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Maybe that player will go on to bring us a little closer to the next chapter for humanity. As designers, our main goal is for people to enjoy playing "Beyond Earth," but if our players run across something in the game, and they're curious enough to look into it a bit more, then we'll be ecstatic to have done our part to raise a little more love for space and science. So, buried through the game are bits of what we've learned about thorium reactors or transgenic medicine or climate engineering. It's been exciting to learn that no matter how strange our ideas are, reality is often stranger, and the future feels a lot closer for realizing those ideas. When we were building one of our victory conditions (making contact with a sentient alien species), we wanted to know more about communications over the vast distances of space, which, in turn, led us to reading about quantum entanglement being used in communications.

Every time we've come up with a gameplay idea, and we've thought: "If only there were some sort of science we could hang this on," we've found a real and promising current direction being explored. Working on "Beyond Earth" has been an amazing opportunity to continue to learn about current directions in research and engineering. The next chapter of humanity will be defined in terms of what humans do when they leave this planet and start to spread out through the universe.ĢK Games and Firaxis released a promotional graphic for the forthcoming computer game: Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth, due in October 2014. Instead of taking control of Stone Age settlers as they would in Civ, players in "Beyond Earth" will be leading one of the expeditions that leave Earth during the Seeding, before the hard reality of the Inflection Point makes it hard to do so. Settling an extrasolar planet would be a massively resource-intensive process, and as resources become scarce, eventually, there won't be enough to support mass colonization, which is an idea we're referring to as the Inflection Point. In our game fiction, this is galvanized by a few key events, such as the first image of a habitable world, another pale blue dot around a distant star.

In "Beyond Earth," we start with the premise that humanity has emerged from a period of great difficulty with a renewed interest and drive in exploring space. If you're a topical expert - researcher, business leader, author or innovator - and would like to contribute an op-ed piece, email us here.