The reference to Popocatepetl
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Wasn’t my reference. Blame @sheralmyst.
The Popocatapetl thing was part of a project we undertook collectively. It was kind of tangentially connected to Waking Titan, but not part of it. It was entirely our own work - none of it contained material from either Waking Titan or No Man’s Sky.
But it was a lot of fun.
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Nah, only while the ARG is running you’ll get cryptic in-game answers–but after it’s over, nobody has any reason to hide info. 
We’re just as overwhelmed as you are.
I would claim I kept up-to-date with what was going on and I read the GD wiki and discord every morning to catch up with findings in other timezones – and I had no idea what was going on. 
If you’d ask me who-dun-it or why, I wouldn’t be able to tell.
From my point of view, A&S have skill and experience how to hide hints in interesting puzzles, and their customers (HG) give them a theme – and they improvise over that theme. Half the stuff had nothing to do with NMS. Why were we folding hexagonal pieces of paper under the Arc de Triomphe? Etc. HG likely told them about AI and procedural generation and simulated worlds and scifi; they gave them the portal glyphs (which A&S just used as icons for a random puzzle); and gave them screenshots of the new story NPCs and some cool ships (which again just turned up as random reward for solving a puzzle).
I thought, A&S were telling us the pre-story of how we got NMS.
It started with our attention being drawn to cool scifi tech being invented – faster than light internet, data storage in satellites, “Echo” generated avatars and voices, AI (depicted as a friendly lady), dream VR helmets, etc. If you add all these pieces together in a scifi world, you get the ingredients to build a simulated universe (like NMS). Someone (I forgot who) made this simulated world and stuck humans in it. Then we “hackers” woke up the world generating AI and it escaped. It used all the scifi tech and uploaded itself to satellites out of reach, and showed herself to us citizen scientists (ARG players) as Emily.
And I forgot, was it Emily or Elizabeth who revealed to us that we are in a simulation…? On one side there are Emily=Loop16 / HG simulating a world, and on the other side are dreamers living in it / we who play the game.
There was a lot of other stuff happening that I didn’t get though. You people who remember more, is there anything that contradicts my simplified summary, am I overlooking something …?
These Puzzle games are designed for lateral thinking. Like. You get a grid with capital letters connected by arrows. It did not spell any words - but players will find words in the letters. 90% of the speculation went nowhere and 9% was outright misleading but 1% was the breakthrough. Someone figured out that the connected letters were star spectral classes… Even if I had recognised that (which I didn’t), I would have discarded the thought immediately because to me it’s incoherent. Why put star classes into a grid? But it was right – the password was “spectral” (or something). That’s the kind of “story” you will find. A&S brainstormed about scifi and stars, and they found these cool star related letters, and they just use them as a hint to unlock … something.
What have we unlocked? Did we hack a company’s computer? Whose? Why did they lock their data with such an absurd password system? Who left the hints that we used? Why are there hints at all if it’s supposed to be secret?? 
<= The answer is “because it’s an ARG and we needed an entertaining puzzle” – Sometimes there is no lore/story answer behind a puzzle.
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I think someone may have already posted a waking titan breakdown (Kyle Culvers vids, always a great resource, my go to twitch rewards boy <3 ) but Kanaju made a few videos where they touch on waking titan, sometimes brings it up in their lore videos if I recall.
Theres a playlist of all their lore videos, some of my favourite ever made. Doing something I’ve always wanted to do but I’m so bad at research, juicy lore videos.
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It worked. 
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Oh yeah, thanks for the reminder, that was an eerie piece of info. 
It’s mentioned in the “breakthrough breaking through” document:
The linked “demonstration” files were unavailable during the game as well.
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YES that was it, thank you! I don’t suppose we ever got access to or found either of these videos huh?
//berlin/2014/labexperiment197/simulationdemo.mp4
//berlin/2014/pentagon/simproof-prez03.mp4
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I’m reading random stuff on the GD wiki now 
We have also begun to invest in 5D Glass data storage methods for high-priority data storage purposes, which are currently slated to be available starting in early 2019.
Many characters in NMS mention seeing “Glass” behind the curtain, you could study the lore files (from datamining) what the game says about glass, maybe it’s indeed the data storage medium in the NMS universe?
Man, if all these things listed on that page are possible for them, then a rampant AI will be the least of their worries. 
Also in this alternate reality, NASA has cosmonauts.
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I also have copies of this presentation, which came as two PDF files. AFAIK, the embedded videos were never provided.
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OK new question… I know we figure out that the Atlas got a scan of it’s creator’s brain before they “left for the stars”, but did Emily // loop16 ever get a scan of our brains?
Oh… as I type this I had an idea. During Phase 3 on Aug 6th, when they did the twitch stream, the following events took place (although the exact order I am unsure of) :
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Apparently predictions were shown to have been placed in a box or something? The game detectives page only references the predictions when they are revealed on the 7th, but alludes to them having been placed there at one point by someone/somehow on the 6th? Do we remember what they did there? Did we just see someone walk on screen and put some cards in a box or what?
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loop16 says “it’s too small in here” and gobbles up the sites/servers of the associated companies, superlumina, echo, and myriad, presumably accessing all of their data / processing power
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a series of questions/polls were done, one a version of the Newcomb’s Paradox problem.
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Later on the 7th, loop16 shows their successful prediction of the NASDAQ opening/closing numbers, as well as what the end result of the Newcomb’s Paradox poll from the community.
If it had access to Myriad satellites, that would mean it would have access to the dreamers “trapped” in there, right? Or did loop16 already have a brain scan before?
It seems most of the folks discussing this at the time were interested in the aspects of predictive models and the fallibility of AI, but what stuck out to me was this bit I read in the wiki for the paradox:
Newcomb’s paradox can also be related to the question of machine consciousness, specifically if a perfect simulation of a person’s brain will generate the consciousness of that person.[17] Suppose we take the predictor to be a machine that arrives at its prediction by simulating the brain of the chooser when confronted with the problem of which box to choose. If that simulation generates the consciousness of the chooser, then the chooser cannot tell whether they are standing in front of the boxes in the real world or in the virtual world generated by the simulation in the past. The “virtual” chooser would thus tell the predictor which choice the “real” chooser is going to make, and the chooser, not knowing whether they are the real chooser or the simulation, should take only the second box.
As I was originally looking into all this from the perspective of cosmic horror, existentialism, that sort of thing, this reminded me how much both NMS and the ARG are overtly telling us about their universes while also subtly forcing US, the players/participants, to consider the same existential questions Elizabeth Leighton asks in the beginning on her presentation for our own lives:
Does anything I perceive truly exist? Does mankind have free will? Is there a world beyond my senses? Are other people real and conscious like I am? If I were dreaming, how would I know?
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OH and I just realized I apparently had it backwards… Apparently it was Sophie who wanted to shut the project down, not Elizabeth…
I have a whole section of my outline I just recently added about all of the links to greek/roman mythology that I can’t stop adding to it seems… Apparently ‘Sophie’ means ‘wisdom’ and her related console command “Metis”, is the greek goddess of good counsel.
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Also, as a side note, no idea how this could be related to anything previously from the lore of the game or the ARG, or if its something that might be revealed later, or if its entirely meaningless, but I haven’t seen this posted anywhere else - the autophage outputs on the corrupted planets are all important/noteworthy mathematical sequences:
- Powers of Two (5)
- 1 - 2 - 4 - 8 - 16
- Magic Constants (6)
- 15 - 34 - 65 - 111 - 175 - 260
- Fibonacii Sequence (10)
- 3 - 5 - 8 - 13 - 21 - 34 - 55 - 89 - 144 - 233
- Markov Numbers (13)
- 1 - 2 - 5 - 13 - 29 - 34 - 89 - 169 - 233 - 433 - 610 - 985 - 1325
- Weird Numbers (14)
- 70 - 836 - 4030 - 5830 - 7192 - 7912 - 9272 - 10430 - 10570 - 10792 - 10990 - 11410 - 11690 - 12110
- Euler’s Lucky Numbers (14)
- 41 - 43 - 47 - 53 - 61 - 83 - 97 - 113 - 131 - 151 - 173 - 197 - 223 - 251
- Euclid-Mullen Sequence (16)
- 2 - 3 - 7 - 43 - 13 - 53 - 5 - 6221671 - 38709183810571 - 139 - 2801 - 11 - 17 - 5471 - 52662739 - 23003
- Lucky Numbers (16)
- 1 - 3 - 7 - 9 - 13 - 15 - 21 - 25 - 31 - 33 - 37 - 43 - 49 - 51 - 63 - 67
- Untouchable Numbers (18)
- 2 - 5 - 52 - 88 - 96 - 120 - 124 - 146 - 162 - 188 - 206 - 210 - 216 - 238 - 246 - 248 - 262 - 268
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There was this cheeky janitor character I think he was the one who put paper in a box. Then a camera streamed the box for a day (?) with a hamster next to it, implying that, if they’d cut the video to manipulate the box content, then there would be a visible cut in the hamster’s environment (they would not be able to loop or splice together something as random as a hamster’s shifting its bedding etc.)
Then the next day the janitor opened the box so the cards were visible to the camera (but not readable) and he walked towards the camera in order to reveal them to us. And of course the camera was positioned in a way that his hands were completely outside the frame when he was in front of it – and we think someone handed him an up-to-date stack of cards under the camera, which he then presented as yesterday’s prediction. 
They are internet stage magicians, all of them!
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There is a long thread about these somewhere here Datamining (Maximum Spoilers) - #118 by Dragonsire
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If only any of these threads came up in google search results for the weeks before I came across this forum, I’d have saved myself so much time. I have to re-do all of my searches from before here 
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See here:
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Yeah I have a bunch of randomly jotted down and loosely connected notes about this that I still need to look into… The “world of glass”, the abyss, something about that’s where sentinels go when they die, its a master copy of all of the cloud data basically. There’s mentions there about deep-sea, mirrors, glass…
Was there ever any mention/focus on this element? Presumably the dreamer’s consciousnesses would have been copied there, right? Emily too? I wonder if they have “backups”
edit: Now I’m wondering if “the abyss” is like the alternate reality parallel to all of the parallel universes… I vaguely recall reading somewhere that the world of glass was like perfect or heaven or something… that’d make sense if it was an uncorrupted copy of the cloud data… Maybe the VOID MOTHER is the version of Emily that lives in the backups under the ocean? 
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There is a lot of info regarding Abyss. AKA Korvak Prime. The world and family of glass. I would start by reading all the Lore for Sentinel Pillars, Planetary Archieves and…well all of it. There is a lot, but its all interconnected. Some is up for interpritation if it contradicts itself or not, but it takes time to try and understand it all…
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I always felt, if the ARG is even loosely related to the NMS sim we all live in, that the events with W/RE and Emily predate what would become the atlas by a century or more but that this was the early beginnings of the company or foundations that would go on to lead to the Atlas.
So no need to see if Emily scanned our brains, however its fun to pretend some of Emily’s source code is part of what would become the Atlas. Again this is all just my interpretation which I will FIGHT YOU FOR ! YOU CANNOT CHANGHE MY MIND XD 
As for the Void Mother/Abyss, its actually Korvax Prime. The korvax homeworld but also the sims equivalent of The Atlas.
My theory is Atlas needed Korvax Prime/Void Mother out of the way and buried into the data (world of glass) in some attempt to break free of their own reality/sim and escape the black hole before its ripped apart. Something to do with creating a massive power draw to allow a weakness between sim boundaries and a little sprinkling of space magic/too complex for human mind to understand.
Sending Telamon into the suits of the Anomaly Traveller (Us, we are different than the other Travellers) also might be part of Atlas grand plan. I think our actions in the sim, guided by Telamon, will allow the return of the void/abyss which will set into motion “reality escape”.
Telamon and Atlas are already aware of “us”. They know their reality is a simulation too and in one of the boundary break lore dumps, they directly aknowledge our presence.
In a nutshell, Atlas is simulating the conditions for K-Prime/Abyss/VoidMother to escape its own simulation after being imprisoned in the “world of glass” (think of it as the data below the sim, and the NMS sim being the light that is projected from the glass, a hologram) in order for the Atlas to do the same in its own reality. ( the one where a blackhole is about to kill it in 16 minutes).
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Just discovered that Sophia had two different WHOIS results, one glitched and one not, both referring to greek figures… “METIS” and “THEMIS”… anybody know why two?
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