Civilization Coalescence 2D: A Branching-Merging World Map

This is the flat-map sibling of the 3D globe model: "universal civilization" is treated as an open empirical question rather than an assumption. A population of societies lives on a bounded 2D world disk, and every epoch each one can either branch — splitting into a divergent sub-culture — or, if close enough to a neighbor, merge through cultural assimilation. The balance between the branch rate β, the merge coupling μ, and the world's interaction capacity K determines whether the system settles toward a single dominant lineage or keeps fragmenting into many, following a logistic-type competition equation for the active lineage count n(t). Live readouts track the number of civilizations, the elapsed epochs, and a Shannon-evenness diversity index, so you can watch convergence and plurality emerge directly from the parameters rather than being asserted. Drag to pan and scroll to zoom the map itself.