pressure in between the planets and the stars, the solar systems, nebulae, and galaxies, where the distance to the nearest restroom is measured with scientific notation, where it is extremely cold and very, very empty, does our own universe’s little gliders pop into existence to play their own little Game of Life?

Do they collide with each other and then explode into seemingly chaotic patterns? Do they breed new gliders that shoot off into their own unknowns? Personally, I don’t think so. Though if it did, we’d probably never know.

Is it more likely that our solar system is one of those chaotic masses of patterns, a huge oscillator? Are we, or are our descendents destined to be the gliders. Will we glide off into the cosmos, where some will die, while others will encounter or create their new and very very wonderful chaos?

I personally think it’s likely that we started out with randomness, a beautiful chaotic randomness where a set of laws dictated how we are now, what we were, and what we will become in the future.

Will we ever know where we came from? At the end of the universe will we settle into still lifes, or oscillators, or both an unmoving snapshot of the final state in this, our own Game of Life. Has the game already ended and is our entire universe just one dot in an even larger Game of Life, stuck in oscillation with other dots? After all, CGoL is Turing complete and can simulate itself. 😉

But really? I don’t know.

I just don’t know.

I am an atheist, and I am totally fine with this.

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” – Carl Sagan