Simulating Biology in Other Dimensions

(4D Shapes Falling) This is a video about life in other dimensions. Flat lifeforms in 2D landscapes, psychedelic entities with higher spatial geometry, even beings that can ignore time. While our 3D brains can typically only perceive a limited number of dimensions, with the help

Of computer simulations and a bit of sci-fi creativity, we can conceptualize some truly mind-blowing hypothetical realities. So, say goodbye to the 3D world you know, and prepare for life in lower and higher dimensions… We’ll start by voyaging down a dimensional layer, to a universe of 2D Life.

The beings of this universe can only move on two axes, with no conception of depth. If we were to stick our faces through the flat plane of their world, the visual might be frightening, as the two-dimensional lifeforms would only be able to perceive infinitely

Thin slices of our three-dimensional bodies at a time, a bit like the images of an MRI machine. To those beings, we would be shape-shifters whose bodies appear from nowhere and disappear with no explanation. But could life really function in 2D? Sure, here’s some now.

This is a simulation running in ALIEN, an artificial life program that lets you build two-dimensional ecosystems. These virtual cells might not be life as we typically define it, but they do self-replicate and adapt to environmental changes. There’s lots of impressive 2D life simulators out there, but for 2D life to exist outside

Of a computer, it couldn’t be made of the 3D atoms we’re familiar with. Scientist Timm Hurton successfully simulated a stable molecule in just two dimensions, so our hypothetical 2D organism could be made of these bead-like components. One of the biggest hurdles for two-dimensional life would likely be innards.

Nearly all three-dimensional animals are built around a digestive tract that passes through their bodies, with a hole on one end for eating, and a hole on the other end for, uh, expelling. But if a two-dimensional lifeform had such a system, it would cut the organism in half,

As this ‘advanced simulation’ shows — with the bifurcated segments of the lifeform falling apart. But there might be a solution. Certain animals like Sea Anemones just have the one hole, for all their various hole-related needs. Which is… something I’m not going to think too hard about.

But perhaps our theoretical 2D lifeform could have a similar system, with a single aperture leading to a simple digestive tract. Of course, it’s worth noting that just because something could exist, doesn’t mean it does. As far as we’re aware, there is no secret realm of 2D life: it’s just an interesting hypothetical.

But what would happen if we went up a level, to a universe of 4D life? The innovate game 4D Toys is a way for us three dimensional lifeforms to start getting our minds around four-dimensional objects. At first, these objects don’t seem to make sense, changing shape as we move them and

Even disappearing from view entirely. What’s happening? To answer that, let’s return to our metaphor of a 2D being observing 3D objects passing through its flat realm. From our perspective, these 3D objects are straightforward, but to the 2D lifeform, they don’t follow familiar rules, appearing and disappearing for seemingly no reason.

As 3D beings, we can see the objects just fell into the third dimension outside of the 2D plane, but the 2D entity has no awareness of this. And that’s exactly what’s happening to us in 4D Toys. We’re three-dimensional beings that can only see a limited, 3D slice of larger, fourth-dimensional objects.

Take this ball pit filled with 200 4D hyperspheres. At first, it doesn’t seem like there’s that many spheres on screen, but if we move our third dimensional slice through the fourth dimension, just like you can move a two-dimensional slice through the third dimension, we can see the spheres are all there after all.

This model of the fourth dimension is more than something the developer made up. These shapes have long been researched in geometry, and objects like tesseracts, essentially 4D cubes, are well-documented structures. Now, some of you might be thinking, ‘wait, the fourth dimension is time.’ Hold onto that comment, we’re going to get to it.

For now, there’s lots of cool stuff you can make in 4D, like this 600-sided die, or fourth-dimensional abacuses, which really makes me feel like a baby fumbling around with a toy. Ever tried to fit a tesseract into a 4D hole? It’s not easy.

I’m convinced this is how USBs work — you can’t plug them in on the first try because they’re 4-D objects — wake up people. Trying to think in 4D can be a humbling experience, and can help you sympathize with 2D life.

For example, let’s imagine a 2D entity is trying to get this sphere out of this ring. From our 3D perspective, the solution is obvious, just pull it forwards. But to a 2D entity, disconnecting the two shapes would seem completely impossible, and our solution would look like magic.

But we’d have similar difficulties with 4D objects. These two rings seem like they could never be separated, but they actually have a gap we can’t perceive along the fourth dimension, allowing them to come apart. It drives home the point that to a fourth dimensional lifeform, we might be like newborns,

Utterly perplexed by the most basic of their shapes. “Struck by the evil prankster’s dimension ray, space itself shatters around hawkman’s ship.” But shapes are one thing. What would it be like if a fourth dimensional being pulled us entirely into their four-dimensional world? The answer might be the game Miegakure.

Created by the same developer as 4D Toys, Miegakure takes place in a world with four dimensions — though we can only perceive a 3D slice of it. But Miegakure allows you to move your 3D slice along the fourth dimension, revealing new sides to buildings and landscapes you couldn’t see before.

It can be quite trippy to look at, but this ability allows you to solve puzzles in interesting ways. Say there’s a wall in front you. You can move your plane of 3D until you reach a point in 4D space where the wall isn’t there, then walk right through.

Now, despite being in development for a while, the game unfortunately still isn’t available to play, for the understandable reason that trying to build a four-dimensional world as a three dimensional being is quite challenging. “Great Galaxies, where are we?” “Location, Dimension 23.” “DiMenSiOn 23?” Another promising 4D game is 4D Miner.

Created by youtuber Mashpoe, this game resembles regular Minecraft at first, until you scroll with the mouse wheel and realize we’re once again seeing a 3D slice of a much larger 4D landscape. Surviving in this world stretches your mind. Sometimes you’ll think you’re in an area without trees, only to realize they’re all

Around you, just hidden elsewhere in the fourth dimension. Other times, you think you’ve found a small cave, only to realize it’s huge. But most challenging of all, is the fact you aren’t alone in this world. Those hovering shapes belong to fourth dimensional predators that see you as an easy meal.

Called hyperspiders, their bodies extend into the fourth dimension, and are considerably larger than we can fathom. Because of their fourth dimensional bodies, hyperspiders are difficult to spot, and even harder to hide from. If you build a house to take shelter in, they’ll often appear inside as if from nowhere.

This is because as 4D predators, hyperspiders can move through gaps that us 3D lifeforms can easily overlook. “Meanwhile, back on the world in our dimension.” “What are we going to do?” “I’m afraid gentlemen, we are at their mercy.” There are other ways of simulating four-dimensional lifeforms.

4D Particle Life is a game that works just like a 2D life simulator, except, of course, in 4D. The artificial life on screen right now might look like simple particles, but every simulated cell has a much more complex 4D body.

It’s interesting to think about how games have gone from 2D, to 3D, to now, with a few games, 4D. Although side note: many classic 2D games aren’t truly two dimensional — as characters can pass in front of and behind objects, so their worlds contain at least some depth.

What’s really weird is that when you play a 4D game, you’re technically looking at a 3D slice of a 4D world rendered on a 2D screen. So now that no one is confused, let’s talk about time travel. “Now to switch on my time conveyer!”

You might have heard that time is the 4th dimension, which raises the possibility of 4D life but, like, with time instead. Whether or not time is best classified a dimension like the spatial ones has long been a subject of debate, but let’s run with the idea. After all, you do ‘move’ through time.

All of us, right now, are constantly traveling forward from the temporal position we were in moments ago, simply by existing. So, by some definitions, you’re already a 4D lifeform, with three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. “What was that strange field we just passed through?”

“It must have been some sort of time barrier. Look, a water dinosaur!” The difficulty is, of course, that we can only move through time in a single direction. We are constantly traveling forwards, and we cannot go back—or even know where we’ll end up.

If you could see your fourth-dimensional self across time, stretching all the way from your first moments to your very last, it’s interesting to consider how that would change what it means to be human. If, from the very beginning of your story, you knew every moment that’s to come, would

That even be a life as we understand it? One of the few sci-fi films to seriously consider the implications of transcending linear time is Arrival. The aliens in the movie, called ‘heptapods,’ seem to experience time in a non-linear fashion,

With every moment in their lives, including their death, as close to the present as any other. We’re not talking about a lifeform that can alter time (not yet, anyway), but rather entities that can exist at any point along a predetermined path.

And as the film progresses, the main human character begins to perceive time the way the heptapods do. It’s an ability that proves both beneficial and heartbreaking, as all the good and bad in her life become contemporary instances in time.

One of the hardest parts of time passing is that the future holds many unexpected tragedies. But if you knew every tragic event in your life before they happened, yet couldn’t change anything, would that really make things easier? Another reflection on the melancholy of non-linear time is the film Interstellar, particularly

In the scene where the lead character falls into a higher dimensional space within a wormhole, where they’re able to see into the past and future. The strange realm is called a Tesseract, even though it’s not a 4D-cube in the traditional, spatial sense.

But like Arrival, Interstellar’s portrayal of the fourth dimension is more of a thematic device than a physics lesson — a meditation on time’s unchangeable nature. We all want to know where we’re going, but if you knew where your ship was headed, but

Couldn’t change course, perhaps you’d be better off keeping your eyes closed. “You are now in dimension 5, the 5th dimension. Give me the library of Gorr!” “It was lost when you pulled me into this world of yours, buddy.”

But what if you could steer the ship, moving across timelines the same way a higher dimensional lifeform could move through space, would that make you 5D Life? While you ponder that question, let’s play some chess. And by that, I of course mean “5D Chess with Multiverse Timetravel.” 5D chess plays…

Basically the same as regular chess. With the small exception that if a game just isn’t going your way, you can send one of your pieces backwards through time, creating a new branch reality where things can unfold differently.

And you can do this as many times as you like, meaning you have to avoid checkmate across multiple different parallel realities. You with me so far? While playing, you can take pieces out from fifteen moves ago. You can send your king through time to another reality, erasing your king from the original

Timeline and making it impossible for you to lose in that universe. There’s a strategy called ‘Jurassic Rook,’ where you send a rook or ‘castle’ all the way back to the beginning of the game, effectively resetting the timeline to its

Original state like you’re in Back to the Future — it’s crazy, and can leave your mind completely shattered. “I just saw a trillion different realities folding on to each other like thin sheets of metal forming a single blade.” “Yeah, yeah, the time knife, we’ve all seen it.”

But what’s potentially even crazier is imagining how fifth-dimensional entities would hypothetically function in an ecosystem. Say you’re a 5D organism, aware of yourself across multiple timelines. If you’re caught by a predator in one reality, it doesn’t matter. In another point in another timeline, you’re still doing fine.

Or, you could go full Jurassic Rook and take out a past version of that predator when they’re little, or better yet, take out their great grandparent so they’re never born. It’s mind-boggling to think about a whole speculative ecosystem of 5D species trying

To out-juke each other across multiple timelines, like they are Skynet from the Terminator. And to be clear, this vision of the 5th dimension is beyond speculative and hardly the most scientific… but while we’re here, can we push things even further? “This little trinket just sent you into the 6th dimension, superman.

The dimension behind mirrors.” Branching off into alternate realities from a single timeline is one thing, but what if you could explore completely new timelines with completely new rules? This multiverse model of reality has become a popular one in recent years, with more and more pieces of media exploring stories where divergent timelines collide.

It’s a concept that doesn’t really line up with the multi-dimensional theories of quantum physics, but let’s not get into all that, this video is already plenty confusing. The most relevant piece of multiverse media for our purpose of visualizing higher dimensional life is probably the film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.

It’s a story in which various characters can perceive and even merge with other versions of themselves from across alternate timelines. An interesting byproduct of this is that as humans with brains only mean to perceive a single reality at a time, focusing on one reality often means a version of the characters

In another reality suffers. Like Arrival and Interstellar, the film’s dimension-bending sequences are largely a vehicle for themes and emotional beats. It’s not just a movie about what would happen if humans had hot-dogs for fingers. Well, it is a movie about that — but it’s also a reflection on meaning in the face of

Infinity. In the context of limitless realities, what is the worth of a single moment? It’s a question that feels particularly relevant to life in the age of the internet. We can download and experience all these different dimensional simulations, and it’s great! But it can also be overwhelming.

In one of the film’s most stunning scenes, the main character embodies all possible versions of herself across every conceivable reality — completely losing her identity to the void of unlimited stimulation. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is the kind of narrative that can make you appreciate

Being here, now — an ordinary lifeform with a reasonable number of perceivable dimensions. “My readings indicate we are not in time and space as we understand it. Apparently, the natural laws of our universe don’t operate here.” In terms of higher temporal dimensions, there’s no real place to go after you’ve encompassed

Every point in time in every possible timeline. But if we leave time and return to spatial dimensions, we’ve got room to grow. You now know what a 4D cube looks like, but how about a 5D cube — with an extra dimension of space instead of time. Or a 10D cube?

Yes, all these points and lines represent a single 10-dimensional hypercube, flatted out in a way that we can perceive. You can really keep adding additional spatial dimensions until things get exponentially out of control, with the monstrosity that’s currently on screen a 16-dimensional hypercube.

Unsurprisingly, there’s not a lot of media that tries to explore life with these types of dimensions. The closest example probably comes from Douglass Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In this series, what we know as mice are revealed to merely be small protrusions into our dimension belonging to vast, higher-dimensional beings.

It’s a comedic concept that riffs on the trope of rats and mazes. Much like how from our top-down perspective a two-dimensional maze is easy to solve, mice in Hitchhiker’s Guide find our mazes absurdly simple — which might hold true for any higher dimensional being. “You can hide nothing from me. My x-ray intelligence.”

We could also head in the other direction and imagine a one-dimensional game — a concept the same creator who made 4D Miner has a great take on. The game is technically a three-dimensional interpretation of a one-dimension field of vision, as a completely 1D-game would just be an impossibly thin line.

Playing the simulation is kind of like living in a world made solely of barcodes — although with practice, you can actually get better at navigating the strange environment. Or how about a zero-dimensional game, which… I guess mathematically wouldn’t be a line but just a single point — okay we’ve pushed things too far.

In the end, imagining versions of reality with a different number of spatial or temporal dimensions can be challenging. But there’s so many interesting things you can experience by widening your perspective. Some forms of media might make you wish for extra dimensions, while others will make you appreciate what you have.

It all depends on your point of view. “We will not live in a two-dimensional world. We won’t go in one direction, or zig where we can zag. We will walk through walls. We will not be confined.” There are plenty of other games and pieces of media that experiment with dimensions of

Space and time in their own way that I didn’t get the chance to talk about. If you found this subject thought-provoking, there are links to all the games and simulations discussed in this video down below, with more information on all the incredible people who are building worlds in higher and lower dimensions.

As always, thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this entry, please lend your support by liking, subscribing, and hitting the notification icon to stay up to date on all things Curious. See you in the next video.