"You faded into the Long Dark."

“On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”  

― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

In spite of preparing to move to a new apartment last month, I managed to find time to complete the Winter's Embrace gaming challenge in The Long Dark by surviving for 25 days, but couldn't dedicate the time to earn the achievement badge for eating 25 bags of Ketchup Chips and 25 bottles of Maple Syrup before the time ran out.

Since then, I've taken the occasional break from unpacking to try playing The Long Dark at the aptly named Interloper level, the most challenging option in terms of game play: the player starts with a minimal set of resources, and must craft almost all the essential tools for continued survival instead of salvaging them from the wreckage of civilization, with the environment becoming progressively more hostile as time goes on.

To illustrate the relative level of difficulty, until now I've only played at the second level, the Voyageur setting.  As a Voyageur, my longest run in the game has been close to 180 days. At the Interloper setting, I have yet to survive longer than eight days, and there have been lots of attempts where I haven't even made it through the first day without dying.

It's not an accident that all the locations on Great Bear Island where you can forge knives, hatchets and arrowheads are exposed to the elements to a greater or lesser extent, which has made the simple task of equipping myself for survival a fatal one in all of the attempts to date  - when I've managed to get that far, that is.

Karli asked me how much longer this would continue to be fun, and I can see her point: part of the enjoyment of gaming is in overcoming the challenges offered by the game, and if that challenge is insurmountable, why bother? There are a couple of games in my past that I abandoned because of exactly that problem: for example, I never did manage to defeat General Deathshead in the final boss fight of Wolfenstein: The New Order, and I finally got tired of trying.  However, I haven't reached that point yet as an Interloper.

In fact, I'd actually like to see the Fallout series introduce a similarly grueling option. The Survival setting in Fallout 4 is initially demanding, but after the player levels up a few times, it becomes easier and easier to stay alive, and ultimately ends up being very similar to the standard gameplay, whereas the Interloper option in The Long Dark is unrelenting in its assault, requiring constant planning, ingenuity and determination on the part of the player as weather conditions become worse and worse, and resources more and more rare.

Eating ketchup chips was a lot easier.

- Sid

UPDATE: After 30 attempts, I managed to stay on my feet long enough to successfully complete the trip across the challenging Forlorn Muskeg map through a howling blizzard to the Old Spence Family Homestead, survive the 24 hour hypothermia attack that resulted, forge a hatchet, knife, and four arrowheads, and return to the Camp Office beside the lake in the Mystery Lake map, one of the more forgiving locations in the game. Now I can finally harvest the maple sapling required to build a survival bow - provided I can stay alive for the six days that it takes for the wood to dry out first...

 

Perseverance II: Explorers

NASA's press release for the Perseverance launch mentioned something that I’d forgotten about completely - this was the mission that would take my name to Mars, etched by electron beam onto three silicon chips along with the names of 10.9 million people.  It's both surprising and gratifying that so many people would have discovered an obscure link to an odd opportunity, and then decided that they wanted to be involved in a trip to Mars - fellow explorers, I greet you.

Just out of curiousity*, I clicked on the link from my previous posting to see if the sign-up site was still live (and to see if there were any other opportunities to add to my travel reward points).

I was pleased to see that, in an admirable demonstration of attention to detail, NASA had updated my boarding pass to say NOW BOARDING:

The joke is that. what with the current situation, this is as close as I'm going to get to travelling abroad for quite a while.  The good news is that it certainly looks like we** have seats with a view for when we make our landing.

- Sid

* No Martian rover pun intended.

** Yes, we - because Karli is coming too!

Perseverance I: Liftoff.

At the start of 2021, the robotic population of Mars will increase by one.* The Perseverance rover launched early this morning from Cape Canaveral, and is scheduled to land at Jezero Crater next year on February 18th. 

However, this mission is a little different than its predecessors.  In addition to the same kind of physical exploration performed by other rovers, the newest citizen of the Red Planet is acting as a scout for future manned missions to Mars:  testing technologies for extracting oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere, identifying crucial resources such as subterranean water, trialing new landing procedures, and analyzing environmental conditions to allow future explorers to better predict dangerous weather.

Perseverance has also been tasked with searching for microbial life forms, in hopes of answering the ongoing question as to whether or not there is any sort of life on the surface of Mars, and whether or not there may have been life in the past.

Perseverance will be the first rover equipped to store drilled core samples for eventual collection.  It's an important development - in spite of all the robotic exploration and experimentation which has taken place on the surface of Mars, no samples have been returned to Earth for further study and research, and this change in sampling strategy is part of the planning for astronauts to visit Mars.

To be completely accurate, I should have started by saying that the populations of Mars will increase by two.  Perseverance isn't alone on its mission - it has a companion called Ingenuity,  a lightweight autonomous*** solar-powered helicopter drone which will hopefully perform the first powered flight on Mars, thereby opening a completely new door for rapidly exploring the planet's surface.

The atmosphere of Mars is about 1% the density of Earth's, which makes powered flight a definite challenge, but on the plus side, the gravity is only 1/3 that of Earth.  I'm confident that the science behind Ingenuity is sound, which means we're going to see some spectacular drone shots of Mars.

Building on the unexpected longevity of previous rovers like Curiousity and Opportunity, the mission duration for Ingenuity and Perseverance is a Martian year, or sol, which is about 687 Earth days.  We wish you both a good trip and a safe landing - and hey, be careful up there, it's dangerous.

- Sid

* Unfortunately, we don’t have enough AI in place yet** on Mars for the kind of Darwinian self-replicating robotic evolution that pops up now and then in science fiction. Recommended reading would be Code of the Lifemaker by James P. Hogan, A Circus of Hells, by Poul Anderson, and innumerable short stories. (To a lesser extent, Gregory Benford’s Galactic Center series fall under this category as well.)

** Yet.

*** Autonomous is the key word here.  The worst-case 40 minute round-trip lag in transmission time  to Mars makes direct control impractical. Imagine trying to drive to work if you could only hit the brakes 20 minutes after you saw the light go red - with another 20 minute delay before your car stopped.  The good news is that there isn't anything else flying around for Ingenuity to hit - other than dust.