Ok so I recently watched project hail mary and I have a lot of positive things to say about it like I like the story or grace and rocky’s friendship was awesome or that my new favorite spaceship is the hail mary but if you want explanations on why the story is good then I am not the right person to ask.
The thing I wanna focus on is the fact that
The Astrophage is a plant
Not in a taxonomic sense because it definitely isn’t close at all but at it’s base function it functions really similarly.
Astrophage takes in sunlight and carbon dioxide to store energy.
Plants take in sunlight and carbon dioxide(and a few other things) to store energy(and also release oxygen in the process).
It’s black and completely opaque for the same reasons plants are green. They both absorb light, astrophage just absorbs more of it.
It even does exactly the same thing as larger trees for exactly the same reason, they both block out the sun because they both want more light.
Astrophage just does it on a stellar scale rather than terrestrial. It’s a living Dyson Bioswarm. And it’s treated as such, I mean the output is literally used to get a ship to a different star system.
It’s like Andy Weir took the concept of a plant and then injected 20 metric tonnes of steroids into it it’s so fucking cool
