“The men were thrown into space like a dozen
wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the
ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun... Death is inevitable in Outer Wilds. It waits beyond every atmosphere, at the bottom
of every cliff, in the ghostly auras on every planet. It’s in your oxygen levels, your ship’s
reactor, your local weather. It’s at the center of your sun. You can pretend death doesn’t exist in Outer
Wilds, for a while. It’s what I did in my first go-round. I was exceptionally careful in taking off
and landing, I talked to every person, I gleaned every bit of information. I practiced floating and falling. I planned my first space flight. And when I finally left the town I was born
in and the planet I was born on, I flew my way over to a neighboring world, gently touched
down, looked up, and saw the sky exploding. Death is inevitable in Outer Wilds. Your solar system is a ticking time bomb. Generations were born, lived, and died, not
knowing that the sun would eventually destroy their world. It didn’t particularly matter to anyone
before today. But that unstoppable supernova does matter
to me, the person who achieved their lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut, minutes before
annihilation. It matters to the scientists who have spent
their lives trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe and were inches away before
they saw it all destroyed. It probably matters to the kids who just want
to play hide and seek, the elders who have seen astronauts like me come and go, the explorers
who have taken up r esidence on other planets. It probably matters to them too. Although they don’t know it. They fell. They fell as pebbles fall down wells. They were scattered as jackstones are scattered
from a gigantic throw. And now instead of men there were only voices—all
kinds of voices, disembodied and impassioned, in varying degrees of tenor and resignation.” Death is inevitable in Outer Wilds, and it’s
not just inevitable once. Every time I die, through suffocation or explosion,
I wake up in the same place. Back home, back next to this campfire. I’m stuck in a loop. In the mind of everyone else, I’ve never
even taken off. I’m groundhog day-ing, and no one else knows
it. And no matter what I do, no matter how many
planets I visit or translations I read or kids I play hide-and-seek with, we’re still
only one tick away from the end of the solar system. But I explore anyway, because maybe someone
had found a way to stop that supernova. Maybe there’s a key that just hadn’t been
turned, or a puzzle that’s almost been solved and just not quite. Every day, it’s still the first day I’ve
ever left the planet, but who knows how many times I’ve woken up in the same place. I can only build my map of the universe a
couple minutes at a time, but I can live those minutes over and over and over, learning more
every time before the sun explodes. I try to get used to it. Exploration is dangerous, and death comes
easily. Once, I’m exploring caverns deep underground
when I notice they’re slowly filling with sand. I get lost among the stalagmites and tites,
and I’m flattened against the ceiling of the cave. Once, twice, a dozen times, I try to land
on the space station that’s incredibly quickly orbiting the sun. It never goes well. Once, I land on a hollow planet with a black
hole at its center. In seeming defiance of the obvious danger,
a previous civilization built power plants, temples, and even schools into the ceiling. But we’re long past their mastery, and now
asteroids are bombarding the outside of this world, sending massive chunks of rock and
architecture down into the void. I wander those dangling caverns for a while,
before I miss a jump and plummet down into the black hole myself. I take a breath. Another death, another chance. But it’s not death. It’s a wormhole that takes me to the outer
reaches of the solar system. I’m alone, floating, among the wreckage
that’s also been warped into the void. I do my best to keep up with it. I find a piece of a house, destroyed, gently
bumping into asteroids. Inside is a quiet love note to someone I’ll
never meet. I’m trying as best I can to manage my jetpack
fuel and my oxygen but they’re both falling so fast. My fuel goes first, and my suit informs me
that it will now use my remaining air as a propellant. I spy one distant, brightly lit building and
drift towards it. I’m trying to barely move, any adjustment
depletes my slivers of remaining air. I reach it. And I realize that this isn’t random debris-
this is intentional. This building is here on purpose. I hold my breath and float inside and [ssssss]
oh my god it’s aerated, there are trees in here, there’s oxygen. I’m not going to die. A sign tells me, helpfully, that I’m not
the first to fall through this wormhole. But not to worry. This building is actually a teleporter, it
will send me right back to the hollow planet I originally landed on. All I have to do is wait for orbit to align
them again. So I do. I wait. I stand there, looking up. Waiting to swing back into view of the planet
my ship still waits on. Waiting to be shot back to the universe, to
continue my journey. But as time spins by, I have the creeping
realization that I’m never making it back. I was too late. This teleporter will never work for me. And as I realize this I hear the sun contract
and explode, and then I look up and I see white light bathing the top of this building
I thought was my salvation and then I look down and it doesn’t matter anymore. When life is over it is like a flicker of
bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and
illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out, “There was a happy day,
there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,” the film burned to a cinder,
the screen went dark.[a] Death is inevitable in Outer Wilds, but so
is beauty. I mean it’s right there, right when you
start. A brilliant flash of blue lightning, a planet
soaring slowly overhead, the comfort of a warm campfire. And that’s before you’ve even moved. On the other side of the world I was born
on, there are huge geysers that shoot steam into the sky, but can also suck me down into
an enormous, mined- out core. There are twin planets locked in an infinite
dance, swinging around one another. When I’m standing on one, I feel like I’m
inches from the sun. There’s a giant that hides countless tornadoes
under its serene surface gasses, tearing the planet’s ocean surface into an endless fury. There is land on this giant, but it’s not
immune either. The first time I stood on a beach here, I
watched as a storm approached, engulfed me, and threw the entire island into space. Suddenly the sky was clear and black, everything
around me gently floating, the sounds of the storm were gone. We float, for a second, above everything. And then we fall back into the sea. More than any individual touch though, what
I can’t get over is the movement of...everything. The skies are alive in Outer Wilds, they’re
so alive, they’ll dart past you and roll over you and shift beneath your feet. The biggest part of learning to pilot your
ship in Outer Wilds is just understanding the mechanics of keeping up with a planet
as it tears through space. You’re trying to hit a moving target from
a moving target. It’s intense. And even once your feet are on the ground,
the game won’t let you forget this cosmic merry-go-round. Have you ever got seasick from watching the
sun’s orbit? I have, now. Nothing is static. Back on the bombarded hollow planet, I fall
towards the black hole again but this time I manage to send myself into a last-ditch
orbit around it instead. And somehow, miraculously, I swing all the
way around, landing gently on an outcropping shared by...someone else? I can’t believe it. I talk to him, in a rush. What does he know? Where are we? What can I do? I’m just a few sentences in though when
I hear it though- I hear it first and then I see it, the streaks of light burning across
the sky. I realize I can actually see the sun, exploding,
through the holes in his hollow planet. This wasn’t fair! I explored, I learned! I inexplicably survived! The universe ends anyway. Death is inevitable in Outer Wilds. It was so very odd. Space, thousands of miles of space, and these
voices vibrating in the center of it. No one visible at all, and only the radio
waves quivering and trying to quicken other men into emotion. Once, I land on a destroyed station, high
in orbit above the gas giant. I’m proud of myself for pulling this landing
off- so proud, in fact, that when my ship gets jostled off the station and quickly disappears
from view, I’m okay with it. My day will end the same way, regardless. I explore the station, a fascinating floating
catastrophe. Destroyed by the energy of...whatever it was
trying to do. There’s one place I can’t reach from the
inside. I can see the hallway I want to go down, but
it’s blocked by debris, and so I make another plan. It’s just a little spacewalk. All I have to do is leave the station, use
my jetpack to fly down, and enter in the other side. Risky , but doable. As I’m preparing for my spaceflight, I look
into the distance at the sun. It’s much farther than it is from my home
planet, but through the atmosphere of the gas giant and the miles of empty space, it’s
still beautiful. And then I look back and realize the space
station has drifted away from me. I laugh, this time. Death is inevitable, after all. And as I go into my own orbit around the planet,
my zero-g version of a lazy river, I take the time- ironically- to breathe. If you’d believe it, it’s incredibly relaxing. I’ve died from blunt force trauma, I’ve
been eaten, crushed, burned, punctured. To drift off in this gentle void, it’s not
too bad at all. Outer Wilds isn’t just about your death
though- it’s the death of civilizations. Across the planets in the solar systems I
found great cities in the most impossible of places. They were filled with writing, stories about
scientific discoveries but also of the minutiae of everyday life. These communities had technology far more
advanced than anything I’ve seen on my quiet home planet, they were scholars and terraformers
and artists. Of course, they’re all dead too. Dead long before I got there. The sound of voices calling like lost children
on a cold night I start to learn more about them though. About their theories of the universe, and
scientific hypotheses and the machine they built...a machine built to send someone back
in time after their death… And just as I’m barely beginning to grasp
how I might be involved in all this, I find myself transported to an invisible lab in
the center of a planet, with more text I just don’t have the context for and more machines
powering technology I couldn’t even guess at. But without considering any of that, I manage
to open the core to this machine and pull out the power source. It seems important, so I don’t leave it
behind when I leave. I’m halfway back to my ship when I realize
what I’m holding. They, whoever “they” are, built a machine
to send things back in time. I, someone who had been mysteriously sent
back in time countless times, found a time machine, cracked it open, and removed the
power source. I look in dread at the angry red sun, already
swelling. Death is inev- From this outer edge of his life, looking
back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if
they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and
done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to
everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation? Kaleidoscope is a 1949 story by Ray Bradbury. In it, a group of astronauts are thrown apart
by a collision with some celestial object. They’re miles apart instantly, getting further
from each other all the time. But they can still hear each other. They can still talk. And as they spin into space, each one experiences
a different kind of cosmic embrace. One man is confident he’ll hit the moon. One is entangled in a swarm of tiny asteroids,
which sweep him into a long and distant orbit. The main character is sent back towards earth. His last thoughts are that he wants to matter,
wants to do something meaningful, wants to do just one good thing. He burns when he hits the atmosphere. On the ground, a child looks up and screams. “A shooting star!” Still holding the core of the time machine,
I do the only thing I can think of. I climb into my little spaceship, lift off,
and head towards home. I touch down on my little green planet, landing
exceptionally carefully though I couldn’t really tell you why. I wished the sun would explode right then. Beautiful, poetic. I touch down moments before being incinerated. But it didn’t. I stand on the planet for an uncomfortably
long time, watching the sky. Nothing has stopped moving- in fact, I have
to keep getting on my ship and moving, because the sun is drifting beyond the horizon. Nothing stops moving, even in its final moments. It feels like I wait forever- in reality,
it’s about 3 minutes. And I don’t know this at the time, but later
on I’ll discover even more about the nature of the universe, the practicality of the warp
core, the virtue and splendor of sacrifice, the never-ending cycle of life. Later, I won’t spend a minute waiting, I’ll
be an experienced and confident spacefaring being and know exactly what to do and where
to go. Later, I’ll be satisfied, content, at ease
despite everything. But it’s not in this life, and it’s not
in this timeline because finally, finally the sun contracts and then it explodes like
I’ve seen dozens of times. And this time I’m afraid. This time, I know I’ve dug my own grave
with the energy core I hold in my hand. This time I look at the supernova, and I start
to run. There were only the great diamonds and sapphires
and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God’s voice mingling among the crystal
fires.
This is such a beautiful video.
That was fantastic. Now I need to go play the game some more. And I have a Ray Bradbury story to look up.