Quote from WinstonSmith on April 26, 2011, 11:36 pm

Great find, but just as a heads up, this was already mentioned in the Easter Eggs thread (and there's a bit of a lively debate going on about it). Thanks for posting the clear texture though, it helps a lot. Mind if I merge this with the Easter Eggs thread?

Quote from ASBusinessMagnet on April 27, 2011, 1:37 am

Nightgunner5 wrote:

http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/4673/postersciencefair04.png

As far as I can tell, all the small text other than HyPothesis and MateriaLS is just squiggles. There might be something on here that confirms or denies our guesses about Chell's parents.

Notes:
[spoiler]One of the materials is "a special ingredient from Dad's home" which is a box (a generator? an energy container?) with an Aperture Science logo, setting in stone that Chell is Aperture employee's (but not necesarilly the founder's) daughter.

Then it IS possible (speculation) that this "Bring-Your-Daughter-To-Work Day" (BYDTWD) is employees-only, and the founder would likely not compete at all and instead be something like a judge.

And then, the BYDTWD took place when GLaDOS was turned on, so Chell was something like a fifth-grader during that time and was born sometime in the 1980s.[/spoiler]

Quote from Player1 on April 27, 2011, 9:33 am

ASBusinessMagnet wrote:

[spoiler]Then it IS possible (speculation) that this "Bring-Your-Daughter-To-Work Day" (BYDTWD) is employees-only,[/spoiler]

[spoiler]BYDTWD would be very weird indeed if it wasn't employee only. So yes that's a safe assumption.[/spoiler]

ASBusinessMagnet wrote:

[spoiler]and the founder would likely not compete at all and instead be something like a judge.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]That's a hefty speculative step to take. Especially considering that the founder is Cave Johnson. I'd say it's more likely it's not a competition at all. Why would it be?[/spoiler]

ASBusinessMagnet wrote:

[spoiler]And then, the BYDTWD took place when GLaDOS was turned on, so Chell was something like a fifth-grader during that time and was born sometime in the 1980s.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]I don't follow that logic at all. Yes, BYDTWD needs to have taken place around the time GLaDOS was turned on (or maybe a little before, otherwise the child experiments would have been cleaned up). How do you place this in the 1980ies?

I'd guess at the BYDTWD experiment participants age to be around 8-13. I don't know if we have an exact date for when GLaDOS filled the lab with neurotoxins though?[/spoiler]

Quote from ASBusinessMagnet on April 27, 2011, 9:39 am

Player1 wrote:

[spoiler]I'd guess at the BYDTWD experiment participants age to be around 8-13. I don't know if we have an exact date for when GLaDOS filled the lab with neurotoxins though?[/spoiler]

[spoiler]200-, the year of the Black Mesa incident.[/spoiler]

[spoiler](Though, I thought about 1998 when calculating that.)[/spoiler]

Quote from Player1 on April 27, 2011, 10:18 am

ASBusinessMagnet wrote:

200-, the year of the Black Mesa incident.

[spoiler]Reference? I don't see how the Black Mesa references in Portal 1 indicate anything other than Black Mesa and Aperture having contact / being in competition before the neurotoxin incident. The trophy case in Portal 2 just confirms that they have been in competition for a long time.

According to the iPad book about Portal 2 the _gameplay_ of Portal 1 is supposedly taking place circa 2010 and Portal 2 circa 50,000 AD. None of those really set a date for the neurotoxin incident though, other than "it definitely happened before 2010".

In Portal 2 the most recent of the old Aperture test chambers is from 1982, and Cave Johnson is by then terminally ill. In the previous sets of tests there have been at most 4 years between chambers and there have been at least a couple of chambers per set. So if we have to speculate I'd say that most likely Cave Johnson died sometime between 1982 and 1986. Naturally Caroline would have been made to upload into GLaDOS as soon as possible after that. How soon that is, we don't know. It's fairly safe to assume (based on the comic) that she wasn't GLaDOS for long before killing off everybody (except Doug Rattmann and whoever was in the relaxation vaults). But this still does not supply any dates.

To narrow it down we could look at stuff like the type of computers you find scattered around in Portal 1 and 2 (which suggests at least early 90ies style, maybe later). But there are plenty of anachronistic office equipment; in the comic they're still using paper files in vanilla binders, but the Test Subject Order file is an excel spreadsheet (or at least a spreadsheet that's from the late 90ies or later).

Also Rattmann is alive during Portal 1, though I'm not sure if we can use that to narrow it down much. He's a young scientist in the flashback part of the comic, but there's no telling how old he is at the time of Portal 1. We can't even use the "there's no way he'd survive alone for that long and stay sane" because obviously he's not sane. The comic suggests he wasn't sane to begin with though, since he's got an anti-psychotic medicine prescription. But really this doesn't tell us much :S If Rattmann was 20 in 1985 he'd be 45 in 2010 (Portal 1); crazy long time to stay hidden from GLaDOS, but then again he is pretty crazy.

My speculation is that the neurotoxin incident probably happened in the mid-1990ies. Mostly I base this on the type of office equipment that's present in all the behind-the-scenes stuff in Portal 1 and on the comic (by 2000 just about no office had any kind of paper-based filing system left, especially not a research facility like Aperture). This would still leave plenty of room for Chell to be born in the 80ies though.

(Further completely baseless speculation: maybe Cave and Caroline decided, when it was obvious that Cave was dying, to try and get a child. So Caroline got pregnant just before Cave died and Chell got born maybe as late as 1986? That'd make her 9 years old in 1995 when the Aperture scientists finally figured out how to upload Caroline to a computer. Since it was Cave's final wish that she should do it Caroline reluctantly agreed, but made sure that little Chell got adopted by an Aperture employee family. Once she was GLaDOS she manipulated Aperture to host a BYDTWD so she could get to see Chell again. When it dawned on her that Chell would be leaving by the end of the day she decided to gas the entire facility so she could keep her baby safe in a relaxation vault. This is where the speculation kinda breaks down though, because this would suggest that Caroline retained a lot of her humanity inside GLaDOS and also that she knew she was Caroline and that Chell was her daughter. The only way this could work was if eventually, over the years, the machine part of GLaDOS slowly pushed the human part of Caroline out of the way until she no longer remembered it. This does fit with the Portal 2 storyline though, where she finally gets rid of the human part alltogether after having had it nearly overtake her with emotions.)

((One minor case of severe problems with that speculation however is that the comic sort of suggests that GLaDOS gasses everybody during a "bring your cat to work day". I don't know if we're supposed to take that seriously though.))[/spoiler]

EDIT: bigspoilered instead.

Quote from Player1 on April 27, 2011, 10:27 am

[spoiler]Upon re-reading my baseless speculation above I've come to the conclusion that it's the rambling of a mad man. The comic clearly states that GLaDOS is homocidally insane from the get-go, so there's no way Caroline had any major influence on GLaDOS' actions.

Also if Chell was originally Cave and Caroline's daughter, but got adopted by somebody else, it sorta would have had to be long before she was participating in the BYDTWD since she'd otherwise be able to remember Caroline as her mother.

I'm sure we can construct a story where this does happen, but it does appear to be rather far fetched. (Also the hidden figure in the painting vs the greek myth thing found somewhere else is more convincing tbh.)[/spoiler]

Quote from ASBusinessMagnet on April 27, 2011, 10:31 am

Player1 wrote:

[spoiler]the _gameplay_ of Portal 1 is supposedly taking place circa 2010 and Portal 2 circa 50,000 AD.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]Honestly, if Portal 2 was 48,000 years after Portal 1 quite literally NOTHING would be left of Aperture. An Ice Age would have destroyed everything.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]And 200- is from Combine OverWiki. They still accepted the last line of the "new" Aperture Science history as canon, but heard from Valve that 1998 was incorrect and 200- was correct.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]And beyond that there is just a longish speculation on Doug's age, based on incorrect assumptions.[/spoiler]

Quote from Nightgunner5 on April 27, 2011, 10:34 am

Player1 wrote:

[spoiler]Also if Chell was originally Cave and Caroline's daughter, but got adopted by somebody else, it sorta would have had to be long before she was participating in the BYDTWD since she'd otherwise be able to remember Caroline as her mother.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]Wheatly said that people in extended relaxation get brain damage, so it's not impossible for Chell to have been Cave and Caroline's daughter without remembering it. Cave is dead and Caroline was turned into a computer, so technically, Chell is an orphan, which fits into GLaDOS's lines.[/spoiler]

Quote from Player1 on April 27, 2011, 10:53 am

ASBusinessMagnet wrote:

Player1 wrote:

[spoiler]the _gameplay_ of Portal 1 is supposedly taking place circa 2010 and Portal 2 circa 50,000 AD.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]Honestly, if Portal 2 was 48,000 years after Portal 1 quite literally NOTHING would be left of Aperture. An Ice Age would have destroyed everything.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]And 200- is from Combine OverWiki. They still accepted the last line of the "new" Aperture Science history as canon, but heard from Valve that 1998 was incorrect and 200- was correct.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]Keighley, Geoff: "The Final Hours of Portal 2", chapter 8, page 4: "Portal 1 took place somewhere around the year 2010, between the events of Half-Life 1 and 2".

Same source, chapter 8, page 6: "One way to further differentiate Portal and Half-Life was to set the game far into the future --- at least 50,000 years."

Same source, chapter 8, page 6: "...Aperture circa 52,000 AD"

This is a book by a journalist that was given free reign to follow the development of Portal 2. So it is not speculation. Aside from a direct statement from Valve itself it's about as close to canon as you're going to get.

As for the whole "nothing would be left of Aperture" don't forget that the system didn't shut down with GLaDOS. It's obvious from the events in the start of Portal 2 that a backup system was still running the facility. In the comic Rattmann managed to redirect power so that at least Chell's longterm relaxation vault didn't run out of juice anytime soon. Wheatley is around, as can be assumed a number of other maintenance systems would be. The nano-bots most likely included in this.

So while the graphical state of decay might not fit your sense of what it should look like after 50 millennia, part of that could be because the facility is still trying to maintain itself. The events in the game seem to be triggered by the backup systems starting to fail, which would also explain the (relatively recent) breakdown of certain test chambers, foliage breaking through, etc.

Related: human structures lasting for that long is not totally out of the question. If you're located in nice old slow bedrock, away from geothermal activity, it can probably be done. In Finland they're creating a nuclear waste facility and they're working on figuring out how that is going to last the projected 100,000 years.[/spoiler]