our solar system is four light years in diameter our known universe is 94 billion light years in diameter that means our solar system makes up just 0.0000004 of our known universe when people tell you to keep things in perspective to consider the grand scheme of things thinking about the size of the known universe can make your day-to-day problems seem really insignificant lessening their impact that said it can easily introduce deeper existential problems in the grand scheme of things what purpose do any of our actions serve when our solar system makes up roughly 400 quintillions of
our constantly expanding universe why do anything especially when anything we would typically consider meaningful usually involves a great deal of physical and emotional pain if your answer to that question is because God is watching us why does he care exclusively about planet Earth in that expanse of 94 billion light years if the products of the Enlightenment didn't challenge our belief in God already surely this would when it comes to science fiction these questions are sometimes invoked but not often and I imagine it's because of their emotional difficulty one place you definitely wouldn't expect to see
these types of questions invoked is in the context of a video game which almost always uses science fiction as a basis to shoot alien bad guys first and ask existential questions never that said there is one game that presented these questions in all their brutality yet also offered the philosophical Insight that would Shield us from their corrupting effects best of all it doesn't dictate this insight to us through a typical narrative structure but teaches us how to discover it for ourselves welcome to the outer Wilds now in order to properly summarize and analyze the philosophy
of outer Wilds I will need to expand upon my previous statement regarding outer wilds's narrative structure in the outer Wilds you play as a hearthian a member of an alien species and culture that originate from the planet of Timber Hearth you like the rest of your species are interested in learning about the history of your solar system specifically you're interested in an ancient race of space-faring aliens known as the Nomi that lived in your solar system roughly 300 000 years ago in order to fulfill your dreams you joined the outer Wilds Ventures an organization that
trained harthians to be astronauts so they could travel to other planets and learn about the nomai you begin the game after you had finished your training and are just about to take your first space flight from this point on you become a cosmic archaeologist you can travel to whatever Planet you choose in whichever order you choose to learn about both the Nomi and your solar system while it's not unusual to see science fiction stories where people venture to other planets to learn about aliens outer Wilds separates itself from those other stories by fragmenting The Narrative
and making you piece it together a feat that the video game medium is uniquely capable of accomplishing It Is by piecing together this fragmented story that we stumble upon those existential questions and all their horror but also cultivate the philosophical Insight that helps us cope where a normal story would dictate these questions and answers through soliloquies and monologues outer Wilds has faith that the gamer will possess the Ingenuity to discover these questions and answers for themselves it's a remarkable philosophical exercise that only a handful of other games have accomplished specifically games like Dark Souls Shadow
of the Colossus and the Talos principle with that said the game also expects you to have an enormous will to persevere provided you're able to Pilot your ship effectively and more importantly land it you might be able to travel to another planet and learn a thing or two about the Nomi this is what I managed to do on my first journey when I traveled to the planet known as Giants deep however after I left the planet temporarily to try and fly to another part of it I heard a large boom I turned to look at
the Sun and saw that it had gone supernova what did I just die ah my character wakes up right in the exact same spot my game began I ask a nearby NPC if I just died to which they respond with a confused no unsure of what to make of this I hopped back in my ship and started again I went back to the same Planet I tried to learn more but again the sun went supernova and I started in the same spot again pretty soon I began to realize that I was stuck in some sort
of time Loop each time I woke up I had exactly 22 minutes to try and travel somewhere learn about the nomai and use that knowledge to my advantage in the next cycle in the hopes that maybe I can learn something about the nomai that might help me get out of this Loop and save my friends before I recount my journey and provide my analysis I will let you all know that there are story spoilers incoming if you don't want the outer wild spoiled for you bookmark this video and come back to it when you're done
my early discoveries led me to believe that the sun's detonation was caused by this no my created device orbiting the Sun a device they called the sun station I also found out that this denation seemed to be intentional that the nomai purposefully detonated the Sun so they could use the energy generated by the Supernova to power one of their other projects that other project being a warp core that would enable the Nomi to send information through a wormhole back in time without the power of the Supernova the nomai could only send information back in time
a second or less but with the Supernova they could send it back 22 minutes don't think about it too much just go with it early on I figured that my purpose in the game was to stop the detonation destroy the warp core and reverse the time Loop resulting in a stereotypically cozy happy ending but as I continued to play the game this hypothesis of Mind started to erode as new questions popped up in my mind questions like why did the Nomi create a device to send information back in time 22 minutes and why would the
nomai only start doing this hundreds of thousands of years after they were around these and other questions regarding the Theta of the Nomi festered at the back of my mind increasing in their discomfort the more information I gathered the more I lost faith in my initial hypothesis and the more I started to suspect that something far worse was going on I started to get the nagging feeling that maybe I wouldn't be able to handle the truth when I discovered it nonetheless my morbid curiosity pushed me forward towards the end of the game I discovered a
warp station on a planet called Ash twin which teleported me to the sun station which I initially was unable to land on due to its fast rotation around the Sun when I entered I used my no my language translation device on a terminal to my right and what I read made me freeze in shock approximate time until sun station is destroyed by expanding star 3 minutes 46 seconds approximate time until star's death 15 minutes 16 seconds this could only mean one thing the sun station was a failed experiment by the nomai it wasn't causing the
sun to go supernova the sun was merely reaching the end of its natural life cycle after staring at these words on my screen for about two minutes I broke out of my paralysis went back to my ship and viewed all of my records I needed to figure out what happened to the nomai eventually I deduced that a comet dubbed the interloper entered the solar system during the time of the nomai and dispersed a toxic substance known as ghost matter something we see on every planet in the game something that will kill you if you stand
in it for more than a couple of seconds this was what caused the Nomi to die out this random unforeseeable event rendered all the effort they put into their projects meaningless and for naught and then I realized I was in a similar situation even if I decided to figure out why the nomai were trying to send things back in time what purpose would that hold in the grand scheme of things I would still be left with the choice of being stuck in this endless 22 minute time Loop or stopping the time Loop and dying not
only that my character's entire life was spent preparing to explore the cosmos only to be drawn into the situation that they had no control over for myself I spent all this time crashing into planets dying before I could get a new piece of information only to find out that my efforts and the efforts of everybody else in the game were for nothing so what now why continue to learn or do anything else if my character is just going to end up like the Nomi why go through all the pain and hardship for a universe that
is indifferent to their plight for a universe that will render all their sufferings null and void on a random whim these are questions that I have struggled with for half my life and continue to struggle with worse yet outer Wilds reminded me of the worst pain that those questions can confer the only time I had ever seen my existential struggles replicated so accurately and vividly was when I played near automata five years ago granted I had found a way since then to cope with those questions but outer Wilds really put those coping mechanisms to the
test I will outline two of those mechanisms and the philosophies they are based on and then explain how outer Wilds reminded me of them the first is reminiscent of Albert Camus philosophy as outlined in his famous text the myth of Sisyphus the title references the Greek mythological figure of the same name for the sin of cheating death on two occasions the Greek god Hades sentenced Sisyphus to an eternity of pushing a heavy boulder up a hill only for it to Tumble back down every time Sisyphus neared the top a state that shares more than a
partial similarity to the one we're stuck with in the outer Wilds now despite sisyphus's hopeless situation Camus believed he could overcome the tragedy if he accepted his fate and embraced its absurdity he could reach inner contentment applying this to real life and outer Wilds if we can come to terms with the universe's Randomness then we can not only accept life but learn to love life of course this philosophy relies on the power of the human will to push past feelings of resentment towards their suffering which some people might be able to do either in real
life or by embodying that ethic in the outer Wilds but as the game makes quite clear not everybody has that capacity and will require an alternate solution eventually I understood what the nomai were looking for during their time one of the know my vessels picked up a signal sent out from a planetary object one that they deemed older than the universe itself they called to this planetary object the eye of the universe and the signal it sent out was coming from our solar system upon arriving here they set up multiple devices to try and locate
the eye but found that they could not do so after a while they realized that they couldn't locate the eye because it was a quote-unquote Quantum object what this means is that it fluctuated between a variety of different points operating in the same way that a Quantum particle like an electron would if you're confused by this here's a bit of quantum physics 101 as I'm sure you know the universe is made up of tiny particles known as protons neutrons and electrons these tiny particles do not operate in the same way that objects in our observable
world do they do not stay still on their tiny Quantum scale but are in constant flux constantly moving around due to this we cannot determine an electron's location in the same way that you can determine where your hand is instead you have to measure the electron's wave function which will then determine the probability of an electron's location interestingly though as science progressed we developed the capacity to observe an electron but when we did it no longer operated like a wave but as a particle the particle would show up in a random place on the wave
function this led some scientists to theorize that in some way our Consciousness causes the wave function of an electron to collapse no longer behaving like a wave but appearing to stand still of course not every scientist agrees that Consciousness plays such a special role in this process but outer Wilds chooses to go with it for thematic reasons which we will discuss momentarily applying this Theory to Outer Wilds the eye of the universe is in constant flux like an electron but if it is observed by a conscious being it will stay in one place when the
Nomi considered the fact that the eye was older than the universe itself and its entire being was quantum the inevitable question popped up in their head what would happen if a conscious Observer somehow entered the eye itself finding the answer to this question became not just the no my soul reason for being but my own when I got to that point in the sun station when I realized that all my efforts would likely end up meaning nothing I couldn't accept that I couldn't accept the absurdity what made me want to push forward was finding out
what the I was for myself and the nomai this omnipresent force that was older than the universe itself became my analog for God it became my reason for being as long as I could set my sights on God I could put aside in my existential frustrations for the time being for the I slash God provided me with my Nichi and raison d'etra my reason for being herein lies the second possible solution pick the highest value I can aspire to which in this case was something like God and March string towards it like Sisyphus but unlike
him I would hopefully find a meaningful end to my suffering now to be intellectually consistent I need to acknowledge that this position is incompatible with Camus view that we live in a Godless world and we need to embrace its meaningless absurdity in fact in the myth of Sisyphus Camus criticizes this philosophical view which he thought was made most famous by the fictional works of Theodore Dostoevsky Dostoevsky through the characters in his novels asserts that the only thing that could justify the suffering of the world was God I was aware of these two conflicting philosophies before
I played outer Wilds they formed the basis of the inner existential debates that I've dealt with for half my life outer Wilds just reacquainted me with that inner debate and the intense feelings they provoke though I felt deep down that the outer Wilds wouldn't resolve the debate if and when I reached the eye I pretended that it would just so I could reach the end back when the nomai were around they constructed a cannon that would shoot out a probe in a random direction to see if it would hit the eye of the universe when
it didn't the probe would send that information back in time 22 minutes using the warp core then at the beginning of a new cycle a new probe would be sent out in a different direction until the eye was found we realized that the probe did eventually hit the eye and its coordinates were discovered once we gathered those coordinates we could take them to the original no my ship along with the warp core and go to the eye of the universe [Music] oh when arriving there we don't hit the eye itself but just the outskirts of
it we wander for a while on a dark desolate planet with Quantum objects like trees and rocks popping up randomly around me when I get to the South Pole I happened upon a giant hole that I could jump into which I deduced was the eye itself I then realized what I had to do the time had finally come to see what happens when the eye was observed now all I had to do was take a leap of faith foreign [Music] I end up in an area that looks like the museum back on my home planet
I walk up the spiral stairway and interact with what looks like a floating Galaxy when I do the camera pulls back revealing what looks like the infinite expanse of the universe in all the galaxies that reside in it I find that I can move forward and touch those galaxies only for them to be tragically snuffed out in an instant before I could reflect further on this I found that below these galaxies was a forest after a few moments of wandering I encountered a campfire and shortly after the friends I had encountered throughout my journey began
to join me they started to play music and as they did a giant egg started to form above the campfire and not knowing what else to do I reach out and touch the egg and then [Music] by observing the eye of the universe and all its unrealized possibilities I unknowingly brought a new universe into existence I finally understood this was why the eye of the universe sent out the signal in the first place the universe was dying and the eye needed somebody to observe it in order to birth a new one in this infinite expanse
of the universe almost completely devoid of conscious life it was my Consciousness a property unique to me and the character I was playing as that was of the greatest importance by demonstrating what a rare gift Consciousness is how unlikely something like Consciousness is in our universe outer Wilds assuaged my existential dread it made me realize that I owe it to my self and this gift of Consciousness to see how far I could go how Grand a life I could live maybe it's absurd and indifferent to my suffering maybe there is or isn't a God the
only way I will find out is if I choose life and then live this video would not have been possible without my friend and patreon supporter Arcane he helped to edit a few drafts of my script and flesh out some of the philosophy special thanks as well to Indy for her help with the thumbnail art if you like this video please give it a like or leave a comment it's fast free and it really helps me out a lot if you enjoy this type of in-depth analysis and want to help ensure its continued production please
consider checking out my patreon page or joining my YouTube member section I will leave a link to both in the description box below until next time remember as always to stay safe and stay yellow
