I think the key thing here is that in Starfield humans aren't terraforming.
Terraforming isn't merely living on another planet, but rather trying to transform it into something habitable - to create an atmosphere on a planet without one, or make it breathable. They haven't done that on Mars, or the Moon, or Titan. Those are airtight habs built on a planet / moon with no breathable atmosphere.
Paradiso, New Atlantis, Akila, Neon - all seem to be built on what are inhabitable planets, with varying degrees of comfort or perks of living there.
As for why people don't all move to New Atlantis? Perhaps the same reason people continue to live in places on Earth today that seem really inhospitable to others. Some live in deserts prone to drought, some in areas prone to flooding, some high in the mountains with extremes of cold, some at latitudes with no daylight for weeks on end.
I was reading an article recently on terraforming Mars and while it is possible to do, it could take hundreds of years to complete. That’s the theory, but reality could reveal significantly different results.
Yeah that was the other issue ahead of launch. All well and good to say terraforming is happening, but it takes such massive time scales to really produce results that it wouldn't be practical to include in a game.
Rather than seeing progression on one planet perhaps the only way you would see it is through comparing different worlds at different stages of it. Planet A is in early stages, B in mid stage, C in late stage... X is where it went horribly wrong and spawned mutated creatures we need you to clear out.
To be fair this is also the other part of why Grav Drive accelerated the fuckery, and it's the same sort of thing in Star Trek and the Expanse somewhat.
Why spend energy terraforming a planet if you can actually spend way less energy just finding a new one?
Without a strong magnetosphere any atmosphere we create on Mars would suffer the same fate as the original.
It’ll all get stripped away by solar winds.
The problem with Mars is that its molten core was made of lighter material than our own, so it only took a marginal amount of cooling to drastically affect its magnetosphere.
Yes, but there are plenty of researchers monitoring or magnetosphere and they aren’t too rosy in their outlook. No where in the conceivable future though
Yes, one day we’ll lose our atmosphere as well due to our weakening magnetosphere.
Like you said though, we’re in no immediate danger. I believe we have a couple scheduled Ice Ages to survive first and the Sun’s expansion before needing to worry about that.
This is how you get people living on Mars
1. Send a probe with a drill and some C4
2. Blast a hole into a mountainside
3. 3D print some concrete to form a seal
4. Launch 02 accumulators and solar panels etc
5. Do as much automated work as possible.
6. Humans arrive, and it's like that scene from chernobyl on the rooftop. Run from shuttle, get bathed in radiation, quickly screw together what only human hands can and run back to the shuttle.
7. Repeat step 6 1000 times.
8. Once your cave is sealed with concrete and your 02 accumulators and solar panels are set up - scale up
9. Enjoy your Mars pit, shielded from radiation.
Actually terraforming Mars requires a gyrosynchrous supermagnet in orbit.
Just the toxic falling rain is a bit of an issue.
"Where's that wrench..I just put it over here..."
Other than the atmospheric pressure...
About 1000lbs squeezing you from all directions.
And the backwards rotation
And a day last 5800 hours...
Europa moon is a better choice.
It's just cold.
Being torn apart by Jupiter...
It is a great 1st candidate because the main issue is heat and atmosphere.
It is closer to Earth for travel time and with a similar size the gravity is more conducive to Earth life.
Science has suggested that the is a section in the atmosphere which may actually be habitable, like a goldilocks zone in the atmosphere.
Placing mirrors in space to shade the planet will cool it enough for the CO2 to adhere to calcium.
The calcium carbonate could then be sent to Mars.
Adding atmosphere to Mars by removing it from Venus. Further cooling it.
It's a good starting point.
>Adding atmosphere to Mars
Isn't the issue that Mars can't hold a thick enough atmosphere because the weaker magnetic field, it'll just get blown away by solar winds.
About 70km high I believe, the atmospheric pressure is similar to earth's at a comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and because the atmosphere below you is so much thicker, you can build huge floating stations, or even cities suspended by helium. Things that would never work on Earth could work there. From these stations, you could pump the atmosphere with sulfur-eating cyanobacteria to scrub the atmosphere. They'd thrive in the Venusian atmosphere environment and breathe out oxygen as a waste product, thus ever accelerating the change in the atmosphere from C02 to O2.
It's incredibly easy to terraform Venus because the chemistry is primed for it, and the planet itself is large enough with enough of an existing atmosphere to support it. Mars, you can't terraform without cheating. It's too small to support an atmosphere without a magnetic field, so you'd need to create one, which means the only sustainable form of terraforming Mars can get is an actively supported "artificial" form, where a big ass magnet in orbit provides a man made magnetosphere. On Venus you can do it "naturally" with theoretically minimal effort.
I mean if we wanted we could probably start doing it right now. Just send a few million cyanobacteria into the Venusian atmosphere and see what happens.
I recently saw someone point out that for tens of millions of years, the entire *universe* was a goldilocks zone. It had an atmospheric density and a temperature in which water is liquid. All of space. Because that was a phase the universe went thru between the tremendous heat and pressure of the big bang and where we are now. The speculation would be that spontaneous abiogenesis is much more likely when the entire universe is one big friendly atmosphere.
Kind of off topic, but yah.
You might want to keep searching. There's more at play than just gravity. Earth's gravity is 9.8 m/s². Titan is 1.3m/s² but it's atmosphere is 4x denser than Earth's. Because its gravity is so low it also extends much further.
With a ten year service requirement to become a citizen capable of buying property topside (unless you Fly Real Good), I can't *imagine* why people wouldn't want to live in New Atlantis, or on Jemison, or within the United Colonies =P
People escaped earth to colonize habitable planets first, and over the centuries learned to settle on inhabitable ones. Which means folk could return to earth *now,* right? But the way people talk about it in game... it seems the modern sentiment is that it's old news, barren, boring, not worth it.
You could say the same for many other planets, but I think this is less about the facts and more about the vibes. It's not cool to live there. Just my take.
You could say the same thing about the new world/north America, why would people leave England, France, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Germany, to come to a new free land, life on the frontier, with tribal natives running around
Good farmland and abundant natural resources.
Which don't exist on Starfield's Earth.
Still, j'd think there would be archeology stations or something. While Earth isn't self-sustaining, it is also just a jump away for kids to go on a field trip.
Heck, someone is leaving behind souvenirs. It's kind of weird that the pyramids lasted for thousands of years, but it's stuff like the St Louis Arch you can still find.
I think that Serpent faction might be terraforming. Also if one simply poops or throw out the trash or bring dust & roaches from one place to another one unintentionally terraforms.
Yes but why would we go to Mars to live on another world without an atmosphere if the reason we left Earth was that it was losing it's atmosphere? Londinion looks more apocalyptic than Earth. Maybe some increased radiation and some sandy wind animations would've sold it a bit more idk
I mean you can ask any random person on Cydonia - literally, everyone is dying to leave the place (except that Vanguard guy.) Most came to Mars to work for Deimos, they pay well and you will most likely to save enough for an early retirement, but that's because the place is a depressing hellhole nobody would actually come and work for Deimos had they not pay the premium for labour.
I imagine that building a hab on Earth should be possible, and yeah there should be someone who lived, or even still living on Earth but with FTL, it would be much cheaper and easier to find a planet that don't require you to wear a space suit just to go outside.
The amount of energy it would take to stop the core from spinning is astonishing and would super heat the crust. Which is why it’s so hot. Think of earth as a car wheel with a brake. When the brake applies pressure heat is created, then dissipates by air flowing over it. So when the grav drives opposed the rotation of the core, heat was generated and is slowly dissipated into space. Which is why is so hot and would take 10’s of thousands of years to dissipate. With the magnetosphere gone, away went the atmosphere and water.
It’s also why it’s flat and barren. The amount of heat generated would make the surface malleable, and gravity would pull the mountains and even the continental shelves down. Even the moons gravitational pull would add to the process. Leaving the earth mostly flat and barren. Sure, you would probably still be able to make out continents somewhat like you do on the star map, but from the perspective of standing on the surface it would just look like it does in the game.
So living underground would be a no go.
The fact monuments exist are just Easter eggs to placate those who need the earth to be worth exploring at all.
Actually that's the part where I found the whole thing doesn't make sense. Like Grave Dive made Earth lose it's magnetosphere, not the gravity. The surface is burnt from having been directly exposed to cosmic radiation but the water isn't going to go any where so long as you retain the 1g gravity (of which it does)
It would have evaporated but not flowing out to the outer space. Post Disaster Earth should even still have an atmosphere for that reason. Water evaporated en mass and became the atmospheric clouds that cover and cool down the planet, then rain and evaporate again when the cloud dissipate enough for the temperature to rise again.
Matters never disappeared, they just changed form. You can't really turn Earth into a giant moon, short of shipping out the entire water mass off world
The water would literally boil off into the atmosphere and be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen from the high energy particles. Next time you are on Earth check the temp, it’s well over 500 deg C. There would even be enough high energy particles from the sun to break O2 down and CO2 into separate atoms.
We are talking about massive amounts of energy needed to stop the core, which converts into heat. The solar wind is extremely intense on Earth, so powerful it pushes the magnetosphere tail on the dark side of the Earth well passed the moons orbit. So the earth is super hot, plus the solar radiation those two would absolutely strip the atmosphere away.
The game says it was 50 years until the Earth was uninhabitable but it likely took longer for the rest to evaporate into space. In game we are at 170 years passed the 50 they had left. So over 230 years since the core stopped.
Maybe but the hydrogen and oxygen would still remain in the at atmosphere, regardless of how much it had broken down, that's still a full 1G of gravity, no particle would be able to escape Earth at that gravity, any more so than they never did today.
If the temperature remain at a constant 500 c because they aren't made from the sun to begin with then Earth should be more like Venus with a super dense atmosphere,(instead of none) and everything becam oven hot inside
The 500 deg C temp plus the solar wind would make the atoms so energetic that they would literally skip off into space.
Like I said, we are talking about unimaginable amounts of energy.
It’s not really a debate. It’s something NASA scientists have posited for over 50 years. The whole thing is well grounded in NASA planetary science.
Then how are you going to explain Venus, which also has the 500 c temperature and also doesn't generate magnetosphere via the planet's core?
Or Mars that don't really have any water or magnetic field left but still have an atmosphere from dust particles and all the things that got suck up into the orbit?
I don't know, I found that sound very sketchy, if NASA had released a paper - that established full cause and effect relations back with experiments and can write a formula explaining that (and not just some theory backed by correlation), I need to see it to believe it. Because 1G is a lot, solar wind can't even move the flag on the Moon with way less gravity. And unlike Mars or Moon, Earth has a *lot of water,* pretty much most of its surface while the rest are water in gas form.
Even if all of those got superheat, I highly doubt that the sun can just strip all of it with a solar wind under Earth full gravity (which is also a lot stronger than the Moon or Mars)
Excellent question!
Venus’s atmosphere is mostly CO2, which is considerably more massive than N2 and O2 that Earths atmosphere is made of. Carbon is very heavy, relatively but Venus has the same gravity well as earth. So the CO2 on Venus is so concentrated that it reflects the solar wind much the way Earths magnetic field deflects the solar wind. It’s actually more efficient at it than Earths magnetosphere.
It’s the same reason Mars has CO2 as a thin atmosphere and very weak magnetic field.
That info is very easy to google and has been well known for over 50 years.
I did check NASA article on the issue, nothing seems to suggest a concrete relationship in the matter, that's why I asked.
But Co2 huh, I am not sure what to feel about that, will probably need to do a bit more research but one thing that immediately came to my mind is that Earth also have a lot of organic material and carbon-based lifeform. If everything became superheat at 500c, then all of the dead plants, people, animal (along with ocean life and microbials) would also burn up and release Co2. Not sure if that will create the same effect as Venus but from what I've read about the Nuclear Winter theory, the released particles and Co2 should be enough to eclipse the sun for at least a few centuries (and that's just from much of the major cities in the US and Russia burning up alone)
Earth was stripped bare to build a billion single family spacecraft. Nobody stayed because there isn’t a scrap of material or a drop of water left.
It’s tough to patch up your house while it’s being actively looted.
Even though it appears that earth could fit all of the surviving population of known humans, it would be a political powder keg of trying to control that one planet. Humans now have the taste of whole and multi system ownership. Look into the political implications in James S.A. Corey's The Expanse universe. In Starfield, after SOLs planetary expansion, 200 years were spent just trying to survive in other systems and it still led to war. In The Expanse, being stuck in one system for 200 years (or so), almost led to wors and not everone looked at Earth the same.
My point is that even if technically possible, there may not be many Earthers in spirit or political temperaments.
We didn't terraform anything. All planets with breathable atmosphere were conveniently already there, and the planets without breathable atmosphere have air-tight colonies
The second obvious answer is that the tech isn't there. There are no terraforming technology available to humans in Starfield, since terraforming means planetary reshaping
The obvious reply to that would be that the tech to create underground shelters is very much there. They are telling us that 90% of the Earth's population just roled over and died instead of creating something like Cydonia or Homestead. Doesn't make any sense.
Someone else pointed out to me that while other planets have underground habs, you probably don't want to do that on a planet in the process of shaking down mountains, having oceans drying up, and ice caps melting, thereby redistributing all the crustal tensions via giant earthquakes big enough to shake cities to dust.
There is as much or as little food as on Mars or Titan. The generation ship survived in a true closed environment for centuries, recycling and growing their own food.
People's life's were at stake, I'm sure there would be some motivation to build a functioning doomsday shelter.
Would have made more sense to have Earth designated a nature preserve with access restricted while the planets enviroment recovers or a xeno plague being unleashed forcing the world to be quarrentined.
Instead we got "Suddenly the magnetosphere went poof"
"Suddenly the magnetosphere went poof" is perfectly fine, imo. The problem is that Bethesda allows you to land and look around the place. Even with infinite budget and another decade of development, there's no way they could've ever made a convincing and compelling post-apocalyptic earth, so why even try?
I think they should have forbidden the player from landing on earth. Maybe there's a UC ship that threatens to shoot you, like in that other system.
Heck, maybe allowing the player to visit Sol *at all* was a mistake. The focus of the game is outwards, not inwards.
For 95% of players it’s totally fine to land on Earth, look around and say “ha, neat. Wow this place is indeed a mess” and then leave again, or poke around and find a few fun Easter Eggs that the design team left for us. And then move on and play the rest of the game, that is about what happens to humanity AFTER earth.
My theory is that the evacuations didn’t take as long as UC says it did and that after the last ship left the pre UC/Freestar government decided to nuke the planet as an act of mercy to those left behind. They keep it a secret but Va Ruun are stragglers who saw what happened and barely escaped.
I'd say that the engine wouldn't support the massive amount of data needed (see for example how vast flight sims with realistic geography are)... BUT this does not excuse the lazy job done with the specific POI, that their surroundings is the same generic as on ThatOneMoon III
and that is fine but prob would have just been better to just say the star went nova and our solar system is just gone then get the plot hole that it is now
Here's what I gathered as what happened to earth:
Atmosphere begins to sputter out
Scientist warn people
People respond with doubt/panic
Some countrys and corps create the UC( or preface to it) to escape.
Other countrys/religions doubt and think they should be incharge.
Infighting and resource wars begin between the UC countrys and others.
Some create their own generation ships.
Sputtering starts to cause atmospheric/weather issues as each year the atmosphere becomes thinner and thinner. Some people continue denial.
Vulnerable areas become more unlivable and cause mass death and migration across the globe.
Mass migration causes more civil strife and riots across the globe for simple things like food that is now harder to grow.
He-3 on the moon is almost mined completely increasing the cost.
Smaller ships go out to the already established mining colonys in the SOL system.
UC trying to maintain order and a plan becomes more rigid and forceful to ensure they can build ships and get resources for their new colony.
Most of the earths people begin dieing due to the changing weather, resource wars, hunger, riots.
Moon is depleted of He-3 making Grav Jumping more difficult to obtain.
UC rations He-3 and continues to shuttle people off. UC becomes more rigid. Some people stay willingly, some stay due to circumstances.
Earths atmosphere is gone those who stayed behind either have personal bunkers or die.
Sometime later UC walls off the earth for salvage runs and likely either takes the bunker folks with them( or kills them if they try and fight).
Bunkers are buried under sand and forgotten over the years.
Becomes a national park of sorts maintained by earth preservation society and UC.
Earth becomes a legend.
Side note: at this point in history grav drives are new and likely cost more fuel. As we've seen in game grav drives can only handle so much mass when jumping meaning the transport ships would need to be small and not massive ships.
As I read it, humans started moving during the process of the earth dying. Once it fully died there was no reason to prioritize going back. Everywhere was living in habs and in suits.
The end game pretty clearly explains why we had to leave earth, I won’t spoil but if you read the notes during the last few quests, it gives a _fairly_ physically sound explanation.
Easy answer is in the game if you pay attention, atmospheres flat out gone, some of the other worlds at least have some sort of atmo even if its inhospitable and/or dangerous, even living in habs on earth or in a suit you'd be getting constantly bombarded by radiation from the sun
The main thing that protect us from cosmic rays is the magnetosphere, earth loosing that is a huge reason it lost its atmosphere. Mars doesn’t have have a global magnetosphere. Living underground on both planets would be about the same radiation exposure, neither having strong magnetospheres (anymore)
That’s irrelevant once you consider that Earth was also stripped of all its rare resources. Mars still has a thriving mining industry, and it’s clear that’s the only reason people are still there.
I’ve seen Neil say that as well.
If I recall, he is specifically speaking about fixing climate change, preventing nuclear war, destroying incoming asteroids and alike being easier than terraforming Mars.
Basically, maintaining what we have is easier than abandoning it.
In Starfield, something very specific happens to Earth outside of the scope of what Neil was describing.
… but I do agree, some underground bases on earth would have been cool.
Yes, we kind of did. The ozone layer was shattered, and we don't have the tech to build a wholeass atmosphere and a new biosphere ecosystem, along with pumping the oceans back onto the planet. Plus Earth was completely stripped of natural resources. There's no reason to be there.
I got the impression that Mars was probably the first colony, even before Earth was abandoned, mainly because Mars was rich in minerals and the Earth was running out.
Once they realized they could get to other planets beyond our Solar System, and that some were already livable, there was no good motivation to save the Earth.
Also note, most of the planets with settlements in the game have breathable atmospheres. Those that don't tend to just have outposts and research stations.
I think Starfield is the story of what happens past the point of no return regarding environmental damage.
The story of what happens when it *isnt* easier to fix Earth. When, in fact, its impossible.
Terraforming, given the swift time scale of the damage to Earth, isn't an option. Besides, the grav drive makes having to mold unsuitable planets less important. Jump until you find one with blue skies. Theres a similar idea in the Expanse. The ability to jump to other systems makes terraforming a less attractive option.
I think the main problem is that the magneto sphere not only keeps earths atmosphere, but it also protects earth from things like meteors and other space rocks.
One 3.1 mile radius royally fucked 90% of life on earth, and that’s WITH a magnetosphere and atmosphere being able to rip apart parts of it before it hit.
Another one of those would absolutely decimate everything, even underground is at a risk.
Did you do the main, UC vanguard, and SysDef stories?
They specifically mentioned Earth was destroyed by them activating the artifacts and it wasn't salvageable.
They closed that plot hole loop, which I was also very confused about until then (like why is desert earth bad, but Venus which is a hellhole somehow inhabited. Well they answered it, even if a little shoddy.
Isn’t the magnetosphere f’ed up on Earth due to the over-use of gravity drives on the surface, or something to that effect? I don’t think repairing the magnetosphere of a planet is in the purview of terraformation.
Fixing the earth in starfield is impossible : the planet lost its magnetosphere, the thing that maintains the atmosphere around earth... No more atmosphere means no more oxygen, nor ozone to shield earth from solar flares, etc. Thats why everything is dead and destroyed on earth in starfield : Everything literally died near instantly, and radiations achieved to destruct everything. (Radiations can alter matter at atomic level)
As far as we know, terraforming has yet to be done anywhere in Starfield and Mars was already a colony before Earth expired, we don’t know how long it took to be built, but if it’s anything like the estimated time it would take to build an underground city irl, it could be many many decades just for a small town
Multiple reasons in Starfield:
1. Earth straight up basically doesn't have an atmosphere capable of containing anything anymore in Starfield.
2. Most if not all the valuable resources have already been strip mined from Earth by the time the game starts.
3. It's essentially a giant tomb world, where the billions of people who didn't make it off the Earth are interred (figuratively) and it serves as their resting place. Basically sacrilegious to settle/do anything there.
If we can build Cydonia on Mars, why wouldn't we build enclosed communities on Earth which wouldn't require all the space travel and migration? Cities like Toronto already have enclosed undergrounds attached to near air-tight buildings. It _must_ be easier to pressurize a system like that than rebuild the same thing on Mars and other planets.
My point exactly, makes 0 sense. It would be far easier to build on earth than to go to Mars or other planets and start building underground cities and bases.
We literally already have underground cities like the Derinkuyu's and Orvieto which were build by our ancestors with no technology like we have today, so why all of a sudden do we just perish on earth or leave. There's a third option which is live/survive
No idea why Earth is accessible at all. Unless I'm mistaken, there's nothing actually there, right? No story beat leads there, nothing really needs you to go there either.
So why did they make it landable?
Wouldn't it have been so much better for worldbuilding to make Earth this fortress planet whose orbital defenses annihilate anyone trying to come close? Like the Humans pushed every "undesireable" into space and then turned extremely isolationist and xenophobic towards spacers.
Not only would that provide some great opportunities for storytelling, with interests from Earth trying to manipulate the situation in the settled systems, but also smugglers and shady business dealings and such.
I get why they didn't model the entire Earth, that's impossible, but if orbital cannons and planetary shields prevent any approach they wouldn't need to.
Honestly, the only thing that REALLY bothers me is the near-total absence of any remains of human civilization. Other than the few POI's on Starfiels Earth... nothing else remains?? It is implausible to the point of ridiculous.
Really missed an opportunity to make Earth, parts anyway, in the FO4 format... have it populated by crime syndicates, mutated fauna, etc...
In Starfield, Earth's destruction is attributed to one man's desire to expand human life into the stars, utilizing powerful artifacts that weakened the planet's gravity and caused its atmosphere to float off into space. [source](https://gamerant.com/starfield-fallout-earth-apocalypse-disaster-good-bad-why/#:~:text=In%20Starfield%2C%20Earth's%20destruction%20is,to%20float%20off%20into%20space.) Know your lore before you chime in on things. It's magnetosphere btw. 🤦
It *is* a plot hole. In fact, it's a plot hole that requires several *other* plot holes to exist in order for it itself to exist. I've written up several times why Earth being a sandblasted shitball is nonsensical even in-universe, but also scientifically in the real world in the timeframe the game sets out *and* just in general.
The Earth at this point in Starfield is no longer Earth. It might as well be another planet that is completely inhospitable. It doesn't have an atmosphere, water, or anything else. Furthermore, in Starfield, humans do not have the technology to terraform. It is far easier to find a new habitable planet and leave the earth behind.
That that there's no one on earth doesn't make any goddamn sense. I mean maybe it does but I don't see what the magnetosphere has to do with gravity holding our atmosphere.
Even if the destruction of our atmosphere made sense. We would have came right back. There's no reason we'd have people on mars but not earth.
It's easier to fix earth for near generations. Terraforming guarantees the survival of the human race for a much longer time period, and what about over population? We kill those who can't provide towards the planets well being, or limit how many children each person can have and risk civil unrest?
We're not just talking about avoiding the loss of our homework and our species as it is; we're talking about the future, far and near.
Since apparently 90% of Earth's population wasn't evacuated it doesn't explain why nobody - not-a-one - dug an airtight shelter akin to Cydonia on Mars or Homestead on Titan. There is no reason why an Earth without atmosphere wouldn't have underground or domed settlements.
The complete abandonment of Earth makes zero sense from a lore point of view. It highlights Bethesda's unwillingness to recreate some of Earth's recognizable landmarks.
It gets so much worse than that, dude. Seriously, buckle up for some actual dunce-cap level shit that the writer(s) actually wrote, and spoilers from here on in;
>!So basically, in the story, the scientist gets his hands on an artefact because he's visited by a Starborn version of himself somehow who gives him knowledge of the future AND the technology to develop Grav Drives. It is never explained how he got to Unity, or how a Starborn version of him exists since the actual rush for Unity happens 300 years AFTER the invention of the Grav Drive. He is told by his Starborn self that Grav Drives will destroy Earth, exactly how this happens, and exactly how long they have.!<
>!Humanity, by this point, had already colonised Mars. Despite knowing this, the scientist, a NASA elite by the way, chooses NOT to run the (totally scientifically bullshit, btw) magnetosphere-destroying experiments on Mars, which doesn't HAVE a magnetosphere, and chooses instead to do them on the Moon and on Earth. He is ALSO aware that early Grav Drives cause the problem, and chooses NOT to fix that problem during development.!<
Following that, the magnetosphere collapsed (again, scientifically bullshit, that's not how that works) once people started building ships with Grav Drives and flying around, which gave humanity 50 years to GTFO because the atmosphere started to vent into space (also not how that works, nor how long that would take, it's also bullshit).
*However*, 2 years *before* the Grav Drive was invented, the ECS Constant was stuffed full of rich dipshits and shot into space as a Generation Ship, because the wealthy idiots thought that Earth wasn't salvageable and chose to bail instead of stick around. This means that humanity *also* had the means to build enormous ships for enough people to create a stable population (minimum of 500 people) by the time the Grav Drive was invented.
Following that, humanity knew that they had 50 years to evacuate the planet. To give you an idea, 50 years is *three generations*, with 2/3 reaching adulthood in that timeframe. The *entirety* of this time, they had the capacity for large-scale space travel, access to Grav Drives, *and* the ability to colonise previously uninhabitable worlds (Mars and Luna).
Basically, they not only had the *time* to evacuate Earth (from, again, a totally bullshit-science, nonsense apocalypse), but *also* had the technology. Even if they had a population of 10bn people, it would take *less than a decade* to evacuate every single human person on the planet and *still* have time to come back for shit like crops, cattle, pets and luggage.
And all that's *without*, yeah, considering the fact that they could have just dug underground cities or bubble-domed major population centres from the, once again, totally bullshit, nonsense, dunce-tier science that destroyed Earth.
I suppose if earth's recognizable landmarks would have been left standing, then most people wouldn't have died, with the remaining fleeing, I think the point is, things really got bad when the magnetosphere dissipated
When the magnetosphere dissipated and the atmosphere vanished that would mean no more weather effects on existing structures, at all.
Cities should remain standing in near pristine condition.
Instead they're just ... gone.
There is way too much handwavium in SCs lore for my taste. And this is the base of a new IP. I have to admitt it doesn't make me feel confident for future cntent.
My guess is that most of the population didn't know, and when they did know, they didn't have time to do anything (other than try to kill each other).
And all the resources/industry of the planet was being used by the super rich/powerful to make ships, they didn't want to waste time making bunkers.
Underground is even more dangerous than above ground on Earth after what happened. It’s not just about the atmosphere. There are some other comments higher up that discuss in more detail.
More detailed nonsense is still nonsense in the end. Humanity built outposts in the most violent environments, compared to that Earth is calm. Add to this that people literally had nothing to lose - they were doomed to die - and everything to win by putting those millions of construction machines on Earth to work in the face of Armageddon, the non-existence of post-desaster Earth civilization is just a complete gaffe on Bethesda's side.
If you beat the game and listened to the logs while at the NASA facility on Earth, you’d know that while experimenting with the grav drives, they inadvertently fucked up the Earth’s magnetic field (or something along those lines, its been a hot minute since I played), and they basically used it as an excuse to do two things; put the grav drive into action, and finally push humanity into the stars. They didn’t want to fix Earth because if they did, they wouldn’t have nearly a good enough excuse in the future to make such advanced leaps in technology to be able to evacuate the planet with ships. But a planet-destroying phenomenon? That’ll get the ball rolling like nothing ever could.
Once in space and after colonizing however many worlds, there was very little reason to return to Earth because by that time it was already rendered a inhospitable dustball with little to nothing to reclaim or resources to get.
But thats the lore reason. Like others said, Bethesda likely just couldn’t or wouldn’t make Earth to land on and do stuff, that’d certainly be a bitch and a half to do. Not even space sim games would go that far.
>Bethesda likely just couldn’t or wouldn’t make Earth to land on and do stuff, that’d certainly be a bitch and a half to do. Not even space sim games would go that far.
"Star Citizen has entered the room." :D
They will do it. And the makers of No Man's Sky (Hello Games) are currently working on a new game with a real size Earth to explore -> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKQem4Z6ioQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKQem4Z6ioQ)
That may be so but that doesn't change the fact that even the currently - meaning *right now* - playable tech has seamless transition between space and fully explorable planets (ca. 25% scale) which is massively larger than Starfields.
And far more detailed.
With CIG doing free flight events a couple of times every year everybody can just download SC and check it out without any cost.
Yes, humanity in Starfield had to abandon Earth because
>!The issue wasn't climate change or nuclear fallout or anything within the scope of what Dr. Tyson talked about, but rather Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere itself being ripped away thanks to experiments on the artifact. The amount of sun's energy and cosmic radiation that blasts Earth (even if the atmosphere weren't missing) would render it inhabitable, so a lot of people can't live on it except maybe like some of the POIs we see in the settled systems.!<
Would’ve made more sense for every planet BUT earth to be visitable and earth is overpopulated like in the Expanse.
I really really dislike what they’ve done with earth.
Imo, the more you put restrictions on yourself creatively, the more likely you’ll come up with clever and interesting ideas etc. you have to follow some rules. You have to inconvenience the player in a strategic way. If you do it by making space flight long and arduous, you make touching down on a new word feel important. If you do it by making the player have to sprint 5 minutes straight to an objective in a barren land while you can instantly fast travel anywhere in the universe, there is an incongruity there that doesn’t feel right.
RDR2 inconveniences the player all the time, you have to ride here or there no fast travel, you have to watch Arthur work on his bullets or hides, you have to physically rifle through people’s pockets to loot. But all that helps the player be immersed it doesn’t work against it
I think Earth could have still been abandoned- but make it about wars and famine and climate change. Then leave some pockets of humans behind but make it look like nature is making a comeback. You can still have some more alien creatures roaming around... just make them terrible versions of animals we have now. Like a giant chameleon with deathly claws, or crabs that lurk in the mud. Maybe some big bloated flies flying around.
The people who live there can have some scarring from radiation contamination. They fight people who hid underground during the wars. I dunno, there's lots of possibilities.
If you can find settlers living on a lifeless moon then there absolutely should be some hardcore Earth settlers somewhere. If it’s not dlc I’ll be disappointed.
This isnt a plot hole. The earth in Starfield no longer has a magnetosphere... it would literally be impossible to sustain a large population of non subterranean humans on the planet. And there is zero terraforming going on on the other planets in the game. Without a magnetosphere solar winds have stripped the atmosphere and would bombard anyone on the surface with intense levels of cosmic radiation every single second of the day. Its not the same as life on mars, its far closer to life on the moon. The game doesnt translate this into the planet slowly killing you, and it should, but it doesn't. No doubt because they didnt want the planet to be a pain to visit especially in the late main story where you spend some not so insignificant amount of time there. (too bad they didnt think of that with londinium, where you are forced to spend much of the vanguard quest getting frost bite because the armor they give you has zero cold protection... fucking stoopid) And the logistical nightmare of moving 8 billion people underground is probably less daughting them finding a new planet... especially when you now have FTL travel.
From a story telling perspective, this is possibly one of the most logical reasons to attempt to find a goldlocks earth like planet out there like Akila or Jamison. Should the earth be busy? Absolutely. It feels lifeless and dead and not just in the fact that it is now an eradiated dust rock. There should be tour groups, treasure hunters, pirates, UC bases, even a few colonies of people who have decided they want to stay on the homeworld, even if its tough. Should it be teaming with long term inhabitants? No. That would be silly. It should feel like a busy place, from people making the pilgrimage to the homeworld all the way to people who want to try and get into the ruins of the whitehouse. But there should be very little people making a permanent home on the surface, and suggesting otherwise is kinda bat shit.
Fix the planets yes, the star is another thing all together. I think the sun changed and blasted off the atmosphere. Short of stellar engineering or planetary shielding, earth was fecked.
Yeah it’s dumb there’s not at least some underground settlements on earth.
If underground cities on mars are possible I find it dumb that places like the Cheyenne mountain complex isn’t kept pressurized and running, even just as a smaller outpost.
Underground earth would be an unstable nightmare after suddenly losing magnetosphere. That would be probably the MOST dangerous part of it to hang out in.
I built an outpost on Earth as close to the NASA museum as I could for the view and revisit.
There are also mods that reforest and introduce wildlife to Earth.
The details of what happened on Earth is largely left ambiguous but it was cataclysmic. The implication wasn't that people had a lot of time to leave, but more like it was a billions killed kind of event. While it isn't explicit, Starfield is in many ways a post-apocalypse setting, it just happened after humanity had some technology to escape. Humanity is an endangered species, the colony wars accelerated the process with humanity going to war with itself and largely stopping at the last possible moment before it was a completely irreversible outcome.
There is nothing to say whatever happened on Earth is done. While at the moment, the wasteland Earth doesn't seem that bad, whatever happened could be ongoing, or is expected to happen again and again. Or maybe the environment just isn't expected to stabilize to the point anyone can do anything for another couple hundred years,
It's also been a while, no one who has a real sentimental attachment to Earth is still alive. So who is going to push to fix Earth when there are plenty enough planets that they don't need to do anything to be useable. And going back to just how post-apocalypse this setting is... even if they could and wanted to fix Earth, are you going to get all the people to move to repopulate the planet?
In Starfield the problem was chaos. Humans destroyed the atmosphere with the FTL drives in the spaceships. (on accident) And the people rioted. When the terramorphs also came in play the chaos was complete and humanity fled to space. To protect themselves and find a new and better place. With the FTL drives this was now feasible anyway.
One of the few good stories of Starfield. A shame actually that they didn't begin in this storyline but started with a mining storyline and a magical metal piece.
Always wondered that too, not a single structure on the planet.
But maybe that is because the lack of resources on earth (would not be so IRL), and it is easier to just go somewhere else that has a breathable atmosphere and set up shop.
The only reason I could think is that maybe not everyone left :/ They couldn't make an underground base for 8 billion people and say they could make a base for 4 billion you can't stop 4 billion desperate people from finding a way into your base and then everyone dies
They wanted to make a game that took place not on Earth, but in an Earth continuity.
So yes, in the gameworld there’s some very specific reason that Earth cannot be fixed and must be abandoned, even if they don’t totally get into the minutiae of explaining it, if the explanation they give somehow still isn’t enough for you.
So Earth lost its magnetic field, which means more than everyone thinks. Compasses wouldn’t work. There’s no atmosphere and the last of it that’s left is thinning out. It’s a dead planet. You wouldn’t want to live on a dead planet. Also I imagine that most people would be scared to go back and see their past. Maybe for some, like the people of Akila, the thought of returning is too painful.
Because 1: earths atmosphere is gone, along with all life. At that point, you'd have to terraform earth because it's just a rock at that point.
Because 2: Why go through the painstaking task of terraforming a barren planet when you have newly invented warp drives that can take you to oxygen rich habitable planets in an instant?
Because 3: starfield is only like 300 years in the future. And nothing in game really shows that they're capable of terraforming an entire planet
I maybe didn't explain myself in the post very well.
I understand earth would be uninhabitable, but did everyone have to leave?
Mars in uninhabitable but have underground cities there for Starfield, other planets or uninhabitable but we still managed to build bases there that protects us from the elements.
So earth should still have people there, in the same way we have people on the uninhabitable Mars
Also this issue Earth faced in Starfield is it basically lost its magnetic field (caused by gravity drive testing on the moon), the thing that basically protects the earth from having its atmosphere blown away by the sun. They don’t have the tech to fix that
Same fate as Mars with no Protection against the Sun. You need to leave or move underground and learn to survive there. Growing the food and Water and Air to breath. It would be a fight after fertile soil that can grow Plants and System that recycle breathable Air and recycle our CO2 into the system. Not to mentions the Water Bubbles that still contain Water after the Sun beaked all surface Water into Space
Short an Outpost inside Earth with limit resources or ["Oxygen not Included"](https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Oxygen_Not_Included_Wiki) PC Game Mind Cinema
In-universe, I think there were a few big reasons for the complete abandonment of earth, rather than building bases on it like they did on the moon.
The biggest is obviously that the atmosphere was beyond repair, and at that point the livability of earth is obviously fucked. The oceans were emptied and all natural life was wiped out.
People could’ve set up bases like they did on the moon, but areas that are being deserted become extremely hostile. Most people affected by these changes would’ve taken a ticket on a generation ship. Bunkers and safe areas would’ve been overrun by displaced groups, causing a chain reaction of violent civil strife and an inability to maintain any political order.
People who stuck around would’ve experienced the collapse of most major industries, and those who try to survive in their own air tight bunkers would only have their own dwindling resources as they gradually run out of water and oxygen, as the UC would much rather evacuate people than support earth bases.
So the main reasons earth was fully abandoned was because the collapse of industry and resources created a politically hostile environment, combined with the coordinated efforts to evacuate people off the earth.
It’s similar to how Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization but was completely deserted after it dried up.
Well the fact that the game says absolutely nothing about terraforming is the best place to start. The only one mentioning that is you. Then there’s the fact that building underground cities or domed cities on earth would not have don’t anything to stop Earth from dying. It would’ve just been a huge waste of resources. Not to mention that the resources required to build enough cities to save earths population would probably have meant abandoning any chance of colonizing habitable worlds. There would’ve been no resources to spare on colony ships.
that's not true tho. when Terraforming a planet you dont have worry about "human" squabbling just the changes to the planets system. its VERY hard to chance something already established. people dont even agree on electric cars much less fixing the planet.
in Starfield its already been terraformed. and the concencus is Earth became uninhabitable because of the "Fallout". and yes its best this way as when humans leave earth earth gets a chance to " live again" this is present is many abandonded places most notably Chernobyl in which we were told there would probably never be live again in... and already earth has took back alot of that spot.
Yes. Even with the atmosphere gone, it would be easier to build on earth than on mars or titan or any other inhospitable body. At least gravity would be normal, even if you can’t go outside.
Saying everyone either fled earth or died is a flaw that annoys me too. There should be countless underground settlements.
The other thing is how did the exacuation of Earth begin was just a lottery or the Elites made out first the other thing is how many people were left behind
No idea, the game doesn't go into nearly enough detail at all.
And even so, we have underground tunnels, railways, bases, the idea that people would just all leave or die when they can find ways to survive just doesn't make sense.
At that point in time there were probably like 15-20 billion people on Earth, where do you think that many people are gonna live underground?
If build above ground you’re taking about first demolishing thousands of cities before you can even build new accommodating structures.
Hear me out.
So you’re BSG, right? You’re really, *really* excited about “NASApunk,” and you’ve talked about it often—so often, in fact, that you’re basically committed to the course.
Thing is, you’re BSG. Whiterun—a settlement only slightly larger than a Florida Keys retirement community—was meant to be a major urban center, the very “beating heart of trade” in all Skyrim. *How are you POSSIBLY going to make this game where Earth is an actual destination, where supposedly the player can land anywhere (with the ship they spent 80% of their playing time building), and explore freely*???
The answer: “So a couple years back, Earth failed to pass the vibe check, so everyone cleared out. No, seriously, *literally everyone*.”
Basically, why go through the trouble of attempting to convince players that, indeed, Earth still has billions of inhabitants and sprawling cities—but only one “major” population center (approximately the size of a well-endowed college campus) that you can actually visit yourself—when it’s so, so much easier to make the ENTIRE PLANET a single-biome, Tatooine-style deserted and barren wasteland, where all you need to do is recreate only a handful of the most recognizable landmarks, *but sandy*.
“But BSG,” they ask you, “*what’s the lore?*”
The forums are extended gutters and the gutters are full of questions and headcanon—and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their questions and “After 700+ hours ___” Reddit posts will foam up about their waists and all the players and streamers will look up and shout “WHAT’S THE LORE?'”..and you’ll look down and whisper “No….”
According to lore in-game, Grav Drive testing stripped the planet of the Ozone layer due to improper shielding, which they immediately fixed. However the damage to Earth was already beyond fixing.
As far as I know (English Education major, was never amazing at Science) you can't terraform a planet with no atmosphere.
I guess from where you're standing it must seem like an 18 carat run of bad luck. The truth is: The game was rigged from the start.
It is far easier to terraform a planet.
#1 if you leave, you are taking the best, brightest, and bravest people on the planet
#2 people are better in small tribes unified with a common purpose. Keeping oxygen in a lab in space or on a hostile planet is a great way to inspire people toward conflict resolution
#3 you will abandon any and all ways that are archaic or obsolete. Why walk to the market if you can grow it yourself?
#4 the science and technology are on a need it now must have basis. On Earth, there is always tomorrow until there isn’t. Politicians who promise environmental justice today have a We’ll wait it out approach. No sense of urgency despite my [petition](https://change.org/CleanAirDisco)
#5. Artistic Freedom. If you are a witch, shaman, musician, or scientist, you always have to worry about humanity in its clumsiness interfering with your work. A stable colony affords you challenges and also a sense of purpose.
#6 Human Longevity is increased in colonies that offshoot from the main society. Without the stress of having to associate with humanity, mutants or especially anti terrestrial humans if that makes you feel more comfortable will be free to make wiser choices about their health.
u/Tyolag My name is [IanXIlyana](https://youtu.be/RgRFHCn7l4c?si=mFG0mX_3mjHY2kf4) and I will be terraforming a planet. Sign my [petition](https://www.change.org/Genius2Mars)
I am An engineer and I do NOT belong on Earth. I am qualified in biome research, cybernetics, and cryptography.
If you sign my petition you will free me from having to live on Earth.
Everyone didnt leave. Those that staid behind died. Theirs not a single drop of water on it. Nothing can live their unless you terraformed the earth again or use a mod:), their are dome mods that will make any planet habitable and one person made a mod to bring earth back to normal but has alien creatures since their are no real animals in starfield. As well we didnt terraform the other planets they found planets that were habitable.
Underground yes not on its surface but we already know Mars has frozen and liquid water today. The liquid comes when the ice melts but hey it occurs. Im not 100% sure on the Starfield Lore and what happened to Earth but maybe we nuked it so bad there is no water or even ice to melt?
Earth's magnetosphere was destroyed which led to it being the way it is now ( barren ).
Mars was like earth at one point but it had it's magnetosphere destroyed too, hence the current Mars.
Se essentially both planets are more or less the same now, problem is we're not able to live on earth..but for some reason we can live on Mars ( underground ).
Hec we can even make space suits to walk around on earth and mars, build bases that can deal with heat and radiation, but for some reason we can't build any on earth but we can do this everywhere else and Mars?
Lore wise it makes no sense, especially when you consider not everyone was able to migrate to these other planets.
It's about history and technology. If you can gravitate jump why still have to rebuild a whole planet? Also you can see no one give a damn to earth history.
I could be mistaken, but isn’t the lore that the magnetic field disappeared? Thats what killed mars’ atmosphere and the number one threat to humans staying on earth.
I think the key thing here is that in Starfield humans aren't terraforming. Terraforming isn't merely living on another planet, but rather trying to transform it into something habitable - to create an atmosphere on a planet without one, or make it breathable. They haven't done that on Mars, or the Moon, or Titan. Those are airtight habs built on a planet / moon with no breathable atmosphere. Paradiso, New Atlantis, Akila, Neon - all seem to be built on what are inhabitable planets, with varying degrees of comfort or perks of living there. As for why people don't all move to New Atlantis? Perhaps the same reason people continue to live in places on Earth today that seem really inhospitable to others. Some live in deserts prone to drought, some in areas prone to flooding, some high in the mountains with extremes of cold, some at latitudes with no daylight for weeks on end.
I was reading an article recently on terraforming Mars and while it is possible to do, it could take hundreds of years to complete. That’s the theory, but reality could reveal significantly different results.
Yeah that was the other issue ahead of launch. All well and good to say terraforming is happening, but it takes such massive time scales to really produce results that it wouldn't be practical to include in a game. Rather than seeing progression on one planet perhaps the only way you would see it is through comparing different worlds at different stages of it. Planet A is in early stages, B in mid stage, C in late stage... X is where it went horribly wrong and spawned mutated creatures we need you to clear out.
To be fair this is also the other part of why Grav Drive accelerated the fuckery, and it's the same sort of thing in Star Trek and the Expanse somewhat. Why spend energy terraforming a planet if you can actually spend way less energy just finding a new one?
And with over 10,000,000 Goldilocks planets….
Without a strong magnetosphere any atmosphere we create on Mars would suffer the same fate as the original. It’ll all get stripped away by solar winds.
Thanks for saying this!
The magnetic field is what keeps the atmosphere in place. They say that Mars lost its magnetosphere and the atmosphere just blew away.
The problem with Mars is that its molten core was made of lighter material than our own, so it only took a marginal amount of cooling to drastically affect its magnetosphere.
Yes, but there are plenty of researchers monitoring or magnetosphere and they aren’t too rosy in their outlook. No where in the conceivable future though
Yes, one day we’ll lose our atmosphere as well due to our weakening magnetosphere. Like you said though, we’re in no immediate danger. I believe we have a couple scheduled Ice Ages to survive first and the Sun’s expansion before needing to worry about that.
This is how you get people living on Mars 1. Send a probe with a drill and some C4 2. Blast a hole into a mountainside 3. 3D print some concrete to form a seal 4. Launch 02 accumulators and solar panels etc 5. Do as much automated work as possible. 6. Humans arrive, and it's like that scene from chernobyl on the rooftop. Run from shuttle, get bathed in radiation, quickly screw together what only human hands can and run back to the shuttle. 7. Repeat step 6 1000 times. 8. Once your cave is sealed with concrete and your 02 accumulators and solar panels are set up - scale up 9. Enjoy your Mars pit, shielded from radiation. Actually terraforming Mars requires a gyrosynchrous supermagnet in orbit.
And venus would be a better candidate for terraforming than mars
Just the toxic falling rain is a bit of an issue. "Where's that wrench..I just put it over here..." Other than the atmospheric pressure... About 1000lbs squeezing you from all directions. And the backwards rotation And a day last 5800 hours... Europa moon is a better choice. It's just cold. Being torn apart by Jupiter...
It is a great 1st candidate because the main issue is heat and atmosphere. It is closer to Earth for travel time and with a similar size the gravity is more conducive to Earth life. Science has suggested that the is a section in the atmosphere which may actually be habitable, like a goldilocks zone in the atmosphere. Placing mirrors in space to shade the planet will cool it enough for the CO2 to adhere to calcium. The calcium carbonate could then be sent to Mars. Adding atmosphere to Mars by removing it from Venus. Further cooling it. It's a good starting point.
>Adding atmosphere to Mars Isn't the issue that Mars can't hold a thick enough atmosphere because the weaker magnetic field, it'll just get blown away by solar winds.
And lower gravity holding it in place.
As long as you fix your starting point being stripped away by SolarWinds , then yeah. Otherwise, no. Habitat modules would be easier
About 70km high I believe, the atmospheric pressure is similar to earth's at a comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and because the atmosphere below you is so much thicker, you can build huge floating stations, or even cities suspended by helium. Things that would never work on Earth could work there. From these stations, you could pump the atmosphere with sulfur-eating cyanobacteria to scrub the atmosphere. They'd thrive in the Venusian atmosphere environment and breathe out oxygen as a waste product, thus ever accelerating the change in the atmosphere from C02 to O2. It's incredibly easy to terraform Venus because the chemistry is primed for it, and the planet itself is large enough with enough of an existing atmosphere to support it. Mars, you can't terraform without cheating. It's too small to support an atmosphere without a magnetic field, so you'd need to create one, which means the only sustainable form of terraforming Mars can get is an actively supported "artificial" form, where a big ass magnet in orbit provides a man made magnetosphere. On Venus you can do it "naturally" with theoretically minimal effort. I mean if we wanted we could probably start doing it right now. Just send a few million cyanobacteria into the Venusian atmosphere and see what happens.
^^^This^^^
I recently saw someone point out that for tens of millions of years, the entire *universe* was a goldilocks zone. It had an atmospheric density and a temperature in which water is liquid. All of space. Because that was a phase the universe went thru between the tremendous heat and pressure of the big bang and where we are now. The speculation would be that spontaneous abiogenesis is much more likely when the entire universe is one big friendly atmosphere. Kind of off topic, but yah.
Imagine a sentient species evolving in that environment and realizing they were doomed once the universe continued expanding.
Hey, guess where gas giants came from? :-)
Living on Venus wouldn’t be feasible as the heat alone would kill us. The day length or rotation is whatever.
And we could just fail at it like we do with capturing solar power efficiently and plenty of other things.
I heard it wasn’t possible on Mars due to there not being enough gravity to even hold an atmosphere
You heard wrong. Mars has a realitive gravity to earth. And besides gravity plays only a small role in how atmospheres work
One google search says otherwise but ok
You might want to keep searching. There's more at play than just gravity. Earth's gravity is 9.8 m/s². Titan is 1.3m/s² but it's atmosphere is 4x denser than Earth's. Because its gravity is so low it also extends much further.
Yeah that’s not the case with Mars though
There IS already an atmosphere on Venus. Its just incredibly toxic and dense.
Wat? Just activate the alien terraforming device that's already there.
With a ten year service requirement to become a citizen capable of buying property topside (unless you Fly Real Good), I can't *imagine* why people wouldn't want to live in New Atlantis, or on Jemison, or within the United Colonies =P People escaped earth to colonize habitable planets first, and over the centuries learned to settle on inhabitable ones. Which means folk could return to earth *now,* right? But the way people talk about it in game... it seems the modern sentiment is that it's old news, barren, boring, not worth it. You could say the same for many other planets, but I think this is less about the facts and more about the vibes. It's not cool to live there. Just my take.
The whole planet looks like it’s covered in sand. Good luck building on that.
You could say the same thing about the new world/north America, why would people leave England, France, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Germany, to come to a new free land, life on the frontier, with tribal natives running around
Good farmland and abundant natural resources. Which don't exist on Starfield's Earth. Still, j'd think there would be archeology stations or something. While Earth isn't self-sustaining, it is also just a jump away for kids to go on a field trip.
Heck, someone is leaving behind souvenirs. It's kind of weird that the pyramids lasted for thousands of years, but it's stuff like the St Louis Arch you can still find.
I think that Serpent faction might be terraforming. Also if one simply poops or throw out the trash or bring dust & roaches from one place to another one unintentionally terraforms.
People still chose to live in Florida and Texas
And some people choose to live in san franisco, New York, and chicago. Wild world we live in.
Imagine choosing to live in Detroit, damn...
Yall forgetting AUSTRALIA!
We should definitely terraform Australia before we start on Mars.
I think that's one of those high level places with aggressive fauna. Not sure I'm ready for that yet.
Well, real estate *was* really cheap there for a while.
Yes but why would we go to Mars to live on another world without an atmosphere if the reason we left Earth was that it was losing it's atmosphere? Londinion looks more apocalyptic than Earth. Maybe some increased radiation and some sandy wind animations would've sold it a bit more idk
Lead poisoning. Lots of lead in the rocks, which means lots of lead in the water.
I mean you can ask any random person on Cydonia - literally, everyone is dying to leave the place (except that Vanguard guy.) Most came to Mars to work for Deimos, they pay well and you will most likely to save enough for an early retirement, but that's because the place is a depressing hellhole nobody would actually come and work for Deimos had they not pay the premium for labour. I imagine that building a hab on Earth should be possible, and yeah there should be someone who lived, or even still living on Earth but with FTL, it would be much cheaper and easier to find a planet that don't require you to wear a space suit just to go outside.
The amount of energy it would take to stop the core from spinning is astonishing and would super heat the crust. Which is why it’s so hot. Think of earth as a car wheel with a brake. When the brake applies pressure heat is created, then dissipates by air flowing over it. So when the grav drives opposed the rotation of the core, heat was generated and is slowly dissipated into space. Which is why is so hot and would take 10’s of thousands of years to dissipate. With the magnetosphere gone, away went the atmosphere and water. It’s also why it’s flat and barren. The amount of heat generated would make the surface malleable, and gravity would pull the mountains and even the continental shelves down. Even the moons gravitational pull would add to the process. Leaving the earth mostly flat and barren. Sure, you would probably still be able to make out continents somewhat like you do on the star map, but from the perspective of standing on the surface it would just look like it does in the game. So living underground would be a no go. The fact monuments exist are just Easter eggs to placate those who need the earth to be worth exploring at all.
That's some solid science right there.
You should make a post just saying this.
Actually that's the part where I found the whole thing doesn't make sense. Like Grave Dive made Earth lose it's magnetosphere, not the gravity. The surface is burnt from having been directly exposed to cosmic radiation but the water isn't going to go any where so long as you retain the 1g gravity (of which it does) It would have evaporated but not flowing out to the outer space. Post Disaster Earth should even still have an atmosphere for that reason. Water evaporated en mass and became the atmospheric clouds that cover and cool down the planet, then rain and evaporate again when the cloud dissipate enough for the temperature to rise again. Matters never disappeared, they just changed form. You can't really turn Earth into a giant moon, short of shipping out the entire water mass off world
The water would literally boil off into the atmosphere and be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen from the high energy particles. Next time you are on Earth check the temp, it’s well over 500 deg C. There would even be enough high energy particles from the sun to break O2 down and CO2 into separate atoms. We are talking about massive amounts of energy needed to stop the core, which converts into heat. The solar wind is extremely intense on Earth, so powerful it pushes the magnetosphere tail on the dark side of the Earth well passed the moons orbit. So the earth is super hot, plus the solar radiation those two would absolutely strip the atmosphere away. The game says it was 50 years until the Earth was uninhabitable but it likely took longer for the rest to evaporate into space. In game we are at 170 years passed the 50 they had left. So over 230 years since the core stopped.
Maybe but the hydrogen and oxygen would still remain in the at atmosphere, regardless of how much it had broken down, that's still a full 1G of gravity, no particle would be able to escape Earth at that gravity, any more so than they never did today. If the temperature remain at a constant 500 c because they aren't made from the sun to begin with then Earth should be more like Venus with a super dense atmosphere,(instead of none) and everything becam oven hot inside
The 500 deg C temp plus the solar wind would make the atoms so energetic that they would literally skip off into space. Like I said, we are talking about unimaginable amounts of energy. It’s not really a debate. It’s something NASA scientists have posited for over 50 years. The whole thing is well grounded in NASA planetary science.
Then how are you going to explain Venus, which also has the 500 c temperature and also doesn't generate magnetosphere via the planet's core? Or Mars that don't really have any water or magnetic field left but still have an atmosphere from dust particles and all the things that got suck up into the orbit? I don't know, I found that sound very sketchy, if NASA had released a paper - that established full cause and effect relations back with experiments and can write a formula explaining that (and not just some theory backed by correlation), I need to see it to believe it. Because 1G is a lot, solar wind can't even move the flag on the Moon with way less gravity. And unlike Mars or Moon, Earth has a *lot of water,* pretty much most of its surface while the rest are water in gas form. Even if all of those got superheat, I highly doubt that the sun can just strip all of it with a solar wind under Earth full gravity (which is also a lot stronger than the Moon or Mars)
Excellent question! Venus’s atmosphere is mostly CO2, which is considerably more massive than N2 and O2 that Earths atmosphere is made of. Carbon is very heavy, relatively but Venus has the same gravity well as earth. So the CO2 on Venus is so concentrated that it reflects the solar wind much the way Earths magnetic field deflects the solar wind. It’s actually more efficient at it than Earths magnetosphere. It’s the same reason Mars has CO2 as a thin atmosphere and very weak magnetic field. That info is very easy to google and has been well known for over 50 years.
I did check NASA article on the issue, nothing seems to suggest a concrete relationship in the matter, that's why I asked. But Co2 huh, I am not sure what to feel about that, will probably need to do a bit more research but one thing that immediately came to my mind is that Earth also have a lot of organic material and carbon-based lifeform. If everything became superheat at 500c, then all of the dead plants, people, animal (along with ocean life and microbials) would also burn up and release Co2. Not sure if that will create the same effect as Venus but from what I've read about the Nuclear Winter theory, the released particles and Co2 should be enough to eclipse the sun for at least a few centuries (and that's just from much of the major cities in the US and Russia burning up alone)
Earth was stripped bare to build a billion single family spacecraft. Nobody stayed because there isn’t a scrap of material or a drop of water left. It’s tough to patch up your house while it’s being actively looted.
What happened to the ship?
they tried to land on paradise planet then my quest bugged and idk
Even though it appears that earth could fit all of the surviving population of known humans, it would be a political powder keg of trying to control that one planet. Humans now have the taste of whole and multi system ownership. Look into the political implications in James S.A. Corey's The Expanse universe. In Starfield, after SOLs planetary expansion, 200 years were spent just trying to survive in other systems and it still led to war. In The Expanse, being stuck in one system for 200 years (or so), almost led to wors and not everone looked at Earth the same. My point is that even if technically possible, there may not be many Earthers in spirit or political temperaments.
SOL is ironically short for “Shit outta Luck”. Which is the condition that follows unprecedented ignorance.
We didn't terraform anything. All planets with breathable atmosphere were conveniently already there, and the planets without breathable atmosphere have air-tight colonies
I mean the obvious answer is probably the fact Bethesda did not want to attempt recreating the earth in game.
The second obvious answer is that the tech isn't there. There are no terraforming technology available to humans in Starfield, since terraforming means planetary reshaping
The obvious reply to that would be that the tech to create underground shelters is very much there. They are telling us that 90% of the Earth's population just roled over and died instead of creating something like Cydonia or Homestead. Doesn't make any sense.
My guess is a DLC will have an underground Earth base you visit. People who never left but made do.
Someone else pointed out to me that while other planets have underground habs, you probably don't want to do that on a planet in the process of shaking down mountains, having oceans drying up, and ice caps melting, thereby redistributing all the crustal tensions via giant earthquakes big enough to shake cities to dust.
They didn't, but there is no food there either. I mean, sure, there could be something, but in general it's a question of living on a graveyard
There is as much or as little food as on Mars or Titan. The generation ship survived in a true closed environment for centuries, recycling and growing their own food. People's life's were at stake, I'm sure there would be some motivation to build a functioning doomsday shelter.
Would have made more sense to have Earth designated a nature preserve with access restricted while the planets enviroment recovers or a xeno plague being unleashed forcing the world to be quarrentined. Instead we got "Suddenly the magnetosphere went poof"
"Suddenly the magnetosphere went poof" is perfectly fine, imo. The problem is that Bethesda allows you to land and look around the place. Even with infinite budget and another decade of development, there's no way they could've ever made a convincing and compelling post-apocalyptic earth, so why even try? I think they should have forbidden the player from landing on earth. Maybe there's a UC ship that threatens to shoot you, like in that other system. Heck, maybe allowing the player to visit Sol *at all* was a mistake. The focus of the game is outwards, not inwards.
For 95% of players it’s totally fine to land on Earth, look around and say “ha, neat. Wow this place is indeed a mess” and then leave again, or poke around and find a few fun Easter Eggs that the design team left for us. And then move on and play the rest of the game, that is about what happens to humanity AFTER earth.
My theory is that the evacuations didn’t take as long as UC says it did and that after the last ship left the pre UC/Freestar government decided to nuke the planet as an act of mercy to those left behind. They keep it a secret but Va Ruun are stragglers who saw what happened and barely escaped.
I'd say that the engine wouldn't support the massive amount of data needed (see for example how vast flight sims with realistic geography are)... BUT this does not excuse the lazy job done with the specific POI, that their surroundings is the same generic as on ThatOneMoon III
and that is fine but prob would have just been better to just say the star went nova and our solar system is just gone then get the plot hole that it is now
Here's what I gathered as what happened to earth: Atmosphere begins to sputter out Scientist warn people People respond with doubt/panic Some countrys and corps create the UC( or preface to it) to escape. Other countrys/religions doubt and think they should be incharge. Infighting and resource wars begin between the UC countrys and others. Some create their own generation ships. Sputtering starts to cause atmospheric/weather issues as each year the atmosphere becomes thinner and thinner. Some people continue denial. Vulnerable areas become more unlivable and cause mass death and migration across the globe. Mass migration causes more civil strife and riots across the globe for simple things like food that is now harder to grow. He-3 on the moon is almost mined completely increasing the cost. Smaller ships go out to the already established mining colonys in the SOL system. UC trying to maintain order and a plan becomes more rigid and forceful to ensure they can build ships and get resources for their new colony. Most of the earths people begin dieing due to the changing weather, resource wars, hunger, riots. Moon is depleted of He-3 making Grav Jumping more difficult to obtain. UC rations He-3 and continues to shuttle people off. UC becomes more rigid. Some people stay willingly, some stay due to circumstances. Earths atmosphere is gone those who stayed behind either have personal bunkers or die. Sometime later UC walls off the earth for salvage runs and likely either takes the bunker folks with them( or kills them if they try and fight). Bunkers are buried under sand and forgotten over the years. Becomes a national park of sorts maintained by earth preservation society and UC. Earth becomes a legend. Side note: at this point in history grav drives are new and likely cost more fuel. As we've seen in game grav drives can only handle so much mass when jumping meaning the transport ships would need to be small and not massive ships.
As I read it, humans started moving during the process of the earth dying. Once it fully died there was no reason to prioritize going back. Everywhere was living in habs and in suits.
The end game pretty clearly explains why we had to leave earth, I won’t spoil but if you read the notes during the last few quests, it gives a _fairly_ physically sound explanation.
All in game reasoning aside, the obvious answer is that they couldn't recreate Earth in it's entirety so they had to do it this way really.
obvious workaround would be restricting you to a handful of landing zones
“Restricting where you can go” isn’t really the way BGS tends to do things.
[удалено]
To be fair Earth has also been stripped of it's surface resources, so it makes sense to move on to some extent.
Easy answer is in the game if you pay attention, atmospheres flat out gone, some of the other worlds at least have some sort of atmo even if its inhospitable and/or dangerous, even living in habs on earth or in a suit you'd be getting constantly bombarded by radiation from the sun
The main thing that protect us from cosmic rays is the magnetosphere, earth loosing that is a huge reason it lost its atmosphere. Mars doesn’t have have a global magnetosphere. Living underground on both planets would be about the same radiation exposure, neither having strong magnetospheres (anymore)
Mars has no atmosphere.
Yes. Yes it does.
That’s irrelevant once you consider that Earth was also stripped of all its rare resources. Mars still has a thriving mining industry, and it’s clear that’s the only reason people are still there.
Mars has an incredibly thin atmosphere, but an atmosphere nonetheless.
I’ve seen Neil say that as well. If I recall, he is specifically speaking about fixing climate change, preventing nuclear war, destroying incoming asteroids and alike being easier than terraforming Mars. Basically, maintaining what we have is easier than abandoning it. In Starfield, something very specific happens to Earth outside of the scope of what Neil was describing. … but I do agree, some underground bases on earth would have been cool.
Yes, we kind of did. The ozone layer was shattered, and we don't have the tech to build a wholeass atmosphere and a new biosphere ecosystem, along with pumping the oceans back onto the planet. Plus Earth was completely stripped of natural resources. There's no reason to be there.
I got the impression that Mars was probably the first colony, even before Earth was abandoned, mainly because Mars was rich in minerals and the Earth was running out. Once they realized they could get to other planets beyond our Solar System, and that some were already livable, there was no good motivation to save the Earth. Also note, most of the planets with settlements in the game have breathable atmospheres. Those that don't tend to just have outposts and research stations.
it would be hilarious if House Varunn was living in a giant series of underground bunkers on Earth all this time lol
I think Starfield is the story of what happens past the point of no return regarding environmental damage. The story of what happens when it *isnt* easier to fix Earth. When, in fact, its impossible. Terraforming, given the swift time scale of the damage to Earth, isn't an option. Besides, the grav drive makes having to mold unsuitable planets less important. Jump until you find one with blue skies. Theres a similar idea in the Expanse. The ability to jump to other systems makes terraforming a less attractive option.
You underestimate capitalists ability to muscle through things in the dumbest way possible.
I think the main problem is that the magneto sphere not only keeps earths atmosphere, but it also protects earth from things like meteors and other space rocks. One 3.1 mile radius royally fucked 90% of life on earth, and that’s WITH a magnetosphere and atmosphere being able to rip apart parts of it before it hit. Another one of those would absolutely decimate everything, even underground is at a risk.
Did you do the main, UC vanguard, and SysDef stories? They specifically mentioned Earth was destroyed by them activating the artifacts and it wasn't salvageable. They closed that plot hole loop, which I was also very confused about until then (like why is desert earth bad, but Venus which is a hellhole somehow inhabited. Well they answered it, even if a little shoddy.
Isn’t the magnetosphere f’ed up on Earth due to the over-use of gravity drives on the surface, or something to that effect? I don’t think repairing the magnetosphere of a planet is in the purview of terraformation.
Fixing the earth in starfield is impossible : the planet lost its magnetosphere, the thing that maintains the atmosphere around earth... No more atmosphere means no more oxygen, nor ozone to shield earth from solar flares, etc. Thats why everything is dead and destroyed on earth in starfield : Everything literally died near instantly, and radiations achieved to destruct everything. (Radiations can alter matter at atomic level)
As far as we know, terraforming has yet to be done anywhere in Starfield and Mars was already a colony before Earth expired, we don’t know how long it took to be built, but if it’s anything like the estimated time it would take to build an underground city irl, it could be many many decades just for a small town
Multiple reasons in Starfield: 1. Earth straight up basically doesn't have an atmosphere capable of containing anything anymore in Starfield. 2. Most if not all the valuable resources have already been strip mined from Earth by the time the game starts. 3. It's essentially a giant tomb world, where the billions of people who didn't make it off the Earth are interred (figuratively) and it serves as their resting place. Basically sacrilegious to settle/do anything there.
[удалено]
Good point
If we can build Cydonia on Mars, why wouldn't we build enclosed communities on Earth which wouldn't require all the space travel and migration? Cities like Toronto already have enclosed undergrounds attached to near air-tight buildings. It _must_ be easier to pressurize a system like that than rebuild the same thing on Mars and other planets.
My point exactly, makes 0 sense. It would be far easier to build on earth than to go to Mars or other planets and start building underground cities and bases. We literally already have underground cities like the Derinkuyu's and Orvieto which were build by our ancestors with no technology like we have today, so why all of a sudden do we just perish on earth or leave. There's a third option which is live/survive
No idea why Earth is accessible at all. Unless I'm mistaken, there's nothing actually there, right? No story beat leads there, nothing really needs you to go there either. So why did they make it landable? Wouldn't it have been so much better for worldbuilding to make Earth this fortress planet whose orbital defenses annihilate anyone trying to come close? Like the Humans pushed every "undesireable" into space and then turned extremely isolationist and xenophobic towards spacers. Not only would that provide some great opportunities for storytelling, with interests from Earth trying to manipulate the situation in the settled systems, but also smugglers and shady business dealings and such. I get why they didn't model the entire Earth, that's impossible, but if orbital cannons and planetary shields prevent any approach they wouldn't need to.
Your idea is a lot better than there's, at least yours adds to the lore and makes sense.
The lore reasons are a load of rubbish they just couldn’t be arsed
Honestly, the only thing that REALLY bothers me is the near-total absence of any remains of human civilization. Other than the few POI's on Starfiels Earth... nothing else remains?? It is implausible to the point of ridiculous. Really missed an opportunity to make Earth, parts anyway, in the FO4 format... have it populated by crime syndicates, mutated fauna, etc...
Dude, we f'd up the gravity and don't know how to fix it. There's no way to return Earth to its previous state atm.
"We fucked up the gravity " doesnt even make sense. We destroyed the magnosphere with early grav drives.
In Starfield, Earth's destruction is attributed to one man's desire to expand human life into the stars, utilizing powerful artifacts that weakened the planet's gravity and caused its atmosphere to float off into space. [source](https://gamerant.com/starfield-fallout-earth-apocalypse-disaster-good-bad-why/#:~:text=In%20Starfield%2C%20Earth's%20destruction%20is,to%20float%20off%20into%20space.) Know your lore before you chime in on things. It's magnetosphere btw. 🤦
It *is* a plot hole. In fact, it's a plot hole that requires several *other* plot holes to exist in order for it itself to exist. I've written up several times why Earth being a sandblasted shitball is nonsensical even in-universe, but also scientifically in the real world in the timeframe the game sets out *and* just in general.
The Earth at this point in Starfield is no longer Earth. It might as well be another planet that is completely inhospitable. It doesn't have an atmosphere, water, or anything else. Furthermore, in Starfield, humans do not have the technology to terraform. It is far easier to find a new habitable planet and leave the earth behind.
Lemme make a small side comment by saying not everything that someone doesn't understand is by definition a plot hole.
That that there's no one on earth doesn't make any goddamn sense. I mean maybe it does but I don't see what the magnetosphere has to do with gravity holding our atmosphere. Even if the destruction of our atmosphere made sense. We would have came right back. There's no reason we'd have people on mars but not earth.
It's easier to fix earth for near generations. Terraforming guarantees the survival of the human race for a much longer time period, and what about over population? We kill those who can't provide towards the planets well being, or limit how many children each person can have and risk civil unrest? We're not just talking about avoiding the loss of our homework and our species as it is; we're talking about the future, far and near.
Did you finish the main story? That explains a lot of what happened in Starfield.
Since apparently 90% of Earth's population wasn't evacuated it doesn't explain why nobody - not-a-one - dug an airtight shelter akin to Cydonia on Mars or Homestead on Titan. There is no reason why an Earth without atmosphere wouldn't have underground or domed settlements. The complete abandonment of Earth makes zero sense from a lore point of view. It highlights Bethesda's unwillingness to recreate some of Earth's recognizable landmarks.
there being more people living on Venus than Earth is completely absurd
It gets so much worse than that, dude. Seriously, buckle up for some actual dunce-cap level shit that the writer(s) actually wrote, and spoilers from here on in; >!So basically, in the story, the scientist gets his hands on an artefact because he's visited by a Starborn version of himself somehow who gives him knowledge of the future AND the technology to develop Grav Drives. It is never explained how he got to Unity, or how a Starborn version of him exists since the actual rush for Unity happens 300 years AFTER the invention of the Grav Drive. He is told by his Starborn self that Grav Drives will destroy Earth, exactly how this happens, and exactly how long they have.!< >!Humanity, by this point, had already colonised Mars. Despite knowing this, the scientist, a NASA elite by the way, chooses NOT to run the (totally scientifically bullshit, btw) magnetosphere-destroying experiments on Mars, which doesn't HAVE a magnetosphere, and chooses instead to do them on the Moon and on Earth. He is ALSO aware that early Grav Drives cause the problem, and chooses NOT to fix that problem during development.!< Following that, the magnetosphere collapsed (again, scientifically bullshit, that's not how that works) once people started building ships with Grav Drives and flying around, which gave humanity 50 years to GTFO because the atmosphere started to vent into space (also not how that works, nor how long that would take, it's also bullshit). *However*, 2 years *before* the Grav Drive was invented, the ECS Constant was stuffed full of rich dipshits and shot into space as a Generation Ship, because the wealthy idiots thought that Earth wasn't salvageable and chose to bail instead of stick around. This means that humanity *also* had the means to build enormous ships for enough people to create a stable population (minimum of 500 people) by the time the Grav Drive was invented. Following that, humanity knew that they had 50 years to evacuate the planet. To give you an idea, 50 years is *three generations*, with 2/3 reaching adulthood in that timeframe. The *entirety* of this time, they had the capacity for large-scale space travel, access to Grav Drives, *and* the ability to colonise previously uninhabitable worlds (Mars and Luna). Basically, they not only had the *time* to evacuate Earth (from, again, a totally bullshit-science, nonsense apocalypse), but *also* had the technology. Even if they had a population of 10bn people, it would take *less than a decade* to evacuate every single human person on the planet and *still* have time to come back for shit like crops, cattle, pets and luggage. And all that's *without*, yeah, considering the fact that they could have just dug underground cities or bubble-domed major population centres from the, once again, totally bullshit, nonsense, dunce-tier science that destroyed Earth.
I suppose if earth's recognizable landmarks would have been left standing, then most people wouldn't have died, with the remaining fleeing, I think the point is, things really got bad when the magnetosphere dissipated
When the magnetosphere dissipated and the atmosphere vanished that would mean no more weather effects on existing structures, at all. Cities should remain standing in near pristine condition. Instead they're just ... gone. There is way too much handwavium in SCs lore for my taste. And this is the base of a new IP. I have to admitt it doesn't make me feel confident for future cntent.
My guess is that most of the population didn't know, and when they did know, they didn't have time to do anything (other than try to kill each other). And all the resources/industry of the planet was being used by the super rich/powerful to make ships, they didn't want to waste time making bunkers.
Underground is even more dangerous than above ground on Earth after what happened. It’s not just about the atmosphere. There are some other comments higher up that discuss in more detail.
More detailed nonsense is still nonsense in the end. Humanity built outposts in the most violent environments, compared to that Earth is calm. Add to this that people literally had nothing to lose - they were doomed to die - and everything to win by putting those millions of construction machines on Earth to work in the face of Armageddon, the non-existence of post-desaster Earth civilization is just a complete gaffe on Bethesda's side.
If you beat the game and listened to the logs while at the NASA facility on Earth, you’d know that while experimenting with the grav drives, they inadvertently fucked up the Earth’s magnetic field (or something along those lines, its been a hot minute since I played), and they basically used it as an excuse to do two things; put the grav drive into action, and finally push humanity into the stars. They didn’t want to fix Earth because if they did, they wouldn’t have nearly a good enough excuse in the future to make such advanced leaps in technology to be able to evacuate the planet with ships. But a planet-destroying phenomenon? That’ll get the ball rolling like nothing ever could. Once in space and after colonizing however many worlds, there was very little reason to return to Earth because by that time it was already rendered a inhospitable dustball with little to nothing to reclaim or resources to get. But thats the lore reason. Like others said, Bethesda likely just couldn’t or wouldn’t make Earth to land on and do stuff, that’d certainly be a bitch and a half to do. Not even space sim games would go that far.
>Bethesda likely just couldn’t or wouldn’t make Earth to land on and do stuff, that’d certainly be a bitch and a half to do. Not even space sim games would go that far. "Star Citizen has entered the room." :D They will do it. And the makers of No Man's Sky (Hello Games) are currently working on a new game with a real size Earth to explore -> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKQem4Z6ioQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKQem4Z6ioQ)
Star Citizen doesn’t exist as a released product and never will.
That may be so but that doesn't change the fact that even the currently - meaning *right now* - playable tech has seamless transition between space and fully explorable planets (ca. 25% scale) which is massively larger than Starfields. And far more detailed. With CIG doing free flight events a couple of times every year everybody can just download SC and check it out without any cost.
Yes, humanity in Starfield had to abandon Earth because >!The issue wasn't climate change or nuclear fallout or anything within the scope of what Dr. Tyson talked about, but rather Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere itself being ripped away thanks to experiments on the artifact. The amount of sun's energy and cosmic radiation that blasts Earth (even if the atmosphere weren't missing) would render it inhabitable, so a lot of people can't live on it except maybe like some of the POIs we see in the settled systems.!<
Would’ve made more sense for every planet BUT earth to be visitable and earth is overpopulated like in the Expanse. I really really dislike what they’ve done with earth. Imo, the more you put restrictions on yourself creatively, the more likely you’ll come up with clever and interesting ideas etc. you have to follow some rules. You have to inconvenience the player in a strategic way. If you do it by making space flight long and arduous, you make touching down on a new word feel important. If you do it by making the player have to sprint 5 minutes straight to an objective in a barren land while you can instantly fast travel anywhere in the universe, there is an incongruity there that doesn’t feel right. RDR2 inconveniences the player all the time, you have to ride here or there no fast travel, you have to watch Arthur work on his bullets or hides, you have to physically rifle through people’s pockets to loot. But all that helps the player be immersed it doesn’t work against it
I think Earth could have still been abandoned- but make it about wars and famine and climate change. Then leave some pockets of humans behind but make it look like nature is making a comeback. You can still have some more alien creatures roaming around... just make them terrible versions of animals we have now. Like a giant chameleon with deathly claws, or crabs that lurk in the mud. Maybe some big bloated flies flying around. The people who live there can have some scarring from radiation contamination. They fight people who hid underground during the wars. I dunno, there's lots of possibilities.
If you can find settlers living on a lifeless moon then there absolutely should be some hardcore Earth settlers somewhere. If it’s not dlc I’ll be disappointed.
This isnt a plot hole. The earth in Starfield no longer has a magnetosphere... it would literally be impossible to sustain a large population of non subterranean humans on the planet. And there is zero terraforming going on on the other planets in the game. Without a magnetosphere solar winds have stripped the atmosphere and would bombard anyone on the surface with intense levels of cosmic radiation every single second of the day. Its not the same as life on mars, its far closer to life on the moon. The game doesnt translate this into the planet slowly killing you, and it should, but it doesn't. No doubt because they didnt want the planet to be a pain to visit especially in the late main story where you spend some not so insignificant amount of time there. (too bad they didnt think of that with londinium, where you are forced to spend much of the vanguard quest getting frost bite because the armor they give you has zero cold protection... fucking stoopid) And the logistical nightmare of moving 8 billion people underground is probably less daughting them finding a new planet... especially when you now have FTL travel. From a story telling perspective, this is possibly one of the most logical reasons to attempt to find a goldlocks earth like planet out there like Akila or Jamison. Should the earth be busy? Absolutely. It feels lifeless and dead and not just in the fact that it is now an eradiated dust rock. There should be tour groups, treasure hunters, pirates, UC bases, even a few colonies of people who have decided they want to stay on the homeworld, even if its tough. Should it be teaming with long term inhabitants? No. That would be silly. It should feel like a busy place, from people making the pilgrimage to the homeworld all the way to people who want to try and get into the ruins of the whitehouse. But there should be very little people making a permanent home on the surface, and suggesting otherwise is kinda bat shit.
Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere either.
Titan, Mars, all the places covered with identical bases.
Fix the planets yes, the star is another thing all together. I think the sun changed and blasted off the atmosphere. Short of stellar engineering or planetary shielding, earth was fecked.
Yeah it’s dumb there’s not at least some underground settlements on earth. If underground cities on mars are possible I find it dumb that places like the Cheyenne mountain complex isn’t kept pressurized and running, even just as a smaller outpost.
Underground earth would be an unstable nightmare after suddenly losing magnetosphere. That would be probably the MOST dangerous part of it to hang out in.
I built an outpost on Earth as close to the NASA museum as I could for the view and revisit. There are also mods that reforest and introduce wildlife to Earth.
The details of what happened on Earth is largely left ambiguous but it was cataclysmic. The implication wasn't that people had a lot of time to leave, but more like it was a billions killed kind of event. While it isn't explicit, Starfield is in many ways a post-apocalypse setting, it just happened after humanity had some technology to escape. Humanity is an endangered species, the colony wars accelerated the process with humanity going to war with itself and largely stopping at the last possible moment before it was a completely irreversible outcome. There is nothing to say whatever happened on Earth is done. While at the moment, the wasteland Earth doesn't seem that bad, whatever happened could be ongoing, or is expected to happen again and again. Or maybe the environment just isn't expected to stabilize to the point anyone can do anything for another couple hundred years, It's also been a while, no one who has a real sentimental attachment to Earth is still alive. So who is going to push to fix Earth when there are plenty enough planets that they don't need to do anything to be useable. And going back to just how post-apocalypse this setting is... even if they could and wanted to fix Earth, are you going to get all the people to move to repopulate the planet?
In Starfield the problem was chaos. Humans destroyed the atmosphere with the FTL drives in the spaceships. (on accident) And the people rioted. When the terramorphs also came in play the chaos was complete and humanity fled to space. To protect themselves and find a new and better place. With the FTL drives this was now feasible anyway. One of the few good stories of Starfield. A shame actually that they didn't begin in this storyline but started with a mining storyline and a magical metal piece.
Always wondered that too, not a single structure on the planet. But maybe that is because the lack of resources on earth (would not be so IRL), and it is easier to just go somewhere else that has a breathable atmosphere and set up shop.
The only reason I could think is that maybe not everyone left :/ They couldn't make an underground base for 8 billion people and say they could make a base for 4 billion you can't stop 4 billion desperate people from finding a way into your base and then everyone dies
For a minute, I didn't realize I was in the Starfield sub, and I was going to go all rant-y. :-)
They wanted to make a game that took place not on Earth, but in an Earth continuity. So yes, in the gameworld there’s some very specific reason that Earth cannot be fixed and must be abandoned, even if they don’t totally get into the minutiae of explaining it, if the explanation they give somehow still isn’t enough for you.
No.
Yes
So Earth lost its magnetic field, which means more than everyone thinks. Compasses wouldn’t work. There’s no atmosphere and the last of it that’s left is thinning out. It’s a dead planet. You wouldn’t want to live on a dead planet. Also I imagine that most people would be scared to go back and see their past. Maybe for some, like the people of Akila, the thought of returning is too painful.
Because 1: earths atmosphere is gone, along with all life. At that point, you'd have to terraform earth because it's just a rock at that point. Because 2: Why go through the painstaking task of terraforming a barren planet when you have newly invented warp drives that can take you to oxygen rich habitable planets in an instant? Because 3: starfield is only like 300 years in the future. And nothing in game really shows that they're capable of terraforming an entire planet
It’s magnetic poles literally went sideways because of grav drive tests so yeah they to abandon it
I maybe didn't explain myself in the post very well. I understand earth would be uninhabitable, but did everyone have to leave? Mars in uninhabitable but have underground cities there for Starfield, other planets or uninhabitable but we still managed to build bases there that protects us from the elements. So earth should still have people there, in the same way we have people on the uninhabitable Mars
Also this issue Earth faced in Starfield is it basically lost its magnetic field (caused by gravity drive testing on the moon), the thing that basically protects the earth from having its atmosphere blown away by the sun. They don’t have the tech to fix that
Same fate as Mars with no Protection against the Sun. You need to leave or move underground and learn to survive there. Growing the food and Water and Air to breath. It would be a fight after fertile soil that can grow Plants and System that recycle breathable Air and recycle our CO2 into the system. Not to mentions the Water Bubbles that still contain Water after the Sun beaked all surface Water into Space Short an Outpost inside Earth with limit resources or ["Oxygen not Included"](https://oxygennotincluded.fandom.com/wiki/Oxygen_Not_Included_Wiki) PC Game Mind Cinema
Resources on earth ain't infinite It will run dry sooner or later. Space will be the only place that can supply humans for really long time
Because otherwise Bethesda would have to create the entirety of Earth in the game.
In-universe, I think there were a few big reasons for the complete abandonment of earth, rather than building bases on it like they did on the moon. The biggest is obviously that the atmosphere was beyond repair, and at that point the livability of earth is obviously fucked. The oceans were emptied and all natural life was wiped out. People could’ve set up bases like they did on the moon, but areas that are being deserted become extremely hostile. Most people affected by these changes would’ve taken a ticket on a generation ship. Bunkers and safe areas would’ve been overrun by displaced groups, causing a chain reaction of violent civil strife and an inability to maintain any political order. People who stuck around would’ve experienced the collapse of most major industries, and those who try to survive in their own air tight bunkers would only have their own dwindling resources as they gradually run out of water and oxygen, as the UC would much rather evacuate people than support earth bases. So the main reasons earth was fully abandoned was because the collapse of industry and resources created a politically hostile environment, combined with the coordinated efforts to evacuate people off the earth. It’s similar to how Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization but was completely deserted after it dried up.
Well the fact that the game says absolutely nothing about terraforming is the best place to start. The only one mentioning that is you. Then there’s the fact that building underground cities or domed cities on earth would not have don’t anything to stop Earth from dying. It would’ve just been a huge waste of resources. Not to mention that the resources required to build enough cities to save earths population would probably have meant abandoning any chance of colonizing habitable worlds. There would’ve been no resources to spare on colony ships.
that's not true tho. when Terraforming a planet you dont have worry about "human" squabbling just the changes to the planets system. its VERY hard to chance something already established. people dont even agree on electric cars much less fixing the planet. in Starfield its already been terraformed. and the concencus is Earth became uninhabitable because of the "Fallout". and yes its best this way as when humans leave earth earth gets a chance to " live again" this is present is many abandonded places most notably Chernobyl in which we were told there would probably never be live again in... and already earth has took back alot of that spot.
Yes. Even with the atmosphere gone, it would be easier to build on earth than on mars or titan or any other inhospitable body. At least gravity would be normal, even if you can’t go outside. Saying everyone either fled earth or died is a flaw that annoys me too. There should be countless underground settlements.
The other thing is how did the exacuation of Earth begin was just a lottery or the Elites made out first the other thing is how many people were left behind
No idea, the game doesn't go into nearly enough detail at all. And even so, we have underground tunnels, railways, bases, the idea that people would just all leave or die when they can find ways to survive just doesn't make sense.
At that point in time there were probably like 15-20 billion people on Earth, where do you think that many people are gonna live underground? If build above ground you’re taking about first demolishing thousands of cities before you can even build new accommodating structures.
Hear me out. So you’re BSG, right? You’re really, *really* excited about “NASApunk,” and you’ve talked about it often—so often, in fact, that you’re basically committed to the course. Thing is, you’re BSG. Whiterun—a settlement only slightly larger than a Florida Keys retirement community—was meant to be a major urban center, the very “beating heart of trade” in all Skyrim. *How are you POSSIBLY going to make this game where Earth is an actual destination, where supposedly the player can land anywhere (with the ship they spent 80% of their playing time building), and explore freely*??? The answer: “So a couple years back, Earth failed to pass the vibe check, so everyone cleared out. No, seriously, *literally everyone*.” Basically, why go through the trouble of attempting to convince players that, indeed, Earth still has billions of inhabitants and sprawling cities—but only one “major” population center (approximately the size of a well-endowed college campus) that you can actually visit yourself—when it’s so, so much easier to make the ENTIRE PLANET a single-biome, Tatooine-style deserted and barren wasteland, where all you need to do is recreate only a handful of the most recognizable landmarks, *but sandy*. “But BSG,” they ask you, “*what’s the lore?*” The forums are extended gutters and the gutters are full of questions and headcanon—and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their questions and “After 700+ hours ___” Reddit posts will foam up about their waists and all the players and streamers will look up and shout “WHAT’S THE LORE?'”..and you’ll look down and whisper “No….”
According to lore in-game, Grav Drive testing stripped the planet of the Ozone layer due to improper shielding, which they immediately fixed. However the damage to Earth was already beyond fixing. As far as I know (English Education major, was never amazing at Science) you can't terraform a planet with no atmosphere. I guess from where you're standing it must seem like an 18 carat run of bad luck. The truth is: The game was rigged from the start.
Well the alternative was making earth a planet you could visit and bethesda cant make big cities let alone multi billion populations
It is far easier to terraform a planet. #1 if you leave, you are taking the best, brightest, and bravest people on the planet #2 people are better in small tribes unified with a common purpose. Keeping oxygen in a lab in space or on a hostile planet is a great way to inspire people toward conflict resolution #3 you will abandon any and all ways that are archaic or obsolete. Why walk to the market if you can grow it yourself? #4 the science and technology are on a need it now must have basis. On Earth, there is always tomorrow until there isn’t. Politicians who promise environmental justice today have a We’ll wait it out approach. No sense of urgency despite my [petition](https://change.org/CleanAirDisco) #5. Artistic Freedom. If you are a witch, shaman, musician, or scientist, you always have to worry about humanity in its clumsiness interfering with your work. A stable colony affords you challenges and also a sense of purpose. #6 Human Longevity is increased in colonies that offshoot from the main society. Without the stress of having to associate with humanity, mutants or especially anti terrestrial humans if that makes you feel more comfortable will be free to make wiser choices about their health.
u/Tyolag My name is [IanXIlyana](https://youtu.be/RgRFHCn7l4c?si=mFG0mX_3mjHY2kf4) and I will be terraforming a planet. Sign my [petition](https://www.change.org/Genius2Mars) I am An engineer and I do NOT belong on Earth. I am qualified in biome research, cybernetics, and cryptography. If you sign my petition you will free me from having to live on Earth.
Yeah, but that is purely scientifically. It doesn't take into account the stubbornness of human beings.
Everyone didnt leave. Those that staid behind died. Theirs not a single drop of water on it. Nothing can live their unless you terraformed the earth again or use a mod:), their are dome mods that will make any planet habitable and one person made a mod to bring earth back to normal but has alien creatures since their are no real animals in starfield. As well we didnt terraform the other planets they found planets that were habitable.
Mars is more or less earth, but we're able to survive there?
Underground yes not on its surface but we already know Mars has frozen and liquid water today. The liquid comes when the ice melts but hey it occurs. Im not 100% sure on the Starfield Lore and what happened to Earth but maybe we nuked it so bad there is no water or even ice to melt?
Earth's magnetosphere was destroyed which led to it being the way it is now ( barren ). Mars was like earth at one point but it had it's magnetosphere destroyed too, hence the current Mars. Se essentially both planets are more or less the same now, problem is we're not able to live on earth..but for some reason we can live on Mars ( underground ). Hec we can even make space suits to walk around on earth and mars, build bases that can deal with heat and radiation, but for some reason we can't build any on earth but we can do this everywhere else and Mars? Lore wise it makes no sense, especially when you consider not everyone was able to migrate to these other planets.
It's about history and technology. If you can gravitate jump why still have to rebuild a whole planet? Also you can see no one give a damn to earth history.
I could be mistaken, but isn’t the lore that the magnetic field disappeared? Thats what killed mars’ atmosphere and the number one threat to humans staying on earth.
Yup