Grace finds a phone tucked in a random maintenance hatch a couple years into the Erid trip and starts laughing so hard he's crying because the pictures and videos folder is full of Vat shenanigans.
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3
--
Shapiro drowning in Dubois’ EVA suit. Dubois with Shapiro's suit taped to him and her helmet balanced on top of his head
Grace looking at the camera confused while the core time circle around him like the one girl surrounded by five guys meme
Stratt reclined on a couch looking demure with a coffee mug and using Grace's legs as a lap board for her tablet. Grace is dead asleep, obviously snoring with his mouth wide open and covered in reports. His glasses are on Stratt's head.
Carl walking by the camera with Grace thrown over his shoulder. Grace is visibly pleased and yapping.
Illyukhina walking by the camera with Grace thrown over her shoulder. Grace looks vaguely ill.
Yao passionately doing karaoke with each of the core staff members.
Lamai asleep on a prototype coma bed.
Steve Hatch maternity shoot with the Beatles.
Grace and Dimtri using a centrifuge to make butter.
Grace and Dimitri getting yelled at by Lokken for using a centrifuge to make butter.
Dubois carrying Grace and Shapiro under each arm to the cafeteria. They all are talking like this is a normal occurrence.
Yao hanging upside down from a simulator that glitched with a straight face while Illyukhina is crying laughing on the floor below him.
Compilation video of the world's greatest minds dropping tools, tripping, and running into the glass walls.
Videos of the astronauts defeatedly drifting away from the mock ship in the buoyancy tank after losing their grip. The others are dramatically reaching out for them.
Redell teaching the Russians about New Zealand bombing dives in the training pools.
Shapiro, in formal wear, standing next to a slideshow titled “How I Cloned and Replaced the World Leaders”
Dubois - “My Alien Seduction Tactics"
Grace - “Middle Schooler vs Scientist”
Dimitri - “Using the Incorrect Equipment for Correct Results"
Hatch - “Yoko Ono: First Contact?”
Lamai - “How Not to Use a Coma Robot”
Lokken - “Grace is an Idiot”
Leclerc - “The Ice Age and You”
Stratt - “Things I DO NOT Have Time For”
Carl - “Securing a Home Depot for Idiots”
Yao - “Worst Times to Make a Joke”
Illyukhina - "Benefits of Vodka in Space”
Reddell - “What I Did in 1989”
Illyukhina passed out on top of Dmitri (also passed out) surrounded by a minefield of bottles none of which are for alcohol.
Leclerc looking upset and holding a penguin plushy.
Horrible mishmash of memes from all over the world plus some homemade memes of various quality.
even more vatling headcanons because the saviours of the world deserve to be silly:
-A flag war started between the vatlings, whoever could hide their country's flag the longest won an hour of time off. Ryland was disqualified as he used Eva's office—and since nobody was allowed to snoop there, was found out by her. Dimitri's was found by Olesya, who was very quick to rat out her own countryman. Steve engraved his into a prototype beetle, which Lokken quickly discovered. Lamai won since she hid her's under the monkey enclosure
-The team, though consisting of the smartest minds on Earth, very often forgot basic words and grammar rules. In a meeting, since English has been dubbed the common tongue, one vatling may start a sentence before trailing off as they forget the word they were trying to say
-Lokken is a big victim of this, and since there are little other Norwegians on board, she would glare at the object she's trying to name. It takes several other vatlings, Eva, Dimitri and Steve mainly, following her pointed stare, listing off several items in her line of sight until she gets it
-This sometimes turns into charades or a game of pictionary, unfortunately none of team are artists
-Ryland, having experience with his middle schoolers, is the best at figuring out Lokken's shitty drawings (a fleeting moment of civility between them)
-Eva sometimes brain glitched as she switched between her six different languages, and when its time to speak to Ryland again, may still be in that language mode. He joked once that she was a robot having a system malfunction after she gave him an order in Mandarin, which she did not find funny and made him stay in his lab during their usually scheduled lunch
-He pouted the entire time, since it's a rare chance he got to spend with Eva alone outside of the extremely late nights, barely touching the food brought to him. (Eva felt terrible after and never took away her Ryland time again, the two are way too attached than either had realised)
-On the same train of thoughts, having to stay up all hours of the day and well into the night is inevitably a horrible idea with said smartest people
-One day, Ryland, Annie and Martin were all finishing up on an experiment, choosing to explore the Vat while they waited on some results. That's when they poked their heads into the engineering department to find Steve duct taped to a chair, hands behind his back, one on his mouth—faintly they could hear him humming a Beatles song
-Redell said the man was getting on their nerves as he went through the entire discography. Lokken looked two seconds away from strangling the Canadian
-Olesya was trying to free Steve but was held back by Dimitri—who then duct taped her and Steve's hands together. she joined, badly butchering Here Comes The Sun, which felt more like punishment for the rest of the team than it was for her and Hatch
-Whenever Eva made her rounds across the labs, no matter how little time she spends, she was yelled at by one of her team leads to wear protective gear. As expected, Lokken and Olesya were the ones that made her stop at the entrance before slapping on a hard hat and a high visibility vest
-She hated the bright yellow, but was never allowed in unless she complied, dictator or not, her scientists refused to let her through despite her threats of throwing them overboard. (She would never, but hearing how she could make them laugh was enough to keep the act up, morale boosting and all)
-When Eva visited Ryland, he handed her gloves and a lab coat, and she wasn't sure which was worse. She was greatful that the most Lamai would do is make her wear a mask
-She made a comment that she looked like a nerd to them, Olesya and Ryland faked gasped, demanding that science is cool, which did not help their case
-That then led to a series of images of Eva in different scientific gear, usually frowning, and a whiteboard stating, which dictator are you, that other vatlings would a tally mark too—the happiest she looked was one in only a safety glasses watching Ryland explain astrophage energy conversation. Another one showed her with a deep scowl surrounded by a happy Dimitri and Lokken as she was in the full bright getup
-After LeClerc had to bomb Antarctica, Eva and Ryland found him under a table in the command center, looking more depressed than either expected. She gave the man the day off, and tried getting him to move, but he refused, so they brought him a blanket and a pillow
-Whatever quick briefing they had scheduled was moved so that LeClerc could hear it from where he sat
-Actually, sleeping in random places were not uncommon, and another photo album was dedicated soley for this
-Examples include Carl asleep on Eva's sofa, Ryland in front the couch, Carl's hand bracing his neck from falling. Eva tipped back on her chair, Ryland standing behind her holding her shoulders in place as she power naps. Annie and Martin laying on the side of the astronauts training pool, while Olesya was submerged. Yáo's shoulders being used by Annie and Olesya, him being trapped between the two, wearing a proud dad smile
-Lamai on one of the Hail Mary's coma pods, looking so peaceful, everyone joked she was in a coma herself. Redell being used as a pillow by Steve and Dimitri, Lokken slapping them with a report, trying to wake the men after another all nighter. Even one of Lokken and Ryland asleep in a conference room post meeting, heads near each other—Eva did not bother the two, staying until both awoke, laughing at the sound of them scampering away from each other
Out of context screenshots of my post-canon Eva-centric fic while im stuck on writing the next part (vatling edition)
You can't convince me that she did not form any real connections on the vat, Eva humanity's-greatest-lover-girl Stratt formed real and genuine bonds with her crew!!!
Let's ignore that happy ending and do some science :)
So I've been pondering Earth in the Hail Mary's absence and specifically what we can derive from canon to determine a climatic model for what happens. In order to figure this out I went through the book with the finest comb possible to pick out all the instances of related information that Weir has stuck in there.
This is Part 1 of 3. First we will explore the assumptions established in the canon text, then we will model those scenarios utilizing a couple different simulators, and finally, we will wrap up the viability of these scenarios (and what it might look like to actually survive them!)
So here's what I have from that:
(please feel free to comment any other book-specific information I missed! I will not be using any movie or author notes outside the book to keep things easily citable. Thanks!)
1) The sun's luminosity is decreasing. Specifically, we have the numbers 0.01% for the start of the novel, then 1% over 9y and 5% in 20y.
I shrugged. “So? Where are we in the solar cycle?”
She [Marissa] shook her head. “It’s not the eleven-year cycle. It’s something else. JAXA accounted for the cycle. There’s still a downward trend. They say the sun is 0.01 percent less bright than it should be.”
(...)
“It’s right,” she said. “The sun’s output will drop a full percent over the next nine years. In twenty years that figure will be five percent. This is bad. It’s really bad.”
- Chapter 2, Project Hail Mary
p.s. love marissa. wish we could've seen her in the movie 💔
2) A year after this, the ArcLight probes are launched. These are noted to be outside the typical preferred launch window for a Venus-Earth alignment, hence the extra time.
Browne cleared his throat. “We received confirmation about ninety minutes ago that ArcLight successfully inserted into orbit around Venus. Now we’re just waiting for that first batch of data.”
It had been a heck of a year since the JAXA announcement about the Petrova problem.
- Chapter 2, Project Hail Mary
3) However! All stars affected by Astrophage will only lose up to 10% luminosity per the text.
"They only get to about ten percent dimmer before they stop dimming. We don't know why. It's not obvious to the naked eye, but"
"But if our sun dims by ten percent, we're all dead,"I said.
"Pretty much."
- Chapter 5, Project Hail Mary
4) The Sahara Paving - 2 trillion m² of paved blackpanels
“But it would be ridiculously slow,” I said. “If you had a one-square-meter box and ideal weather conditions…say, one thousand watts per square meter of solar energy…”
“It’s about half a microgram per day,” he said. “Give or take.”
“That’s a far cry from ‘a thousand kilograms’ per day.”
He smiled. “It’s just a matter of how many square meters you make of it.”
“You’d need two trillion square meters to get a thousand kilograms per day.”
“The Sahara Desert is nine trillion square meters.”
My jaw dropped open.
“That went by fast,” said Stratt. “Explain.”
“Well,” I said. “He wants to pave a chunk of the Sahara Desert with blackpanels. Like…a quarter of the entire Sahara Desert!”
“It’d be the biggest thing ever made by humanity,” he said. “It’d be starkly visible from space.”
I glared at him. “And it would destroy the ecology of Africa and probably Europe.”
“Not as much as the coming ice age will.”
- Chapter 13, Project Hail Mary
5) Bombing Antarctica extends Dr. LeClerc's halved population prediction from 19y to 27y. LeClerc is using a 1500 calorie model to determine his population numbers here. Some effects are discussed.
Stratt pinched her chin. “Nineteen years isn’t enough time. It’ll take thirteen years for the Hail Mary to get to Tau Ceti, and another thirteen for any results or data to come back. We need at least twenty-six years. Twenty-seven would be better.”
(...)
He looked out to sea. “And I’m ordering a nuclear strike on Antarctica. Two hundred and forty-one nuclear weapons, courtesy of the United States, buried fifty meters deep along a fissure at three-kilometer intervals. All going off at the same time.”
(...)
He checked his tablet. “The shelf will cleave at the line of explosions and slowly work its way into the sea and melt. Sea levels will rise about a centimeter over the next month, the ocean temperature will drop a degree—which is a disaster of its own but never mind that for now. Enormous quantities of methane will be released into the atmosphere. And now, methane is our friend. Methane is our best friend. And not just because it’ll keep us warm for a while.”
“Oh?”
“Methane breaks down in the atmosphere after ten years. We can knock chunks of Antarctica into the sea every few years to moderate the methane levels. And if Hail Mary finds a solution, we just have to wait ten years for the methane to go away. You can’t do that with carbon dioxide.”
- Chapter 14, Project Hail Mary
+1) Temperatures could drop 10 to 15 degrees <30y.
I stood and paced slowly in front of the class. "We don't know. But if it breeds like algae does, at about that same speed, climatologists are saying Earth's temperature could drop ten to fifteen degrees."
(...)
"Climatologists think it'|l happen within the next thirty years," I said.
Chapter 4, Project Hail Mary
The Challenge
So! This last piece of lore established by the text is the one we will be challenging with these models. Will the average temperature actually drop ten to fifteen degrees? Or will they go even lower? If this theory is proven incorrect, we'll also model out how we could've potentially ended up with 10-15 + how Earth will fare.
Science Time, baby!
Let's start with the central focus of the story: the sun's luminosity! Referencing (1), if we take (9,0.01) & (20,0.05) as points, x-axis as our time in years and y-axis as luminosity percent loss, we can figure out a rough exponential to determine when a luminosity percent loss will achieve that 10% limit.
y = 0.00267988e^(0.146313*x)
y = lumosity percent loss
x = time in years
So plugging in our 10% for the y, we can figure out it will take 24.75 years for the sun to reach maximum luminosity loss. We also have a general model for what the year over year loss will be, which will be helpful later.
(Edit: Hi! Just realized I forgot to account for (0,0.001) in my equation. This doesn't really fit the current exponential I'm using, so we're going to use a separate formula for 0-9 then 9-20. Formula for 0-9 is y = 0.001*e^(0.25585*x). Graph updated!)
Okay, next point (5): methane!! Everyone loves methane in this 'verse, and for good reason: it has a relatively powerful global warming potential of 81.2 (GWP) in comparison to its residence time. GWP as a measurement, btw, is comparing the warming ability of greenhouse gasses to the standard of carbon dioxide so in 20 years a tonne of methane warms the Earth as much as 81.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Residence time can vary a lot depending on what source you're looking at, because over the course of this time, the carbon in methane is oxidized (producing carbon dioxide and water vapor) and leaves the atmosphere through various other sinks. This can be best modelled through exponential decay, which can get very complicated very fast.
We're going to say that half of methane will be gone in say 6 years and all of it by 12 years, simplifying this vastly.
Now moving on: how much methane are we adding, exactly? Great question. We don't know :) Even with the specificity in the text, unfortunately we just don't really know how much methane is contained in glaciers and can only utilize what little work has been done on it so far. But in this particular instance, we can figure it out by utilizing some back of the napkin math and the text. So Stratt is asking for 27 years at a minimum (and confirming that we're in the launch year all at once. Thanks Stratt!), when LeClerc previously placed the halved population at 19 years. This means that in a standard model without methane, we will see the average temperature that will halve the population at 19 years post-launch. From there, we'll rewind time and add methane until that temperature doesn't occur until year 27. Now, I'll have to figure out if this will require more than one methane addition (probably), but my general theory here is that the goal will be the minimum emissions possible to achieve this goal.
Amazing! We will then have methane and luminosity... Wait. I'm forgetting something. Oh right. The Sahara!
This is a massive project. Redell rightfully notes that it'll be visible from space, and that affects albedo. What's albedo? Great question! Albedo is a measure of the percentage of sunlight that a surface reflects. You've experienced this if you've ever stuck your hand on a white car versus a black one in hot weather. The white car has a higher albedo percentage, so it absorbs less sunlight thus ends up less hot. In the Astrophage Polar Age, however, we really like having less albedo, not more. So how do we work this out to figure how much paving two trillion square meters would affect the Earth? Back to the napkin we go!
So first we get two trillion into a more usable form. Let's convert to kilometers squared instead, which works out to 2 million km². Excellent. Earth has a surface of 510 million km² of general surface area, divided between 361.13 million km² of ocean and 148.94 million km² of land. So this project would alter 1.34% of all terrestrial surface area and 0.39% of Earth's surface in total. Great job, Bob. Now, just for note, the equator is obviously where the majority of sunlight directly impacts the Earth, so it would likely have an outsized effect in comparison to more extreme latitudes. We can't really account for that without literally losing the plot, but be aware that I'm aware. So we can presume they utilize unoccupied regions of the Sahara for this. So we'll say that the original material present was sand, which has an albedo of around 0.5. Now we don't have an exact equivalent for blackpanels, but we'll use asphalt in a pinch for this exercise, here is a simple module exploring this topic. So that would be an albedo of 0.1 - incredibly low.
Okay so, let's get this show on the road. How is planetary albedo calculated? It is essentially an inventory of the reflectivity of the globe, which we figure out through use of special satellites and a lot of math. A common figure used for planetary albedo is 0.31. Now this one was fairly tricky to work out, but here's how I ended up calculating the potential change in albedo. I utilized this data set from NASA Earth Observations in 720x360, then I altered the "black/9999" cells until we ended up with an average of about 0.31 for the whole set. Yay! Now I need to change 0.39% of that, so 1012 of 259560 cells. My goal is to find cells similar to the sand and replace them with asphalt, so in the 0.5 region. This turned up 957 cells for me which I quickly replaced, and did the additional 55 manually (hahaha, suffering).
So what's the end result? Well. It makes a difference of about 0.002063869 (🥲). I will be utilizing that in the final model, because I'm incredibly petty, but it's negligible in this scenario. In case you were wondering.
Some factors I will be willfully ignoring to preserve my sanity. If you have suggestions for other modifiers we can add, please let me know.
Easton’s assistant and I stood off to the side while our bosses had their dispute. He and I looked at each other and mutually shrugged. A small fraternity of underlings with stubborn bosses.
universal experience
Whoa boy. I stepped forward before this got any worse.
grace saving the day
“I don’t like little dictators in their little kingdoms,” she said.
“Drives me crazy.”
thats kinda hipocritical but alright
I held up a finger. “No, no, no! You can’t just use ‘I’m saving the world’ as an excuse every time you’re a jerk.”
She thought it over. “Yeah, okay. You may have a point.”
it still feels kinda wild every time theyre friends that listen to eachother despite the fact theyre always friends that listen to eachother
“Enlighten us, then,” I said. “If the deaths at your solar farm weren’t your fault, why are you here?”
“Because the government thinks I embezzled millions of
dollars.”
“And why do they think that?” I asked.
“Because I embezzled millions of dollars.”
this is awesome, if youre so willing to admit it why arrest you for something else
“Well,” he said. “It was funded by New Zealand. But the idea was to provide power for Africa.”
all of it?
He looked at his shoes. “We built a pilot plant—one square kilometer of mirror area. All of it focused on a large metal drum full of water on top of a tower. Boil the water, run a turbine, you know the drill. I had a crew checking the drum for leaks. When anyone’s in the tower, the mirrors are supposed to be angled away. But someone in the control room fired up the whole system when they thought they were starting a virtual test.”
i see…
He nodded. “Yeah, that came up in the trial too. But I would have gotten away with it if the project had been successful.
that is secondary but kinda funny how little he cares
“And what if you had been doing your job instead of going on a bender for three months? What if you’d been there the day the accident happened? Would the accident still have happened?”
His expression was answer enough.
ok dude was lying about the lying then
“What’d you get? Maybe a few grams? My idea can get you a thousand kilograms per day. In a few years you’ll have enough for the whole Hail Mary mission. It’ll take you longer than that to build the ship anyway.”
oh?
“You’d need two trillion square meters to get a thousand kilograms per day.”
“The Sahara Desert is nine trillion square meters.”
My jaw dropped open.
“That went by fast,” said Stratt. “Explain.”
IT IS?? a trillion is a really big number yall that does not sound right
why did you plan this whole thing dude, you didnt know stratt would show up
“Okay. You’re with us.”
He pumped his fist
first person to be happy to be in stratts team
“Good Morning,” Rocky says.
morning rocky
(scrambled eggs with pork sausage)
you have such wonderous space breakfast
Okay. Finally I think we have the words needed for this discussion. Here goes.
we gonna finally start working on this actual problem?
“Good. Same. You and me will save Eridani and Sol.”
“Yes yes yes!”
thats the plan, how tho?
My crewmates died, but I didn’t. Random luck.”
“Bad,” he says.
only possible answer but so not enough
He says the Eridian word for “cell,” and I add the tones to my ever-growing dictionary.
we do that so many times, glad were still doing it“I need a word: fast-moving hydrogen atoms. Very very fast.”
“Hot gas.”
“No. Faster than that. Very very very fast.”
He wiggles his carapace. He’s confused
they dont know radiation… at least it didnt take long to figure out how everyone died
welcome back lokken
As a rule, we tried to avoid each other. Our relationship had matured from “annoyed with each other” to “very annoyed with each other.”
hate and war on planet Earth S2
lokken and graces relationship is so much fun, they do the same job and help eachother all the time cause they gotta but, mad about it
“Neutrinos?” I shook my head. “How the heck…”
whats, whats a neutrino again
She wiggled her hand. “Not quite true. Sometimes gamma rays, when they pass close to an atomic nucleus, will spontaneously become an electron and a positron. It’s called ‘pair production.’ So it’s not unheard-of. But we’ve never seen neutrinos created that way.”
you can just make mass?? wild
when you get real small i guess everything is one thing
Astrophage makes neutrinos in pairs by slamming protons together. For the reaction to work, the protons need to collide with a higher kinetic energy than the mass energy of two neutrinos. If you work backward from the mass of a neutrino, you know the velocity those protons have to collide at. And when you know the velocity of particles in an object, you know its temperature. To have enough kinetic energy to make neutrinos, the protons have to be 96.415 degrees Celsius.
we are getting so atomical with it damn, i believe i undertand tho, barely, kinda,
“The Petrova wavelength!” I yelped.
it be photons made by, all that mess
“Yes.” She pulled a diagram of the Hail Mary hull out of her bag. “This is what I need you for: I’m working on radiation protection for the Hail Mary.”
I perked up. “Of course! Astrophage will block it all!”
you were involved in the specific defending your ship from the thing that killed the eridians? thats interesting, tell rocky theyll be so impressed
“Horrifying,” she said.
“I know. Did you hear that global warming has been almost
undone?”
kinda funny, we fucked it up just the right Direction
“We fell in poop and came out smelling like roses,” I said.
hehehehehe
“Why are they called cosmic rays if they’re not even electromagnetic emissions?”
“People used to think they were. The name stuck.”
how so many horrible names happen
I pondered the schematic. “You want to fill the hull with fuel? Isn’t that dangerous?”
IN THE WALLS???
You can kill one by poking it with a sharp nanostick.
learned from experience
“Hmm…a ‘reserve’ that could power New York City for twenty thousand years.”
She looked at the diagram, then back to me. “You did all that
math in your head?”
“Eh, I had some shortcuts. We’re dealing with such absurd
scales of energy here, I tend to think in ‘New York City years’
of energy, which is about one-half of one gram of Astrophage.”
United statesians will use anything but the metric system
“So, what do you think?” she said. “Is this a terrible idea, or could it work?”
“I think it’s genius.”
She smiled and looked away.
friendship?
i should start tagging the "stratts victims" team, grace lokken and redell currently, she just took these people, not to be confused with the "stratts voluntiers" team which includes the crew and backup crew
also i made the sin of starting "saving grace" by cptnbara before i finished (shouldnt have done that)(ill end up spoiling myself)
