Abstract
Currently, theories of viability are unequipped to deal with most biological phenomena as they work at the level of individual agents. In the natural world, organisms are rarely isolated and meaningfully influence each other’s survival. To close this gap, we take one analysis framework, viability space decomposition, and expand it to analyze an idealized model of two interacting, heterogeneous protocells. This ultimately involves thinking about life and death as taking place in a hybrid dynamical system and leads to new global manifolds in viability space that are unique to multi-agent systems. We conclude by discussing how this method scales with the number of agents and the organizing principles it suggests for the global structure of viability in multi-agent systems.