my other favourite thing about the project hail mary book is that rocky spends the first half of his and grace's mission time together totally in awe of the idea that humans can hear light, like he picked this specific type of xenonite for the second tunnel window/his ball bc the part of the initial window that was that type clearly had the better sound resonance for grace's species to be able to hear through, why else would grace have specifically bent down to that part of the window to try and communicate?
and then a little later on he learns that it had nothing to do with sound at all! purely by chance this composition of xenonite lets light pass through it! and humans have this special organ that lets them detect invisible radiation to such a fine and accurate degree they use it to navigate a room and sometimes to communicate with each other, without even needing technological augmentation!* at one point when looking at planet adrian grace is like wow, i know from our readings this planet has a surface, but the atmosphere must be really dense, i can't see anything past the clouds! and rocky is like YOU CAN NORMALLY SEE PLANET SURFACE FROM SPACE QUESTION??
(*mostly. giving movie grace glasses makes this retroactively very funny)
and then there's an initial smaller taumoeba leak before the catastrophic one (not due to the xenonite, due to a lot of stuff around the ship breaking during the adrian mission), which mostly just succeeds in draining the hail mary's non-vital power system and turning all the lights off
which drops grace's ability to navigate his own ship to zero
and rocky's just like oh wow humans suck
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