erosiaart opened this issue on Jan 01, 2011 · 25 posts
electroglyph posted Sun, 02 January 2011 at 11:05 AM
God must be the ultimate Brycer.
Just rendering the room I'm sitting in now with simple polygons would choke my machine's memory. The computer I'm typing on has a smooth monitor, but it still would take10-20gb just to model the surfaces. The dust on the screen is composed of thousands of pieces per square mm. It's made of skin, cat hair, and beautiful pollen grains much like your snowflakes. There are probably a few hundred million of these covering the entire monitor. Each individual sunburst of pollen contains the DNA to make it's parent plant fabricated out of millions of atoms. The atoms in turn a built of combinations of hundreds of different protons neutrons and electrons. All these are in turn made from different species of quarks. It's assumed that all electrons, neutrons, etc. are the same but I always wondered; We look at dust and see thousands of species. If we were on the scale of dust would we see thousands of species of electrons instead of one?
Say you wanted to model an object in a version of Uber Bryce from the atoms up. It would probably take all the memory in all the computers on the planet. It would take every programmer on earth their entire lifetime just to build the monitor on my desk. Now compare the 1 cubic foot my monitor takes up by the 14billion years at the speed of light hubble has been able to see out into the universe. The numbers get so big you could start typing 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, ..... from now till you die and still never reach it.
How many different snowflakes are there? How many grains of sand? I could spend my whole life trying to form the thought and still fall short. Eventually reason has to step out and faith step in.