Surely every reader of Amiga Format must have heard of Arthur C Clarke. His contribution to science and literature is immeasurable, he is both an artist and a progressive thinker; penning the science fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey and also proposing the use of geostationary satellites for communications.A fractal vision of Mars
Arthur C Clarke's masterplan for the colonisation of mars - completed with a little help from his Amiga
Although a prodigious writer of science fiction, his latest work is based entirely on fact. It was a combination of ideas inspired by Hawaii, the data processed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a look at the amazing Vista Pro fractal landscape generation software that gave Arthur the inspiration for his latest work: The Snows Of Olympus.
Arthur has been an Amiga fan for years, and one of the programs that really leapt out at him was Virtual Laboratories' Vista Pro. Long term readers of Amiga Format will surely remember the software, because the full version has featured on the Coverdisk of Amiga Format.
The Vista software started off life as a fractal landscape generator, creating random terrain and using advanced shading techniques to build up a 3D picture of the landscape adding grass, snow, water and so on to create very realistic scenes of almost photographic quality. The software was further refined so that the user could be more specific about what altitude the tree-line was, add fractal clouds, adjust the water levels and, in general, have more control over the landscape environment.
Virtual Laboratories then took the software a bit further and instead of just generating random landscapes, Vista was given the ability to generate landscapes based on real geographical data.
Back in 1970, Arthur C Clarke had taken a helicopter ride, his first, over Kilauea, Hawaii's huge, active volcano. This left a great impression on him, one he was to remember when he first learnt of the existence of Olympus Mons a year later.
A great deal of time later, when he saw Vista Pro on his Amiga, an idea formed in his head, an idea for a book about the terraforming of Mars. With the Vista Pro software he could easily create snapshots of what a Martian landscape would look like, were it to be covered with grasses, and watered with atmospheric rain.
Not only that, but by tweaking the customisable values in Vista, he could also create all the stages in between, from the very first signs of vegetation - probably something simple like algae - to the huge forests which could some day exist on our nearest neighbour planet.
So, using the data we already know about Mars, its surface and its atmospheric content, it was possible to create a scientifically-based blueprint of what the planet could look like, should terraforming take place. Although the later stages of rendering the images were done on a much faster computer system, the initial groundwork was all done on the Amiga. Computers are a tool which can be used to expand your ability, and this is just as true of the Amiga, if not more so, as of other machines.
