Notes: Universal Motion

Another important aspect to this game is making stuff move. So, in order to make it believable motion and satisfy my perfectionist urges, here's the notes I've taken on the relative motions of the Universe.

Motion

First, the relationship between the planet and it's moon. The moon orbits around the planet - clear enough. It is also "tidally locked" to a planet, which means the same face is always showing to the planet, with a few exceptions. This is also less the case the further a moon is away from the planet. Which means the moon spins on it's axis the opposite of what the Earth spins on, to keep the same face pointed towards the planet. This face is also the "heavier" side of the moon, which leaves interesting possibilities in our project as to the link between planets and moons.

Now, the motion of planets. The planets of the solar system work as follows:

Mercury:
~0.4x the size of Earth
orbits once every 88 days (47.87 km/s)
rotates once every 59 days (10.892 km/h)

Venus:
~0.9x the size of Earth
orbits once every 225 days (35.02 km/s)
rotates once every 243 days (6.52 km/h)

Mars:
~0.5x the size of the Earth
orbits once every 687 days (24.077 km/s)
rotates once every 24 hours and 40 minutes (868.22 km/h)

Jupiter:
~11x the size of Earth
orbits once every 4335 days (13.07 km/s)
rotates once every 10 hours (45,300 km/h)

Saturn:
~9x the size of Earth
orbits once every 10823 days (9.69 km/s)
rotates once every 10 hours and 32 minutes (35,500 km/h)

Uranus:
~4x the size of Earth
orbits once every 30799 days (6.81 km/s)
rotates once every 17 hours and 14 minutes (9,320 km/h)

Neptune:
~3.8x the size of Earth
orbits once every 60373 days (5.43 km/s)
rotates once every 16 hours and 6 minutes (9,660 km/h)

So, aside from the obvious conclusion that the further the planet is away from the Sun, the longer it takes to orbit, there are a few other observations. Planets tend to get bigger the further away they are from the Sun, although size seems to be mostly determined by their composition. And, planet rotate faster the further away they get from the Sun - due to lesser gravity or the size they achieve, I'm not sure.

Will this affect how we organize our websites? With the example of Slashdot being a Sun, could it mean that it's closest planet will end up the size of Jupiter? Or should we compress it down somehow, much like gravity compresses down planets, or would tampering with the fact that the size of a web page determines the size of the planets cripple the educational aspect somehow?

Source: Various Wikipedia articles.

Notes: Universe Hierarchy

So, the first step to structuring a game based on the final frontier is to understand how the final frontier is structured. So, here are notes I took, trying to understand how the universe is structured.

Hierarchy of the Universe

Now , for the purpose of keeping this somewhat simple, we start on the lowest level of your common moon. The hierarchy goes as such.

Moon --> Planet --> Sun --> Galaxy --> Cluster --> Supercluster

Galactic centers are highly speculative, perhaps full of black holes or larger suns with huge gravitational pull. So stars in a galaxy relate to each other, but have no definitive center like a Sun is to a solar system.

Clusters are a bunch of galaxies that have a common attracting point, and are pretty much moving together through the Universe as it expands. The Milky Way galaxy is part of the "Local Cluster"Again, this common point of attraction is fairly vague, speculated to be dark matter. The cluster does not have a clear orbit like a solar system - as a matter of fact, in approximately 3 billion years our Milky Way galaxy will be crashing into the Andromeda galaxy. Good to know, huh?

Clusters can also be bound together into a Supercluster, as scientists have termed it, but it's not entirely certain that they work like the smaller clusters, so for the sake of this project, we'll ignore superclusters.

So what does this mean for our project? The current plan is to scan the internet and let site with a lot of links rise to be the Suns and maybe more could be changed. Since there is no definitive center for things like galaxies and clusters, having a site "represent it" would be puzzling. So perhaps sites that become Suns merely orbit around the "center" of the galaxy and perhaps group closer or further depending on their relationships - in which case, we may not need to go to a cluster level at all.


Another thought is looking at the spiral structure of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The galaxy has "arms" that spiral outwards from the galactic center. Could websites be organized into arms based on content or amount of links? it's something to think about, because then we wouldn't have to worry about the cluster level at all, and everything could be contained into one spiral galaxy form for exploration.

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