Overview
Daisyworld is a working model of one of the most elegant ideas in earth science: that life and climate can settle into a self-regulating system without anyone steering it. On this planet there are just two kinds of daisy -; black ones that absorb sunlight and warm their surroundings, and white ones that reflect it and cool things down. As the star brightens or dims, the mix of daisies shifts to hold the planet's temperature in the livable zone… right up until it can't, and you watch the system tip.
It's based on James Lovelock's Daisyworld thought experiment, the canonical illustration of Gaia Theory, and it's built to teach: how feedback loops work, what planetary self-regulation means, the link between albedo and temperature, and where the tipping points are. It ships with a manual and an NGSS-friendly teaching guide.
How It Works
It's a self-contained web app -; any modern browser, JavaScript on, no install. You generate a planet, set conditions, and run the simulation, watching the world map, a temperature graph, and the daisy populations respond in real time. Rendering is done on a 2D canvas: all the terrain tiles are drawn once as small offscreen canvases and blitted, so it stays smooth, with a deliberately retro SimEarth-flavored display.
Current Status
Archived -; a finished educational tool, complete with its lesson materials, that still runs as-is.
- Complete simulation with world generation, live temperature graph, and tipping-point behavior.
- Ships with NGSS-aligned lesson plans and assessments alongside the user manual.
- Parked -; left as a polished standalone unless there's reason to extend it.