Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir's "The Martian" was a gigantic hit on both literary and cinematic fronts. So how does he keep the momentum going in his latest work, "Project Hail Mary?" Well, it has a little something to do with icy apocalypses, Jason Bourne-esque amnesia, and some super memorable aliens. More info inside...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

If ever modern science fiction had a bona fide superstar, it would be Andy Weir. This is a guy who has Hollywood Studios knocking down his door to make film adaptations of his books before his books are even published. His name is one that carries so much weight that it's transcended the simple medium of books and the genre of science fiction to genuinely enter the wider public consciousness. When he puts pen to paper, a lot of people take notice. Mind you, up to and including people like the former president of the United States. People that aren't even dedicated science fiction fans want to know what Andy Weir is up to. Pretty much everybody knows about The Martian, and even if they don't, they sure as hell know about the Matt Damon movie that was made off of it. And I think a lot of that owes to the fact that Andy Weir has this kind of supernatural talent for making this super hard and really techno-baboey science fiction somehow remotely accessible and entertaining to the general audience. And if you've ever sat through science fiction books with paragraph after paragraph after paragraph describing astrophysics and quantum mechanics and engineering problems that you can't even wrap your mind around, then you understand how massive a feat it is to make that kind of stuff palatable to basically anybody who's not working in those fields. Now this next bit is total conjecture, might not have any basis in reality whatsoever. But it's my personal belief that most people have an innate interest in science, whether it's something they acknowledge or identify with or not. At least in my experience, I feel like people perk up when you're having a conversation about the universe or nature, even if it's not something that they would otherwise be interested in outside that conversation. And I think Andy Weir's work lends itself so well to that inherent curiosity because of the sheer amount of passion he puts into it. He very obviously wants everybody else to be as passionate about science as he is, and he wants to teach everybody everything about it, and I think that kind of enthusiasm has a way of endearing his books to the audience. You know, it's like baking cookies, they have that extra bit of love put into them. So if you want a bit of a cheat sheet to see what science fiction books are all about, or to have your finger on the pulse of the next inevitable science fiction film hit, then check out the three big science fiction books that Andy Weir has written: The Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary. And just in general, pay attention to Andy Weir, because anything he does, unless there's some catastrophe looming ahead, typically turns out to be a giant hit.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Also, he and James Essekori have agreed that the Expanse of the Martian take place in the same universe. Mark Watney is mentioned in one of the expanse books. I don't care if it's just a gentleman's agreement, it's canon.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

And all this brings us to Andy Weir's latest work, Project Hail Mary, which, as you might have guessed, already has a film adaptation lined up. It's supposed to star Ryan Gosling as our protagonist. And here's hoping he taps into the work he did for Nice Guys because he was absolutely hilarious in that role. But anyway, Project Hail Mary kind of sets itself apart from Andy Weir's two previous higher profile science fiction books. Where Artemis and the Martian were kind of smaller scale and took place in more or less a single location. Project Hail Mary is an interstellar adventure with super high stakes that unfolds over the course of decades. And there's also the fact that Project Hail Mary features a lot more fantastical elements than either of his previous full-length works. So the initial setup for Project Hail Mary finds our main protagonist stuck in this small windowless room with only a snaking robotic arm coming down from the ceiling and two corpses to keep him company. He has absolutely no memory of how he ended up there, or even really any recollection of who he is, period. He doesn't even know his own name. The only information we're given about this guy in the opening chapters of the book is that he has a very peculiar aversion to curse words, and the fact that he uses the metric system but thinks in imperial units, which implies that he might be from the United States. And of course, you know, in true Jason-born fashion, inevitably we get more information via flashbacks as the book progresses. You know, half of the story is told in the past and half is told in the present day as this guy tries to figure out what he's supposed to do and then tries to accomplish that. But when we jump in, it's with this sense of disorientation. It's kind of a similar setup to The Martian, in a way. It's a survival situation in which the character uses an enclosed location, the Hab, as their sort of headquarters in this very hostile environment. But now Mark Watney gets to do all of his Mark Watney things with amnesia to boot. It's a setup that we've all seen before, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And therein lies the problem with talking about Project Hail Mary, because it's a book whose experience is driven in no small part by its mysteries. And because of that, it's kind of difficult to outline the main conflict of the book, and even the identity of the main character or who he is and what he's all about, because if I do, then yes, I get to explain a little bit more about the plot and the world, but I also give away some stuff that you spend the first, you know, 30 or so pages trying to scratch your head and figure out. So just keep in mind going forward that some of the things I'm going to be outlining from here are a little murky and nebulous in the beginning. I'm not going to talk about anything that happens after the first, like, hundred to hundred and fifty pages of the book, but if you find that anything I mentioned from here on out piques your interest and gets you interested in actually reading the book, then it might be best to tap out before listening to whatever follows that. So it turns out our friend Ryan Gosling is stuck aboard a spacecraft known as the Hail Mary. And the Hail Mary represents this huge multinational effort to build humanity's first interstellar spacecraft. Keep in mind the story takes place more or less during present day, so the distances we're talking about are not exactly trivial and are definitely not as trivial as a lot of more futuristic and advanced space operas tend to make it. We're not dealing with the culture that can exceed the speed of light by like 200 times, you know? We're dealing with a world that hasn't even been able to send a manned mission to Mars yet. By today's standards, getting a spaceship from our solar system to even the closest star is a massive engineering challenge and honestly might be impossible for the next few decades. And then you couple that with the fact that the Hail Mary is also designed to contain a whole lab full of testing equipment and microscopes and whatnot, which means that you need gravity for a lot of the scientific equipment to function. So those are two major engineering problems that you need to solve before this project can even get off the ground, and a big portion of the early flashbacks are dedicated to how exactly people go about doing that. The gravity problem has a very creative fix. Essentially, the ship is divided into two sections. The rear section is this kind of assembly of building-sized engines which will propel the ship from the soul system to another star. The second section is the crew quarters and the scientific suites and the infirmary and the bridge and whatnot. And essentially the two sections of the ship split apart and are held together by these two cables which kind of telescope out, and the sections can get further and further from each other. When the cable is fully telescoped and extended, the section of the ship that contains the scientific suites and the labs and whatnot sort of twists and rotates 180 degrees, and then thrusters along the side of the ship start firing so that the whole thing kind of spins around and creates a nice little centrifuge. After that, it's just a matter of spinning the whole thing until you get to one G of gravity, and bam, the gravity problem is solved. The propulsion issue, though, requires a bit more doing. But first I think it's important to explain why exactly we're doing all this. The scientist Irena Petrova discovers this very serious anomaly that shows up in our solar system. It comes in the form of this line of infrared light that arcs from the Sun to Venus, which is subsequently called the Petrova line. We end up sending one of our probes to go and pick up samples of this Petrova line to see whatever agency is causing it, and it turns out that the Petrova line is a product of the reproductive cycle of alien microbes. Now, of course, this is the first indication of alien life humans have ever found, so of course the scientific community and humanity in general is ecstatic about this discovery. But it soon becomes apparent that these little alien microbes known as astrophage are actually using our sun as sustenance. They are feeding upon the energy that the sun provides. There's nothing malevolent about any of this, and the astrophage don't even seem to be intelligent in any way. But the thing is, the astrophage's activity is causing the sun to dim. Now, for those of you who don't know, Earth exists in a very delicate relationship with our sun, a a mathematically improbable relationship with our sun. The temperature and the distances are just right to support life on our planet. So naturally, any variance in that relationship, even the most minor variances, is going to have huge rippling effects. A solar-dimming event that involves even 10 to 15% less output from the sun would have a catastrophic effect upon Earth and its biosphere. It would immediately trigger a new ice age that would just annihilate society as we know it. It would cripple food production, and billions of people would starve. And it turns out that the situation is so dire that life has probably a few decades at most to live. Earth is going to be an uninhabited ice ball unless we figure out this astrophage situation and we figure it out fast. The clock is ticking on humanity. Again, this isn't a science fiction story where we've inhabited a bunch of worlds and losing Earth would be kinda bad, but we would still survive. This is our only home, and if we lose it, we're screwed.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Kind of like real life.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Our first line of defense against this solar dimming event is protecting Earth itself from it, or at least buying Earth a little bit of time. And what do I mean by this? Climate change. Intentional climate change. There's a great quote in the book along the lines of, humans have been accidentally changing the climate for over a century. Let's see how well we can do when we really put our minds to it. We start intentionally abusing the Earth on a huge scale to offset the icy fingers of space that are kind of wrapping around us as the sun becomes less and less luminous. It's a huge coordinated effort of putting our poor, motherly, ancestral garden world through the ringer. And even then, it's only going to buy us another few years or a couple decades at most. There's this kind of timely theme of being, you know, proper stewards for the Earth that's kind of prevalent throughout the book. And while the existential threat that is facing us today has nothing to do with solar dimming, the book does describe some of the awful societal things we can expect if we keep on taking the earth for granted the way we are. If a permanent solution to the astrophage exists, it is not on Earth or in anything we can do to fortify it, but rather out amongst the stars. And Project Hail Mary is commissioned to investigate exactly that and to determine whether it's something we can bring back to help humanity in a timely manner. We have the various countries and superpowers of the world pouring untold amounts of money into this project because, as far as anybody can guess, there's no other option. So that propulsion issue I mentioned earlier, that that challenge of how do you get from Soul to another star, and how do you do it in a time span that allows you to get there, record your findings, and send it back to Earth before everybody dies, is a pretty major barrier to the obvious next step. How exactly does one address this massive problem? Well, as it turns out, the instrument of our doom, the astrophage, might also be a very useful ingredient in our salvation. Because of their diet of, well, sun, individual astrophage particles have this insane capacity for energy storage. And when this energy capacity is reached and the astrophage are full up from their dining, they will dart off at ridiculously high speeds towards the nearest carbon dioxide-rich environment in order to breed. This carbon dioxide-rich environment, of course, in our scenario, being the planet Venus. And then after they've had their little astrophage babies, they come right on back to the sun. And it's the energy expenditure from this journey that forms the Petrova line that we observe from Earth. And we find that if you cram a ton of astrophage into this engine known as a spin drive, and then simulate the conditions for their breeding, suddenly you have a device that can use astrophage both as a fuel source and a propulsion method. There's also the added bonus that a small amount of astrophage will get you just as far as a huge amount of modern Earth fuel equivalents will, which means that you don't need to bring as much fuel and thus impart as much mass onto the Hail Mary, which means that you're not expending more fuel as a result. In essence, this means that despite being a colossal threat to all life on Earth and human civilization as we know it, the astrophage is far and away the most efficient fuel source we know about. It's a revolution on the scale of attaining sustained fusion power. So this last bit could be seen as a pretty significant spoiler, but it does only happen in the first quarter of the book, and I'm only going to touch on it briefly, but I can't not talk about it. Project Hail Mary is humanity's last ditch, desperate attempt to save itself. It's this out of left field attempt to find the solution to a problem that might have none. If you think about the way the astrophage works, you wouldn't be far off in comparing it to a virus or an infection. But rather than an infection that afflicts humans or an infection that afflicts bacteria, this is an infection that afflicts stars. There's nothing to indicate that our sun is in any way special. I mean there's billions of stars just like it strewn throughout our galaxy alone. Which stands to reason that if the astrophage has infected our sun, it's probably infected many others. Which means that there is bound to be an infected sun out there that also has a culture that is threatened by the astrophage, and who would probably want to find the same solution that we are looking for. So with all this in mind, it's not exactly outside the realm of possibility that Ryan Gosling may or may not be on a collision course with a certain alien that looks like a dog-sized spider encased in rock, waves jazz hands around and says things like amaze repeatedly when it's very happy, is not capable of falling asleep voluntarily and will just conk out whether it wants to or not, which of course necessitates a culture in which watching one's fellows sleep as a protective measure is pretty much the norm, a norm which our alien friend pretty fervently asks Ryan Gosling to participate in himself, by the way. They're also a mechanical genius who regularly works with materials that scientists on Earth only theorize is possible to make, and is just in general one of the most endearing and wholesome alien bros I've seen in science fiction, period. But I think to say anything more than that would spoil the fun of finding out all the rest yourself. These two, these two being Ryan Gossing and our new alien best friend, are probably amongst the greatest minds in two separate branches of evolution. But they also find themselves in a solar system that is many light years from home and where every second that passes by is death for hundreds or even thousands of people back in their respective homes. They're dealing with the highest possible stakes and the most intense pressure either of them can possibly imagine, and one single mistake can mean the end of both of their missions and the end of life on two entire worlds. And all they need to do is overcome the ultimate test of scientific problem solving in order to find a way to keep the stars from going out. If anything, calling a mission like this Project Hail Mary is probably selling it short.