Scientifically Dubious Aspects of No Man’s Sky

Yes, I am, to some degree, going to be pedantic here. I know that. You don’t have to tell me. I’m having fun, and if you don’t want to see me having fun, well, go somewhere else!

What I’m Not Going to Critique

I’m not going to provide a critique of the following parts of No Man’s Sky because the genre requires that these game elements be present:

• Fast interstellar travel (that’s the entire point of the game, right?)
• Negation of inertia (the ships fly very badly, but that’s not a science quibble)
• Near instantaneous teleportation over intragalactic distances (as of the Foundation update, and the game more or less requires it, so no penalty assigned)
• A mining and defense multi-weapon that (somehow) gathers liberated materials to the player

The developers get those for free. After that, I’m going to insist that there be some consistency either in the environment they’ve set up, or — having agreed to let them get away with a few things for the sake of game play — insist that much of what remains match how physical laws are known to work.

So, on to the Wrong Stuff

It goes wrong from the beginning — during the “fly-in” as the game engine cranks up, one appears to transit through an extensive star field. There are two problems that I see immediately.

1. Green and purple stars: stars aren’t green or purple. That’s just how the physics works out, folks — sorry! [Aside: The “RYCA-1: Dream of a New World” exhibit that one observed on the speed ramp after the Space Mountain ride at Walt Disney World starting in 1985, featured a scene with a green star with purple coronal mass ejections (or maybe it was a purple star with green coronal mass ejections). No matter which way it appeared, it was hideous — and wrong.]
2. The stars are too close together. Here’s how I can tell: I can see disks as they approach me (they don’t remain as single pixels at the point of “closest approach”). That allows me to gauge their sizes. Let’s assume that any one of them (which we’ll call Σ) is the size of the Sun. That’s about 0.0093 astronomical units (an AU is the distance from the Sun to the Earth, about 147.9 million kilometers). Any nearby star Ψ (for example, orbiting Σ) might be 9.6 AU away (the distance between the Sun and Saturn, and also the closest distance between Alpha Centauri A and B as they orbit their common center of mass). That means the distance between Σ and its neighbor Ψ is about 1,032 Σ diameters. Since the maximum size of Σ on my screen is about 10 pixels, that means the nearest star should be about 10,322 pixels from Σ. Given the 96 DPI pixel density on my monitor, that’s about 3 meters away from wherever Σ happens to be at any time. No matter what, the average distance between stars in the Milky Way is about 6 light years. That’s a separation of over 40,800,000 pixels; that next star would be 11 kilometers away at 96 DPI. The average distance between stars in a globular cluster is one light year. We have no reason to believe these distances change in other galaxies, so those stars are just too darned close together. Yes, I agree that the start-up wouldn’t be as visually interesting if they were further apart. But science, right? (Yes, I realize I’m mixing metric system measurements with DPI — but roll with it, please. “37.8 DPcm” floweth not trippingly off the fingers.)

Now, onto the star systems themselves.

1. Space is black. It’s not highly-saturated cerise, magenta, or puce.
2. Asteroid fields aren’t as dense as portrayed in the game. Fields of that density would have collapsed and amalgamated into proto-planets after not too long a time. If you attempt to refute this by saying that the time hasn’t elapsed yet — well, they can’t all be that way, and they all are.
3. The planets are too close together. The moons are too close to the planets. I realize that this is to allow players to spend more time exploring and less twiddling their various palps and manus while traveling, but the jump/pulse drive mechanic could have been adjusted to make traveling over a realistically-sized star system more palatable. Since navigation in-system is more visually-driven than instrument-driven, I suppose I can only count this as half a fault.
4. Black holes, when found in a star system, seem to translate your ship over a million light-years from its previous location. The largest galaxies ever observed were no more than 400,000 light years in diameter when the light left them; if your ship is transported over a million light years, you’re between galaxies, not in the same one. (Okay, okay — you might be in a satellite galaxy, but you’re not still in the “Euclid Galaxy” or wherever you started.)
5. The presence of a black hole in a solar system would wreak havoc with planetary orbits if it had somehow been a capture scenario, likely resulting in the ejection of most the planets in to interstellar space. In the case of a binary star with planets, the collapse of one star to become a black hole would have catastrophic consequences for the planets. Or not, as we seem to see in NMS. (The gravity of the black hole isn’t the issue — it’s all the stellar material blasted off into space at high velocity during the supernova that precedes the collapse.)
6. Look at the stars from inside one of the space stations — there are windows in many of the rooms. The stars are twinkling. What’s outside the window is vacuum, and stars can’t twinkle in a vacuum, because it’s air movement that causes twinkling. The air between the window and your viewpoint won’t make them twinkle.

Next, the planets.

1. In NMS, the gravitational force experienced on the surface of a planet or moon, regardless of its diameter, mass, or density, is always the same. I realize that with the inertia-less spacecraft we fly this makes no difference, but the game would have different (and to me, more interesting) dynamics if my ability to travel across the surface and use the jet pack was affected by differing surface gravity. When a planet and its much smaller moon have the same surface gravity, it means the moon is very much more dense its primary, and only by astounding coincidence would it work out this way.
2. Plutonium, so far as we know, has no red crystalline form. Since it occurs naturally in only very, very small amounts, it wouldn’t be found poking up from the surface of planets and moons.
3. Platinum is not a silicate. It’s a transition metal; silicon is a metalloid. If gold and iridium are “neutral” elements, then platinum should be as well, as it sits between iridium and gold on the periodic table.
4. Planets listed with no flora at all may nevertheless have many herbivorous fauna. Sometimes all the fauna are herbivorous. What are they eating?
5. Sometimes the herbivores come equipped with meat-tearing fangs. I don’t think that makes much sense from an evolutionary standpoint, since herbivores have different sorts of teeth than predators; one could say they’re for defense, but some of these planets have no predators against which one would need to defend.
6. Each planet and moon sporting any sort of flora seems to have its own, more-or-less unique, varieties. Yet the plants that provide thamium-9, platinum, and zinc are identical every place they’re found, no matter how separated the worlds on which they appear are in space. (Let’s not even go into how these plants accumulate and store the metals in collectible quantities. One hundred grams of spinach contains around 0.5 milligrams of zinc. This is why there are zinc mines and not zinc farms.) The curly plants that sting you as you walk by (I call them “whipstings”) are the same everywhere as well. It’s an amazing mixture of divergent and parallel evolution, isn’t it? (Nada the renegade Korvax comments on how similar things are across the galaxy, when they ought to be different.)
7. In NMS, if a planet is cold, it’s cold everywhere. If a planet is hot, it’s hot everywhere. If a planet is tropical, it’s tropical everywhere. This is an issue because not all locations on a planet receive the same amount of light (read: “heat”) from their primary star. Equatorial regions get more, polar regions get less. It shouldn’t be tropical at the poles — but if it is, it shouldn’t be habitable at the equator.
8. Storms aren’t localized. It should be possible to fly out of a storm, especially if it’s just started and you pick a direction away from the one in which the storm is encroaching — but you can’t.
9. The effects of storms only happen while you’re on foot or or ship is on the ground.
10. During extreme windstorms the smallest of two-legged fauna, which should be airborne and tumbling about like cattle in Twister (the movie, not the game), remain solidly on the ground. In fact, my avatar in the game should go tumbling off as well.
11. Planets on which the environmental hazard is radiation become more radioactive at night. There isn’t any way this can happen without an obvious external (extra-planetary or extra-lunar) source of radiation, and there’s none to be seen. Solar radiation aside (that is, the only obvious source of radiation), any gamma, x-ray, alpha, or beta sources should remain constant throughout the day, or only fall off as your location on the moon or planet rotates away from the external source of radiation. (If there was an external source of radiation, the radiation would fall off on the night side in the part of a moon’s orbit in which the planet was eclipsing the source of radiation.) Don’t come back with “dark matter,” because dark matter doesn’t interact electromagnetically (so no photons of any wavelength), and doesn’t emit alpha and beta particles (we’d have noticed by now).
12. Many planets have impossible geology, whether it’s the giant snaky rock formations encircling the planet like tinsel on a Christmas tree, or the massive formations of antigravium, “Nth metal,” or Cavorite or whatever it is that keeps them from crashing to the surface of the planet or moon. (These must be alloys or amalgams of antigravium and ordinary materials — otherwise those formations would just go shooting off into space until they found whatever locations are Lagrangian-like points for anti-gravity materials.)
13. There isn’t a single gas giant planet anywhere to be found, but we’re pretty sure there are a lot of them in a galaxy, because most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered so far are gas giants. Half the planets in our own solar system are gas giants! Since the Foundation update there are a lot more completely useless planets around (and there’s no reason that shouldn’t be true), so why aren’t some of them gas giants with accessible moons?

Conclusion

So, there you are. I notice things like this, and they bother me. They won’t stop me from continuing to explore the galaxy, of course — nor will they keep me from enjoying it. Still, there will always be that part of my psyche that does a face-palm when I find another planet dominated by hemispherical antigravium nodes.

So, may you soon find the monolith or education station that teaches you the Vy’keen word for “grah” (spoiler alert: it’s “grah”). I bid you farewell and good spacefaring.