At the start of Portal 2, it's clear that time has passed. You've been woken up every few months for physical and mental fitness tests, until something goes wrong and you're left in stasis for much longer. How long is Chell, your character, in stasis? How much time has passed between the end of Portal and the start of Portal 2?
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Assuming the announcer was reciting the number of days you had been in stasis, as with your earlier 50-day wake up call, "it has been 9 9 9 9 9..9 9...[static]", it has been at least 273 years, or 27,300 assuming the pause wasn't a broken-record effect.
In "The Final Hours of Portal 2" e-book, Keighley mentions that:
One way to further differentiate Portal and Half-Life was to set the game far in the future—at least 50,000 years.
It doesn't explicitly say that Portal 2 was set in 52,000 AD, but the general point was that the events between the two series are so distant from one another as to not interfere.
Nick T
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No exact number has been stated that I'm aware of. All we know is that "hundreds of years" have passed between the end of Portal 1 and the beginning of Portal 2.
Brant
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12@Juan - Unless the timer simply caps out at a given number of nines and stays there rather than rolling over, in which case it could have been any length of time. MILLIONS OF YEARS. D: – Shinrai Apr 20 '11 at 16:57
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7@Shinrai, You would think that Aperture Science would have enough foresight to fix the y9.999...k bug. – Zoredache Apr 20 '11 at 19:34
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22I assumed that the count of "9 9 9 9 9..." was intentionally meant to indicate that the counter reached its upper limit and didn't roll over. From a storytelling perspective an unknown but large amount of time having passed is dramatically better than a large but precisely known amount of time. – Andrew Lambert Apr 20 '11 at 20:16
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13Hey, at least the programmer protected against an integer overflow. How would you like to hear that you were in stasis for a negative amount of time? – Ryan C. Thompson Apr 21 '11 at 07:09
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1@RyanThompson as someone who's dabbled in programming, yes. Yes I would. :) – Keen Apr 22 '11 at 18:55
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2@RyanThompson Honestly, why would an amount of time be signed? Much more efficient to have it unsigned. – Apr 24 '11 at 23:02
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@Amazed If we're throwing computer logic in here, then might as well mention that the upper limit of a number is hardly ever a sequence of nines, since computers work with a binary, not a decimal system. – Apr 27 '11 at 09:50
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@Arda Xi true, but it would be less dramatic (and less obvious to non-programmers) if the counter said 4-2-9-4-9-6-7-2-9-5 or 6-5-5-3-5, don't you think? Besides, how often does your computer give you a number without first converting it into base 10? – Andrew Lambert Apr 27 '11 at 17:08
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1@Amazed No, you understood me wrong. The limit of a 32-bit integer is 4294967295 when converted into base 10. In base 2 it would be 11111111111111111111111111111111. (All 32 bits set to 1). Valve is usually true to technology like that. (Since GLaDOS died in 200X, I doubt the programming was updated since then) – Apr 27 '11 at 18:28
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@Arda Xi And in hexadecimal it would be FFFFFFFF, in octal it would be 1777777777, in base 12 it would be 9ba461593. What I'm saying is that Valve was going for comedic/dramatic value, not accuracy, in its depiction. – Andrew Lambert Apr 27 '11 at 21:01
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@Amazed And what I'm saying is that that's not really Valve's style. They usually go for realism. (As far as portals are realistic). – Apr 27 '11 at 21:15
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@Amazed I think I've just found proof for your theory. One of the sound files,
announcer/openingcourtesy01.wavwhich I think is unused in the game, has the nines persisting for 30 seconds in the background. That would be a lot of days. – May 01 '11 at 22:02 -
@Arda Xi: I'm really not sure where you're going with this, and I'm pretty sure that as far as Portal 2 went, storytelling was their overriding concern. – doppelgreener May 16 '11 at 08:57
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@Arda I just noticed it was two weeks ago! Anyway, you were making a great case, but I'm not sure what point it was driving toward: either just on a tangent about computer logic, or an assertion that 9999... was actually a specific date because if it was real it would've overflowed at a power of 2 (because Valve goes for realism)? If it was the latter, I mean to say: this time they may not be. – doppelgreener May 16 '11 at 14:25
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@JonathanHobbs Indeed, it is intended to show overflowing. That's rather obvious, from the comment I made on May 1. – May 16 '11 at 15:13
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3@JonathanHobbs obviously Cave Johnson had his scientists develop a decimal computer, resulting in a 999999 overflow. – kotekzot May 04 '12 at 14:58
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... if it's him, he really would've made such a computer. He went waaay beyond trinary and decided that decimal logic with quantum voltages made the most sense :P – codetaku Jul 28 '14 at 12:19
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In an unused GLaDOS voice line she states that:
Fifty thousand years is a lot of time to think. About me. About you. We were doing so well together. Source
Referring respectively to herself and the protagonist Chell.
Joachim
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That message is more likely from co-op, where (as the site you link to also shows) GLaDOS mentions those 50k years. – Zommuter Jul 17 '13 at 12:36
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I disagree with zommuter. There's no reason for her "about you" if she's talking to the robots, right? Why would she have even given them a passing thought in fifty thousand years? – codetaku Jul 28 '14 at 12:22
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6@codetaku: (Spoilers) As part of the bonus chapter in the co-op missions, GLaDOS pretends that it's been 50,000 years since you found the humans at the end of the regular missions, but a few levels in and she admits that that was a lie and it's only been a week. – Pyritie Jul 28 '15 at 08:56
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According to the Combine Overwiki, the appearance of wood, paper and upholstery would suggest decades rather than years. Portal took place roughly around the same time as the Combine Invasion of Earth (just after Half-Life [estimated to be 2003]]), Chell was the placed in stasis for presumably approximately 27 years and woken up presumably approximately 2029/2030.
2003: Half-Life, Portal.
2029/2030: Half-Life 2 (and Episodes), Portal 2.
These dates are estimations using information from the Combine Overwiki. The 2003 info is taken from a December calander in Half-Life (Office Complex) and the date is either 2003 or 2008. The 27 years info is taken from the Overwiki, in-game evidence and fan information.
Dominic
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Why does the appearance of wood/paper/upholstery suggest decades versus years? Did you mean to say that the fact they were still around and hadn't decayed or rotted suggested a shorter time-period? In any case, if kept in good conditions, or at least stable (e.g. underground) the shelf life of most of those products should be fairly long. – Nick T Apr 27 '11 at 03:20
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I believe that it was somewhere around 30,000 years in the future.
A. Paper, wood, upholstery? This is Aperture Science! It would be no surprise to me if they were created to last. They obviously prepared for the apocalypse and extreme periods of time (announcer recordings referring to the future: "If the laws of physics no longer apply in the future then god help you" or "...when society has rebuilt itself").
B. I like to think of the 9,999,999 days in a comical way: Wheatley, being the impressively engineered moron that he is notices that there are an awful lot of nines scrolling on the monitor and realizes what his job originally was. He then decides to wake you (remember that the last time you checked everyone looked pretty much alive).
C. Even for 27 years I doubt that there would be so many plants all over the facility. Despite the super potato growth that little Chell presented on that fateful bring your daughter to work day (which is the perfect time to have her tested).
D. Hundreds of years is always mentioned everywhere, but unless 9,999,999 is a broken overflow timer it would seem unlikely that it was 273 years versus 27,300. In all reality it was probably longer than that.
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I think 9 years because the Aperture Labs are near the Great Lakes and way below the water table. Also the labs are nuclear powered and if it was longer, Chell would be dead. Half-Life 2 is also taking place after the time Portal 2 is, so these are my reasons.
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I think it is 27 years, as 27 years is enough time for the facility to get into the condition it was in at the begginning, yet if it were any longer, well, I doubt anything would be functional.
273 yearsis most likely to be the answer as to how long Chell has been in statis. She most likely was put there after the explosion of Aperture Science in Portal 1, so it could most likely also be the amount of time passed between Portal 1 and Portal 2... – Tamara Wijsman Apr 20 '11 at 19:26announcer/openingcourtesy01.wavwhich I think is unused in the game, has the nines persisting for 30 seconds in the background. That would be a lot of days. – May 01 '11 at 22:03