Friday 10 October 2008

Pic of the day: Picture continued from yesterday.

Zooming forward

We have finally zoomed all the way out and can see the entire Spore galaxy! It becomes painfully obvious how insignificant my space empire is in the big picture. If not for those flags, I might not even be able to point out the spot.

There are said to be 500 000 stars in the Spore galaxy. Or perhaps it was just 50 000? The human memory has a tendency to exaggerate, but I am not sure quite how human I am anymore. Looking back on the steps we took from my home planet and up to here, it could well be half a million stars out there. I don't know if I am ever going to colonize 50 of those. I still havent, when I write this near the end of the month. This was what I meant by excessively excessive games.

Bhaktivedanta Hindus - possibly all Hindus, I'm not sure - use the word "lila" about their god's activity in the world. The literal meaning of this is "play". If you look up at the Milky Way on a clear winter night, remember that the real galaxy has more than 100 BILLION stars - some say 500 billion, some a trillion, depending on how many small weak stars there are. And here we are, hard at work ruining the one little planet we share. If we succeed, who will know? Perhaps one day a spaceship will fly in low over the desert that was our home and beam up some interesting artifact... like I do in Spore.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps we are the only sentient life form ever in this galaxy. Why not? After all, there are a hundred billion other galaxies. Plenty enough for all.