Goose the Blog 2.0

One of my favorite parts of my job is thinking of ways to represent the data I generate that might help people understand it. Maybe one day I'll show some examples.

But, inspired by the picture challenge, I thought I'd put up some visualizations I made several years ago just for fun. They are both SF related, so it ties in with another one of my pathetic hobbies.

I called the first one "Mars Attacks!" Using what is appropriately called a shooting algorithm, I calculated the trajectories of a number of ballistic missiles launched from a Martian battlecruiser in geosynchronous orbit. The plan of attack calls for the missiles to simultaneously impact the largest cities on Earth, or something like that. What was tricky about this is that the targets are moving with respect to the launch point as the Earth spins on its axis. In plotting the trajectory, you also have to be careful not to try to fly a missile through the Earth to get to the other side.

• the missile trajectories and impacts, and the position of the Martian battlecruiser at the time of impact as it continues it's orbit around the Earth from an external position
• same, from the north, directly over the Earth's axis of rotation
  
• same, from the Martian ship's position over the Gulf of Guinea

The next one is an illustration of the Fermi Paradox. Enrico Fermi is reported to have wondered, more or less, "If they are exist, why are they not here?" He thought that if there was an extraterrestrial intelligence that was capable of interstellar travel, then they should already be at Earth - once they started spreading out, the interstellar civilization would grow exponentially until it covered all available stars. The following animation demonstrates this as a single civilization develops the ability and desire to colonize other stars, and then spreads out, virus-like, moving from star to star through a globular cluster of 10,000 suitable stars, about 20,000 light years across. After 30,000 years, approximately 83% of the cluster is colonized and the number of colonized stars begins to plateau after 20,000 years of explosive growth. Only the most inaccessable stars remain un-colonized. Changing the parameters of the simulation (probability of launching a mission, probability of technological collapse, probability of technological bootstrapping, etc.) changes the results. The initial speed of spreading is dependent on the density of nearby stars - if there an too few stars nearby, the older interstellar travellers have a greater odds of dying out before there are new colonies to replace them.

• animation from outside the cluster - green stars are colonized, and white stars are not (790kB)
  
• same as above, but viewed from an observer watching the whole sky from the center of the cluster - this animation uses a simple transform to represent the spherical sky as a flat object (839kB)
  

The animations are avi files and should run in Windows Media Player.

Update: Good timing! April is Math Awareness Month.