If you care at all about space (and you should, because we’re all in it), you probably heard about NASA’s discovery of the Trappist-1 system with seven rocky exoplanets at the right range for water and life. It’s incredibly cool news, and it’s made even cooler by the fact that Elite: Dangerous is adding in the data for a system at the right location and distance to ensure that you can fly out there and explore it for yourself.
Of course, that’s less of an accomplishment than it might seem, because it turns out the star and the planets were already there.
All right, that’s not exactly true, but Elite: Dangerous did have a star system in just about the same place, with almost the same star and close to the right number of planets. It’s all based on the game’s predictive system, which tries to guess at what’s out there in the void even when we don’t know about it. The location will be brought in line with what we now know to be true in the next patch, but still, how nifty is it that the two line up so well?
