No man may be able to tease gas giants

Summary

Sean Murray has repeatedly tweeted a planet emoji depicting Saturn, one of our solar system’s gas giants.
No Man’s Sky fans think he’s teasing a gas giant-themed update, or at least an expedition.
This could introduce new, unique moons, air extraction platforms, or even cloud cities.

On January 23, Sean Murray tweeted a single emoji, 🪐. Just a day later, No Man’s Sky Developer Hello Games retweeted his message and confirmed the same Saturn emoji. Murray also retweeted his original post, but with three of the emojis. And yesterday he retweeted a photo of Saturn captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, again with the emoji.

He’s clearly teasing Something, and fans think it might be as obvious as a gas giant update.

Saturn, which the emoji depicts, is one such Jovian planet, and Murray has a history of teasing new expansions with emojis. He posted a Globe Emoji for the World’s Part 1 update and a cursed emoji for the cursed update. But how gas giants would work in nobody’s heaven is another question.

Gas giant moons, air extraction platforms and cloud cities: what is not a man’s man’s man’s man?

You can’t exactly land on a gas giant. If you were to miraculously survive the 200,000 mile radius of Jupiter’s radiation bands (which are equivalent to 100 million X-rays), you would have to brave its pulverization pressure, which is almost 100 times what we are used to on Earth’s surface.

Go any lower and you would descend into a burning core measured at more than 20,000 degrees Celsius. If your ship can withstand the heat and crush gravity without being obliterated, you would still be trapped in the core due to the inexorable gravity, with pressure 50 million times that of the Earth’s surface.

If the sky doesn’t get gas giants from any man, we’re unlikely to ‘explore’ them as we do with terrestrial planets. As U/Dread-Cthulu speculates, the focus of a gas giant update may instead be on their moons. After all, those moons are deeply fascinating in real life. Last year, NASA even sent a new spacecraft to travel 1.8 billion miles to study Europa Ocean, which lies beneath an icy crust.

An update theme around these moons could introduce vast underground environments and unique biomes that contrast sharply with any other planet, adding even more variety to No Man’s sky.

Others theorize that Hello Games could also implement floating cities akin to Star Wars’ Cloud City, which sits above the gas giant Bespin. More practically, U/pechy_magazine_354 suggests that a Jovian-themed update would allow us to harvest valuable materials from gas giant atmospheres with an air extraction platform.

Others worry that this might be for an expedition, not a full-fledged update.

This would introduce elements like hydrogen, helium and methane into the game, which are valuable for nuclear fusion in real life. But all of this assumes Hello Games sticks rigidly to the science, which may not be the case. U/Srikandi715 argues that “nothing else in NMS is true to astrophysics, so [there’s] No reason why gas giants have to be realistic”. Hopefully we’ll find out soon.