Bethesda up to date its wildly anticipated sci-fi RPG Starfield’s web site with a canonical timeline on August 14. Other than 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, instant future, together with when humanity may stick its ft 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 turn out to be the primary nation to ship a crewed flight to Mars, although NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has just lately been struggling on the dusty, crimson planet, and it doesn’t even have frangible lungs. Billion-dollar child Elon Musk is already pondering well past that—he says he’ll deposit a million individuals on Mars by 2050, however he additionally helmed the ugly Twitter rebrand and looks as if the form 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 give the impression of being previous it and resolve to colonize Alpha Centauri (a triple star system within the Milky Manner that may truly comprise hospitable exoplanets) as an alternative. Once more, this isn’t fully 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 recommend it will 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 area explorer group Constellation’s significance and units up the occasions of the sport. It skews extra “fiction” than “science,” however at the very 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.