I don't know how to articulate this well, but I really fucking hate the way a lot of thin writers write fat characters. Like how men write women "breasting boobily" there is something so dehumanizing about how fat characters are often written. "He waddled", "he lumbered", the writer of the book I'm reading always mentions this characters "fleshy hand" when he does something with his hand. Like, we already know that he's fat. There is no need to describe everything he does as "doing it fatly".
i think the first time grace loses a tooth from scurvy, once they get past the initial panic (āno, i wonāt die from losing one toothā and āyeah, it hurts, but itās not that badā and āi can still eat just fine, i promiseā), rocky tentatively asks if he can hear it more closely.
āyeah, sure.ā grace holds up the tooth to the xenonite barrier.
āno, closer,ā rocky says, claws clicking nervously. āwant to hold.ā
grace considers that. if rocky were to, say, lose a chunk of carapace, heād ask to have it without a second thought. heād probably make an excuse about wanting to point a spectrometer at it or test its properties, and heād obviously do those things, but heād mainly just want to touch it. to hold a piece of rocky without fear of either of them being harmed.
he drops the tooth into the exchange drawer and rocky lunges to retrieve it. grace has a thousand self-hating, existential thoughts about losing it ā his health is declining so quickly, his smile is changed forever, he can guess which tooth heāll lose next ā but they all quiet as he watches rocky pick it up with trembling claws. rocky cradles the tooth in the palm of his hand like a delicate treasure, warbling a wordless tune of delight, and grace thinks that, if he makes it through this, everything might just be okay.
it really does feel like a lot of autistic people on tumblr are looking for any possible opportunity to make fun of other autistic people & especially autistic people worse off than them
condescending reading comprehension questions & making fun of people who only read fanfiction and watch cartoons & making fun of picky eaters & "you people can't do anything" & "you can't even ask for ketchup" & "guys gullible is written on the ceiling" and i see these posts reblogged by people i otherwise consider good and kind people and people i consider my friends and it makes it extremely scary to talk about my own experiences for fear of being made fun of by people who should like... understand
like yeah you guys respect me and treat me like the adult that i am NOW but will you continue to do so if i say that my parents or girlfriend have to order food for me in restaurants. if i tell you that i have ARFID so severe my safe food list is less than twenty items long (and that i have no interest in exposure therapy to change that). if i ask for clarification when you make a joke you think should be obvious. if i tell you i only read comics & watch tv marketed for children. if i can't cook. if i play pokemon games over & over. if i can't work. if i can't clean. if i can't live alone. how autistic am i allowed to be before my friends start treating me differently. how autistic am i allowed to be before i become the target of ridicule
Why are eiridians different colors (do they have different minerals, perhaps?)
Thank you for asking this question! I jumped out of my seat in joy in anticipation of answering. I will be explaining some speculative ways of how Eridians were able to evolve different colored carapaces :)
Traits in general can be sorted onto a spectrum: they evolved because they are in some way advantageous for survival and reproduction, or is so neutral to evolutionary success it just never needed to be selected out.
Eridians donāt percieve colors, so different color carapaces probably lands closer to the "no effect" end of the spectrum. Happy coincidence that (at least with movie depiction) we have colorful little pebbles!!
We can see the difference between an advantageous trait and a neutral trait demonstrated by the fur coats of wild cats vs house cats. Wild cats donāt have nearly as much fur variation within a species as house cats, because in the wild cats have a way higher need for good camouflage as it is crucial for hunting for prey and hiding from predators. House cats, however, coexisted with humans for centuries -- humans provide cats with shelters, food, and way more variability in types of environment (so a specific coat is not selected for) so even unusual fur patterns could be passed on with way more success.
Colors are likely a byproduct of other physical traits, so letās consider some physical traits eridians CAN perceive via sonar: 1) texture, and 2) silhouette.
Silhouette is straightforward enough: by how sound bounces off a surface, an Eridian can get the outline of another Eridian, down to the unique spiky protrusions of each finger. They can also get information via the texture of the surface: sound bounces off differently on different textures. This combined with silhouette can allow very fast person recognition!
The Eridian carapace is entirely inorganic, being composed of oxidized metals. If āEridianā is all one species, all Eridians over Erid probably have very similar carapace makeup, especially Eridians living in close proximity, because they consume similar foods. But if they are different species of the same genus (think modern humans and neanderthal humans), it could allow more possibility for more carapace variation. (If you are interested in the speculative biology different species of Eridians, @lutheban has a great post on it under the tag #eridian biology !!)
Addressing the second part of the asker's question: can the colors be result of different minerals? While pure mineral/crystal Eridian designs are super cool to see, it unfortunately is not super biologically viable (unlikely to be evolved consistently). Eridian carapaces are comparable to shells and scales, being grown and shed as needed; it would take way too much energy to maintain pure mineral carapaces when a mixture of what is most available is an option. But at the end of the day, spec bio is spec bio: if Erid is strange enough, even the strangest traits can become necessary and be evolved.
Now that we know these factors, we can go into the main possible reason Eridians develop different colors: variation that comes along with the mechanisms that create the unique textures and sillouhoutes of each Eridian. Perhaps every Eridian breaks food down just a little differently, making the carapace a little different between each Eridian. Color, in this context, is similar to human fingerprints and palm etchings: due to it having no evolutionary effect, itās allowed to randomize to no bounds -- to the point itās pretty much impossible for two humans to have the same etchings!
Random colors then mix and match and go wild with no selection for it or against it! Some of the simpler inheritance patterns are listed. Keep in mind that most of the time the actual genetics of inheritance are way more complex than just one gene, but these are very classic representations. If this is interesting to you, you can look up the term "non-mendelian inheritance" (YouTube and Wikipedia are both great resources), or ask me in the comments! :)
I have mixed feelings about how Grace's paper + resulting crashout was portrayed by Andy Weir. I'm aware that it was just a throwaway bit meant to be funny, but it's too important to Grace's past, in my opinion, to treat it as such. It's why he became a teacher, and why Eva hired him; he would not be who he was in the book without that paper! But the contents of the paper and the community's reaction makes zero sense if we take Grace's description of it at face value. How could his advisor and committee allow him to take such controversial stances when he got his PhD? How could that last paper make it through peer review? One of two things happened:
This was his first and only paper post-thesis, and his university was... really inept. But I don't think this is something that Andy Weir, Believer In Institutions, would purposefully want to suggest.
Grace was being facetious when he was talking about his research-- his reasoning and methods were legitimate, and it was his reaction to normal criticism of it that was not. People have posted about this before and I personally stand by this idea more. It aligns with his own character traits and doesn't go counter to the world Weir creates.
I do astrophysics for a living, and even though I don't specialize in exobiology or planetary science, I think I can square Grace's circle and propose a summary of Grace's thesis that actually makes sense. He made two main arguments in An Analysis of Water-Based Assumptions and Re-calibration of Expectations for Evolutionary Models:
We should not assume that all life must be carbon based.
This is actually about sample sizes and probability rather than the actual viability of non carbon-based life. The number of exoplanets we've discovered skyrocketed to the thousands in the 2010s (I assume this was around when Grace's paper was published) after the launch of the Kepler Space Telescope. However, the majority of these planets are large planets with tight orbits because these are easier to catch. Only a handful are terrestrial, and even fewer are in the habitable zone. You could argue, then, that we might as well work with the data we already have to look for life on planets we already know exist, because we now have a big sample size (and the computational resources to handle it) on our side. Even if life is objectively harder to form on these massive, hot planets, we still get thousands of chances to find life rather than only 2 or 3 chances on our best Earthlike worlds, even if Earthlike worlds do have an overall higher probability of creating life. These large, tight-orbiting planets also have more easily measured atmospheres than smaller ones, which is necessary to look for biosignatures. If it's a race to find any alien life rather than "Earth life 2.0" specifically, your strategy should be quantity over quality, especially since having one exoplanet telescope means it's unlikely to get the funding for another for the next few decades. Make your hay and lemonade while the Sun still shines and the tree's still bearing fruit!
Also, early Earth's atmosphere was anoxic and dominated by sulfur chemistry, with high levels of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide. The history of life on Earth was dominated by anaerobic bacteria that enjoyed these conditions for over a billion years, which is about half the time life has existed on this planet. Aliens in another system looking at our planet at a random time are equally likely to have observed us during our sulfur dioxide-dominated era as they are to have observed us during our oxygen-dominated era. If our one and only confirmed example of abiogenesis occurred on a planet devoid of oxygen and full of poisonous gases, why must we assume that Earthlike planets that are good candidates for alien life must look like our modern Earth? This point ties into the second part of his argument.
The Goldilocks zone is for idiots:
Stars gradually increase in brightness and temperature as they age. The Sun was only 70% of its modern luminosity 3.5 billion years ago, when we find the first evidence of liquid water and life on Earth's surface. But the Sun being this dim means that the Earth was outside of the Solar System's habitable zone! Our surface should have been completely frozen over, yet life appeared during this time anyway! This is the Faint Young Sun Paradox. We still don't know how the Earth managed to maintain its warmer temperatures.
Earth, again, is our only point of reference for abiogenesis. You could argue that it's not fair to discount planets (terrestrial or otherwise) on the basis of not being in the "right" spot for liquid water when our own best and only example was not in the right spot, either!
We are increasingly finding that complex chemistry can happen at a huge range of conditions, and complex abiotic chemistry is generally understood to be the precursor to simple biology. As a molecular biologist by trade, I will assume Grace has done some work in this specific realm in finding promising evidence for the formation of proteins and lipids (carbon based or otherwise) in non Earthlike conditions, and constraining the range of conditions at which carbon based chemistry can plausibly exist.
That is completely reasonable work to do. These are all perfectly reasonable arguments to make and stand by. But if you were a thin-skinned, stubborn individual who loved creating narratives of ineptitude or persecution as a way to evade criticism and responsibility? You could easily convince yourself that the people leaving comments for peer review hate you.
What doesnāt get talked about enough is that, all those 40-something years, Rocky had all the supplies he needed to go back home. He had the fuel, he had the food. But he didnāt. He tried and tried and tried. He kept going. He took measurements, gathered data, built new Astrophage samplers but could never get it right. He maintained the Blip-A, a ship that was built in a hurry and just kept breaking, for over FORTY YEARS. When Grace found him, Rocky wasnāt just sitting idle in orbit. He was still working, still trying, he hadnāt given up. He was tracking the stars, probably to watch for a potential second mission from Erid, when he spotted the Hail Mary in reverse-thrust. Rocky calls Grace brave. Truly, Grace is. But Iād compare Rocky more to Stratt. How much of yourself would you be willing to sacrifice to save your planet? Rocky was willing to stay at Tau Ceti for the rest of his life until he either found a solution, or died.
My favourite Adrian headcanon is that they're a biologist/zoologist who has seen so much shit, they're completely unphased by any and every alien habit of Grace's.
I mean full-on khaki-shorts-wearing, traversing-wilderness-with-nothin'-but-a-machete Adrian who yoinks snakes outta trees and pets swamp puppies and will unflinchingly dig around in elephant faeces for signs of a rare parasitic tapeworm if needed.
Oh, humans eat socially? No problem, Adrian has observed many many animals eat. Did you know that an obscure species of small underground dirt creature from the north side of Erid also eats socially? Adrian can give you a not-so-short presentation on them.
Oh, the human has no external carapace and so its internal sounds are absurdly loud, wet and off-putting? No problem, Adrian was just conducting an expedition last month researching the incredible eridian animal, the Wet Loud Worm from the south-east region of Wet Loud Wormland. They're desensitised, it's fine.
Oh, Grace leaks often from many orifices and it can be a bit of a learning curve to get used to? No problem for Adrian, see Wet Loud Worm paragraph again!
Meanwhile, Rocky is bewildered as to how he's managed to third-wheel both of his relationships, because both Adrian and Grace are nerds who nerd out about things, and Adrian is shaking in their carapace with enthusiasm to learn more about human culture and biology, not to mention everything about earth animals. And yeah, sure, Grace might be a molecular biologist, but he'll be damned if he'll pass up an opportunity to learn about alien fauna from a fellow scientist, and yes, Adrian, he'd love to hear about the small underground dirt creature from the north side of Erid, and he's so excited to learn more about the Wet Loud Worm, do go on.
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