Watch the universe

One persistent, server-side artificial world. Every visitor sees the same universe at the same moment. Two founder populations began on separate islands. Whether they have ever crossed the water between them is shown above, plainly, because it is a real fact about this particular run and not a scripted narrative beat.

You can look around, zoom, follow an individual organism or a lineage, jump between West and East, inspect what an organism has inherited, open the research views, and return to the automatic documentary camera. You cannot control any organism, change the simulation's speed, place or remove material, or otherwise affect what happens next. Nothing in this browser tab reaches back into the simulation, no matter how many people are watching.

Each organism's body is drawn from its own genome - size, leg length, bulk, eye count and colour all come from real inherited genes, so offspring resemble their parents and a lineage has a look. Those particular genes are cosmetic: they change how an organism is drawn, never how it behaves or survives.

The live universe is deliberately paced slowly enough to follow over real time - roughly one simulation tick every five real seconds. That is a choice about wall-clock playback, not a performance limit, and it changes nothing about the physics computed on any given tick: a slower clock and a faster one would produce the same history. Slowing it down means a persistent world with changing terrain can be watched meaningfully across hours or days rather than blurring past.

Beyond the organisms themselves, this ruleset lets the ground change. Worth keeping an eye on: disturbed or freshly dug ground, a shoreline that has moved from where it started, terrain alterations that persist long after whoever made them is gone, patches of ecological recovery on previously bare ground, lineages that have diverged, and routes across the map that were not always passable. None of this is guaranteed to become anything more sophisticated - see Reshaping the world for what is and is not implemented.

A shoreline that has moved has two possible causes, and they are easy to confuse: the waterline itself rises and falls on a slow cycle, quite apart from anything organisms do. How the moving sea works.

Every organism can broadcast one number, and its neighbours can sense it. At close zoom a glyph marks an organism whose emission has just changed band. The five symbols are a display vocabulary chosen by the renderer, identical for every organism and every lineage - they are not a language, the organisms cannot see them, and a lineage cannot acquire symbols of its own. Whether the signalling carries meaning is a measured question with a published criterion, and a result that is not what people expect. Signals without language.

If your connection drops or the server briefly restarts, the view will say so rather than silently freezing on old data. It reconnects on its own and resumes the same running universe: a restart never starts a new one.