It's actually from the earlier games, so it was David's predictive magic
Michael
I
knew it!
I
knew it!
I thought it rang all kinds of bells with me from the old Frontier Elite 2 days!
EVERYONE PUT YOUR TINFOIL HATS ON
I AM ABOUT TO EMPLOY HYPERBOLE AND SELECTIVE REPORTING
Back in the 1990s David Braben
manually put a planet into the orbit of Proxima Centauri. Rocky, around Earth-sized, when making the game Frontier Elite 2.
In the game background, humanity saw that while it was orbiting too close to Proxima to be in the normal habitable zone, Proxima was much fainter than our sun and so the planet was a contender for having liquid water.
So a rocky world detected by spectroscopic methods of about the right size and gravity (Eden has 0.9G), with a very short orbital period of 31 days because it orbits Proxima so close (0.01AU).
In the game background this drove humanity to explore, since it was a miracle that the very closest system would have a planet that was even a candidate for colonisation!
When they got there, they discovered that Eden was far too irradiated, hot and with too much surface pressure to be hospitable.
I now present my first piece of damning tinfoil-hat evidence:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37167390
AND I QUOTE
"Neighbouring star Proxima-Centauri has Earth-sized planet."
"The planet's mass would suggest it is a rocky world like Earth."
"Scientists say their investigations of the closest star, Proxima Centauri, show it to have an Earth-sized planet orbiting about it.
What is more, this rocky globe is moving in a zone that would make liquid water on its surface a possibility.
Proxima is 40 trillion km away and would take a spacecraft using current technology thousands of years to reach.
Nonetheless, the discovery of a planet potentially favourable to life in our cosmic neighbourhood is likely to fire the imagination."
"Just how "habitable" this particular planet really is, one has to say is pure speculation for the time being.
The Queen Mary University of London researcher and his group concede they still have much work to do to extend their observations.
Simply identifying the world, catalogued as "Proxima b", was a considerable challenge.
It was made possible through the use of an ultra-precise instrument called HARPS.
This spectrograph, attached to a 3.6m telescope in Chile, detects the very slight wobble induced in a star when circled by a gravitationally bound planet.
Its data suggests Proxima b has a minimum mass 1.3 times that of Earth and orbits at a distance of about 7.5 million km from the star, taking 11.2 days to complete one revolution.
The distance between the star and its planet is considerably smaller than Earth's separation from the Sun (149 million km). But Proxima Centauri is what is termed a red dwarf star. It is much reduced in size and dimmer compared with our Sun, and so a planet can be nearer and still enjoy conditions that are potentially as benign as those on Earth.
"This planet is at 5% of the Earth's distance from the Sun. However, Proxima is 1,000 times fainter than the Sun. So the flux - the energy - reaching Proxima b is about 70% of what the Earth receives. It's like taking Earth a bit further away, but it's comparable," explained Dr Anglada-Escudé.
Whether the temperatures on Proxima b are favourable for life to exist is going to depend on the presence of an atmosphere.
An envelope of greenhouse gases would warm surface conditions and provide sufficient pressure to keep water - essential for biology - in a liquid state.
But even with the limited information we currently have, scientists are excited by the news.
"I think it's the most important exoplanet discovery there will ever be - how can you ever trump something that could be habitable orbiting around the very closest star to the Sun?" commented Dr Carole Haswell from the Open University.
"When I was a kid, it wasn't clear there were any other planets that we could walk around on and find liquid water on - so I think it's absolutely thrilling," she told BBC News."
I can only rest my case.
Clearly, something sinister is at work here. Some people
know things. But no one would believe it. No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own.
My own belief is that we are being trained to protect Earth from an extraterrestrial threat. This is because I watched a Zero Punctuation once and I'm ripping off that joke. It's The Last Starfighter, people!
In other news, I vote that Proxima B be renamed as Eden.
Tell me I'm not the only one who wants this.
