Bethesda up to date its wildly anticipated sci-fi RPG Starfield’s web site with a canonical timeline on August 14. Apart from digging into three centuries of imagined interplanetary drama that result in the occasions that kick off Starfield in 2330, Bethesda’s timeline additionally makes some formidable predictions about our extra tangible, fast future, together with when humanity would possibly stick its toes on Mars.
That’ll occur for the primary time in 2050, the timeline decrees, solely 27 years from now. For real-world context, in 2033, China hopes to change into the primary nation to ship a crewed flight to Mars, although NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has just lately been struggling on the dusty, pink planet, and it doesn’t even have frangible lungs. Billion-dollar child Elon Musk is already pondering well beyond that—he says he’ll deposit a million individuals on Mars by 2050, however he additionally helmed the ugly Twitter rebrand and looks like the sort of one that has little bugs in his ears that inform him what to do, so take his phrase with warning.
In Starfield, not solely do people efficiently attain Mars within the close to future, but additionally, they get so choosy that they appear previous it and resolve to colonize Alpha Centauri (a triple star system within the Milky Means that would possibly really comprise hospitable exoplanets) as a substitute. Once more, this isn’t utterly faraway from actuality; astronomers have been looking for an Earth-like planet close to Alpha Centauri for some time now, although, in the event that they discovered one, researchers counsel it could nonetheless take about 6,300 years to fly there. Starfield’s proposed timeline alternatively predicts that people arrive at Alpha Centauri in 2156 and set up the United Colonies by 2159, which is, I’d say, extra optimistic.
Then, after two centuries of galactic catfighting about border management, honored treaties, and cash, a discovered artifact cements house explorer group Constellation’s significance and units up the occasions of the sport. It skews extra “fiction” than “science,” however at the least it’s epic.
And in contrast to the day that blasting off to Mars turns into as quotidian as taking a towel to the seashore, you don’t have to attend for much longer to discover Starfield’s intrigue and 1,000 planets—it’s out on Xbox Collection X/S and PC on September 6.