Sometimes I just must squeak

[hyenabrained]

I made a rocky plushie :)

[unimpressed-frog]

OMG he loafs and looks so squishy.

[lifes-pinata]

One of the compelling things about Project Hail Mary is that you can't fix it.

"What if Stratt didn't force Grace to go?" Then the Earth dies.

"What if Yao and Ilyukhina had survived?" Then they all would have died in space, not enough food to get to Earth or Erid

If the Taomoeba hadn't escaped then Grace would have never seen his best friend again. Returning to a world he loves but no longer recognizes.

If the stars weren't dying then Grace never would have met his best friend at all. Living content but alone.

Project Hail Mary is a hopeful story. It is a story of friendship and what it means to be brave. It's a story about saving the world.

But you can't remove the tragedy of the story without making it unrecognizable. It's written into the bones.

[whyiswingdingsafont]

I think it’s really cool that in Project Hail Mary the astrophage, which are literally killing all life by eating stars, aren’t really treated as the villain or evil? From the very start Ryland is treating it with curiosity and fascination, wanting to understand more than destroy.

One of the most memorable scenes in the movie is when he’s IN the Petrova Line, and he’s having a moment. Because it’s beautiful. It’s destroying galaxies, uncountable lives, but it’s still beautiful.

The astrophage is a problem, yes, but it’s treated as any other organism. It’s just doing what it does, because it’s also alive and happens to eat stars. Ryland is just happy to have the chance to study it because it’s from space.

[unimpressed-frog]

BECAUSE IT'S SPACE.

[defenestrate-yourself-please]

The project hail mary’s logo is genius because the two As are just deltas. And if you think abt it it tells us what the story is about. It’s change over change. The catalysts for progression in the story book and movie have a relationship to each other and it’s fun to think of it this way. And the change could be literally anything

change in sun / change in grace

change in grace / change in rocky

change in crew / change in grace

Etc…Any two things in phm that has a relationship can be expressed in an arbitrary physics equation that doesn’t need an answer. A lil nonsensical and probs not totally accurate but I think it’s beautiful :’)))

[sharkfiinn]

🐈🐈🐈

[raointean]

From chapter 5 of Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary"

[atalana]

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

[randomfingthings]

[ingapotejtoo]

and the universe said...

[antisocialpyromaniac]

When Grace inevitably dies on Erid they build him a statue. It is grand in that it is not towering, but built methodically with the utmost love respect and care. Adrian and Rocky oversee it’s construction and they ensure the Grace depicted not as a godlike saviour but a silly little space blob who taught their planets pebbles about relativity and who learnt to speak a language not made for his body. They make sure he is seen to be kind and brave. Lastly, they ensure an Eridian is carved with him so he will always have someone to watch him sleep.

[onelonelydragon]

Breaking through the atmosphere, And things are pretty good from here.

Frey and I got talking about Eva and Grace when/if Grace gets back to earth and I'm. Really normal about it tbh.

[psilocervidae]

Andy Weir you are a great writer and your understanding of science is broad and comprehensive enough that it really does come across as believable to a general audience. But the same cannot be said of your understanding of music theory.

What the fuck did you mean by "A below middle C major fifth". Andy there is no such thing as a major fifth. Did you mean a perfect fifth? Or were you trying to say that it's an A Major triad? At some point he mentions "G minor diminished", which also isn't a thing and could be referring to like three different chords (G°, G°7, or Gø7)

Also, Grace's ability to intuit pitch names without a reference point, with no musical training, after only a few months of listening to Eridian speech, is crazy. This man has perfect pitch and an incredible (untrained!) ear and he seems to have no idea that he possesses this gift.

ALSO also, why does the Eridian language seemingly operate off of the arbitrary European 12 tone pitch system. THIS IS MY BIGGEST ISSUE, because it's a prime example of the kind of thoughtless musical ethnocentrism exhibited by someone who has never thought to consider that the musical rules they are used to are not innate or universal, even on Earth. If you had brought on a music consultant they would have caught this. You're telling me they speak in music but they don't use microtonality? At all? Andy please I just want to talk.

[forgetful-dorito]

I like to think that Grace and Adrian have very similar problems

[jabberding0]

Wei Weaving is a Chinese artist

[nepharim-tree]

[vampirejuno]

Can you imagine being stuck in space completely alone with only the corpses of your friends for company, and the first living thing you meet after 46 years of that misery is a fucking weird alien creature who just rolls up with crazy advanced tech and goes "hi let's work together" and makes it possible for you to save your world through the power of friendship and molecular biology. AND THEN you find out that in this creature's language, its name means "mercy". Happened to my good friend Rocky btw

[douche-canoe-regatta]

An extra delightful thing about Project Hail Mary is that, eventually, humans WILL go to Erid, and Eridians WILL visit Earth. And there's every likelihood Rocky will be there to see it.

For one, humans on Earth likely continued to breed astrophage, trying to minimize its range or damaging effects - any number of things. Rendering it sterile would be ideal, of course, but it was likely impossible until the mission succeeded. You can damn well bet your ass Stratt was out there chaining scientists to workbenches, trying to find or force a silver lining. She wouldn't be wrong: Astrophage IS an excellent source of fuel, which means it has great potential. PLUS!! the discovery of Taumeba gives you a way to control it.

Erid is only 16 light years away.

Imagine humanity pulled back from the brink, striving together to produce not one but TWO (at least!) huge joint efforts to save ourselves and each other. Project Hail Mary was followed the Taumeba Project, surely. The world comes together again.

I, however, like to imagine there was a third plan.

I think meeting Eridians became a worldwide obsession. Ryland Grace's legacy can be nothing but a collective triumph, though his contact with intelligent alien life is somehow second to saving the Earth and who knows how many other systems. Once saved, the next major project would surely be meeting our interplanetary friends. How would we say "hello"?

Let's say Earth's initial overture is a simple probe, Voyager style. What do you send? Well, they know Grace may still be out there, or at least was/is known to Eridian culture. He's the one link; the only common element.

The probe launches, and what it's full of is love for Ryland Grace. His childhood pictures. Interviews with his students. Thousands of statues and dedications and documentaries. Videos of worldwide celebrations of the Day of Grace. Kids' drawings of Rocky with laboriously-written thank you notes, thick with crayon so the Eridians can see. We love him too. We love you already.

Given their longevity, I imagine Rocky and Adrian opening the probe together, trilling over memories of their old friend. Stories they only heard about secondhand or not at all. Joy and triumph and thankfulness and hope, all in one small interstellar package. Amaze amaze amaze.

After all, it's Full of Grace.

[thewildwaffle]

**Spoilers for Project Hail Mary**

I like to think that once Earth receives the beetles and fixes the sun, they then send another beetle to Erid full of seeds, food, spices, and other care package stuff for Grace.

At that point, they won't know he's still alive, as far as they know, he probably starved to death by then. But Stratt insists they send it anyway. If nothing else, it can be a gift for their newly discovered neighbors, the Eridians. Afterall, what's more friendly than sharing food?

The Eridian scientists study the contents of the care package. It's full of shelf-stable human food that they do their best to clone/replicate for Grace. There are also some seeds that store well for the years of travel they experienced. Radish, lettuce, tomato, beans, etc. (Potatoes would be a great callback to "The Martian")

The Eridians are absolutely delighted to observe Grace grow a little garden of Earth plants. Rocky, Adrian, and any of their kids big enough to fit in xenonite EVA suits help him pollinate plants with little paintbrush-like tools. Grace keeps a few plants in pots so he can easily move them around and show them to his students.