Starfield contains a secret environmentalist message

Earth Tours StarfieldThis is not a happy homecoming. It’s a sad homecoming when I arrive in Florida. As far as the eyes can see, instead of seeing open oceans, twisting Mangroves and lush tropical vegetation, the desert is all that’s left. I, a Xenobiologist, scan the planet and see there’s no flora or fauna left; only basic Earth minerals remain. This planet has literally become a shell of what it once was.

Earth’s dismal state doesn’t come as a surprise in the game. A man in a kiosk tells me, before I’ve even seen the solar system on the map or the planet itself, that everyone tries to avoid it and no one is willing to move there. Mars is the sole inhabited planet of our solar system. Its residents live inside a completely sealed, industrial building, just like a can full of fish. Mars, it seems, is a much better place to live than Earth.

The landscape is barren as I quickly jump from continent to continent in my spaceship. To walk around, I need to suit up fully because there’s no oxygen anymore. Although I’m aware that a handful of monuments withstood the destruction, every continent looks just as desolate as the next, more or less. If I’m lucky, I might happen upon a meteor crash site or some mud flats, but by and large, it’s nothing but dust and dirt.

Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon

StarfieldIn the year 2330, the game is set. In the course of the game, players learn the Earth’s magnetosphere collapsed following the invention of the grav drive, a technology that enables spaceships to travel faster than light. Following Earth’s demise, a number of nations joined forces to evacuate the entire planet. In the virtual world of the video game, the humans are spread across the entire universe. Many of them live on Jemison’s oxygen-rich planet.

In science fiction, the trope of a non-habitable earth is quite common. It is not uncommon to see the trope that an Earth uninhabitable by humans in science fiction. Doctor WhoA future history predicts the evacuation of Earth in large numbers following solar storms. A future history foresees the mass evacuation of Earth following solar flares. Star Trek: DiscoveryThe people of Terralysium think they’re the last humans in the universe. Star Trek: EnterpriseIt takes place on an alternate timeline in which the Xindi has destroyed Earth. The 2001 sci-fi horror film Jason X This video shows students from a college class going on an excursion to a destroyed Earth.

It’s no coincidence that the end of Earth is a powerful message in sci-fi. The fictional worlds are a great way to explore important political and social issues that relate to the time in which they were written. Sci-fi is often prophetic, and it’s rooted in an understanding of social issues like climate change. Imagine the Earth of 2023 and how it will be. Starfield’s environmentalist messages read as salient as any.

In 2023, the year has been a crucial period in tracking climate change. Earth’s July was the hottest month ever recorded, but there will be more to come. The ocean water has also reached record high temperatures. An extensive report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that Earth will likely cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade if governments don’t take aggressive action.

Even in light of the current state of our real Earth’s environment, much of the possible environmental impacts of players’ actions in Starfield aren’t exactly front and center. The invention of the grav drive may have destroyed Earth, but my rocket will endlessly refuel with no consequences, and I’m free to mine planets for any resources or objects I want. The game still nudges subtle messages into the players’ minds as they reach the main campaign quest of visiting Earth. In such moments, Starfield allows us to imagine a future where humanity made the greatest technological leap possible — but it didn’t save the Earth. It destroyed the Earth.