10 Times Video Games Accurately Predicted The Future

10. Elite Dangerous Finds A Real Star System Before NASA

For all of human history and knowledge, and despite passionate people who spend their lives studying it, understanding and unravelling the truths of outer space is still a slow process.

In February 2017, astronomers discovered a new system of planets orbiting a star called Trappist-1. Even finding one new star is something to be excited about, but for NASA to discover a system of seven planets that seemed similar to our own was a real moment in astronomy.

Except someone had beaten them to it… sort of.

Elite Dangerous is a space-faring adventure title that, by its very nature, needs to have a vast universe for its players to explore. As such, Frontier Developers used an algorithm of pre-existing space data to plot out their solar system. Upon the discovery of Trappist-1, the devs looked into their game’s map and found that their algorithm had pretty much already put it there.

39 light years away from Earth, which in a relative sense is pretty close to Trappist-1’s 39.5 light years, there was a brown dwarf star and several planets around it.

NASA: Boldly going where video game algorithms have gone before.