For years now, scientists, journalists, and other truth-seekers have dedicated their waking hours to answering one single question: Is the video game No Man's Sky gonna be big? If so, how big will it be?
Investigators around the world, including some right here at Kotaku, have spent the last two years trying to solve this mind-boggling riddle, working the phones and flying from coast to coast as we fought near-insurmountable odds to find an answer, because you, dear reader, deserve to know just how big the upcoming sci-fi video game No Man's Sky will be.
As Thomas Jefferson once said, "There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world," and it is with that in mind we've battled to bring you this imperative, monumental truth: the video game No Man's Sky is, in fact, large.
No Man's Sky is so big, the developers built space probes to explore it for them - Polygon, 3/3/2015
No Man's Sky: The Biggest Game World Ever Created? - GameSpot, 7/9/2014
'No Man's Sky' Will Take 5 Billion Years To Fully Explore - GameRant, August 2014
The Sun Will Burn Out Before You See All Of No Man's Sky - IGN, 8/15/2014
No Man's Sky is too big to comprehend at this point - GamesRadar, 6/11/2014
HOW NO MAN'S SKY PAINTS 18 QUINTILLION WORLDS WITH AN ALGORITHMIC BRUSH - Kill Screen, 3/2/2014
No Man's Sky's too big for traditional multiplayer - Lazy Gamer, 12/11/2014
No Man's Sky is so big that bots are being sent out to explore distant planets - Tech Radar, 7/23/2014
New No Man's Sky Trailer Will 'Wow' You With Its Scale - MP1st, 12/8/2014
No Man's Sky: How Big is Too Big? - Gaming Bolt, 9/8/2014
No Man's Sky's universe is as big as advertised, maybe bigger - Gear, 12/8/2014
No Man's Sky Is Obnoxiously Big, Like Billions of Years Big - 1080players, 8/19/2014
This is the most ambitious game in the universe - The Verge, 7/1/2014
Years It'd ACTUALLY Take to Visit Each Planet in No Man's Sky: 584,942,417,355 - Kotaku, 8/18/2014
One day, perhaps our children or our children's children will ask where we were when we first found out that the video game No Man's Sky will be very big. "How did you find out?" they'll ask. "How did you determine how big it would actually be? And how many lives were lost in the pursuit of this truth?"
We will tell them. And we will tell them it was worth it.
You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.