Scientists say it took millions of years. Creationists say the whole process lasted a week, plus a leisurely day off.
But now you can whip up an intricately detailed planet in a matter of hours – complete with oceans, mountains, fog, sun and three glowing moons.
The MojoWorld Generator from Pandromeda is an ambitious piece of terrain-generating software. Based on user specifications, the software constructs entire planets that can be explored, filmed and altered by visitors.
"Fundamentally, it's a new window onto another universe," said the software's creator, Dr. F. Kenton "Doc Mojo" Musgrave. "These planets exist in the timeless truth of mathematical logic."
MojoWorld is based on the mathematics of fractals, which can conjure realistic synthetic landscapes from mathematical algorithms. As a result, an entire planet can be rendered with less than 200 KB of data. Put another way, seven planets could be stored on a standard 1.4 MB floppy disk.
But MojoWorld is just the beginning. Musgrave aspires to no less than the construction of a visual rendition of cyberspace.
Cyberspace would be rendered as a giant Mojo galaxy: Websites would be represented by planets, grouped into solar systems of like-sites and portal-style galaxies.
What Musgrave has tried to build with MojoWorld is a program that's powerful enough to do film-quality special effects work but intuitive enough to be enjoyed by average users.
The MojoWorld software is split into the MojoWorld Transporter, a free viewer for exploring virtual Mojo worlds, and the $250 Generator, which conjures up planets. A "professional" version of the Transporter, which removes certain restrictions like the maximum resolution, is available for $30.
With the free Transporter, users can also download, explore and make minor alterations to other people's planetary creations. Users can also change the season and time of day, keep a diary of their discoveries, take snapshots of the planets, and create short Quicktime movies of their travels, whether they are made on foot, airplane or spaceship.
"It's like a virtual camera," said Keith Sales, a 31-year-old Flash animator and graphic designer from Atlanta. "I come from a heavy photography background. Sitting there making a landscape, you can go low by the water and high up without having to get on a 700-foot ladder. Get scenes that otherwise wouldn't be possible."
There's a seemingly endless variety of things users can do with their virtual planets, from creating strange planets with multiple moons, red skies and mysterious fogs, to conjuring a homey place with gently sloping hills and sandy beaches. Most MoJo planets tend to veer toward sci-fi.
"I went camping a few weeks back, and the shoreline was just like something you could see in the program. I said to my wife, 'I could make this!'" Sales recalled.
Alas, users can't build up planets underwater, but it is possible to populate a planet with 3-D animals, people and structures created in other 3-D programs such as Poser Pack by Curious Labs.
There's already a hunt bin Laden game. At EnduringFreedom.com, "MojoForces" are ordered to track down Osama bin Laden on a virtual planet and e-mail in the coordinates using the Mojo Transporter's GPS mapping option.
Alas, MojoWorld's interface isn't very intuitive. Operating instructions, packaged in what appears to be a futuristic spiral notebook, are highly recommended, should users want to do anything more than gape.
Underlying the virtual mountains, rivers and grassy plains is the relatively new branch of mathematics known as fractal geometry. Founded in the '70s by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, fractal geometry is a mathematical language that describes the complex shapes we find in nature such as trees, mountains and clouds.
"The geometry we learned in high school is the geometry of shapes men build," Musgrave explained. "Fractal geometry is everywhere in nature."
A fractal is a mathematical formula used to create an endlessly repetitive pattern. No matter what the scale, all the pieces of the pattern contain the same shapes as the overall pattern. For example, all the sub-branches of a river delta are the same shape as the delta overall.
Because fractals are mathematical equations that are given visual form by the Transporter software, entire planets can be stored in files smaller than a JPEG -— around 200 or 300 KBs – so long as you don't import little people or buildings.
The small file sizes facilitate the easy exchange of these complex worlds among a budding online community of "Mojonauts," as Musgrave calls them. After downloading the free MojoWorld Transporter, users can visit these worlds and even make minor alterations like added oceans, fewer mountains and greener soil.
And because fractals are self-similar (the parts resemble the whole), fractal images contain a ton of detail that would otherwise greedily gobble up computer memory. Zoom-in or zoom-out and the image is equally complex.
"I'd almost have to say it's infinite detail," Sales said. "I don't think that's an exaggeration because of how fractals work. You can be exploring one of these creations, yours or someone else's who provided you the file. Every time you touch it, you find something that's incredibly beautiful."
Musgrave, who spent six years at Yale working under Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, is a pioneering fractal artist. His "paint" is the language of mathematics.
He was director of advanced 3-D research at MetaCreations, where his doctoral dissertation served as the foundation for Bryce, a popular landscape-generating program. He's created digital special effects for the films Titanic, Dante's Peak and Apollo 13.
In addition to building simpler interfaces and more complex systems of planets, the dream of "constructing cyberspace" looms large for Musgrave.
"William Gibson defined (cyberspace) as a consensual hallucination, the place we go to access all the data on all the world's computers," Musgrave said.
That world exists, of course, but it's a bit too 2-D for Musgrave's tastes. Instead of logging onto websites, Musgrave hopes Web surfers will travel to fractal planets to log on.
"It's not very engaging, sitting at a computer, scrolling through Web pages," he said. "We all do it, but it could be a lot better if we all go into a consensual hallucination. Instead of reading, we could walk into a library."
