Project Hail Mary

Kiltonge said:
Having just watched the film, I would have relaxed into it more if there was some indication why they only launched one ship - ignoring the need for dramatic effect.

Yes, PHM cost $11 trillion or whatever, but once the R&D costs are sunk then building hardware is the cheap bit. Maybe fuel was the issue?

If it's your one big chance to save everything, staking it all on one ship that could get whacked by an asteroid before it even gets out of the system seems foolish.

A single throwaway line about "We've built three but to be honest just one getting there will be a miracle" would have helped, and would have made Grace look like even more of a fluke.

Nice Easter egg right at the end of the credits, though; made me laugh!
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I thought the first ship blew up on the launch pad?
 
No, that was the facility behind them.

The rocket you saw in the foreground was a generic looking thing, perhaps used to ferry some last cargo to LEO so as to dock with the nearly complete ship.

No escape tower that I recall.

I am thinking they didn't trust the sun-eater drive for anything other than space use

Now, maybe they felt they didn't need an escape tower with the new drive--but that rocket fairing may have had a small capsule in it--good for a short jaunt....like here:

https://twitter.com/x/status/2041918344736207255

https://forum.cosmoquest.org/forum/...53291-project-hail-mary?p=3753405#post3753405https://www.space.com/entertainment...tive-science-fiction-and-why-the-film-did-not
 
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My basically only issue with the movie - why "Hail Mary" was not equipped with any kind of planetary probe. Mission planners knew, that astrophages breed only in planetary atmospheres; so for whatever reasom Tau Ceti wasn't affected, it could be linked with the planet. It was reasonable to equip the vessel with some kind of probes, capable of taking samples from planets. Considering the efficiency of spin drives, suxh probe could be made extremely lightweight and compact.
 
Dilandu said:
My basically only issue with the movie - why "Hail Mary" was not equipped with any kind of planetary probe.
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With fishing, you don't want to scare anything by being under power.

Small craft, unless released like the little recorder marker deals in free space, just don't do well.

Even with their fancy drive....you still need chemical rockets around planets.

Tether use might have been all they had time for.

I am beginning to think that the SSTO concept is a greater mechanical impossibility than FTL is a physics impossibility.

I can buy a ringship warp drive--but you still need a rocket to get to it. In this movie, they stayed sunlight at least.

Nice 3D print

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/enSn-AfP4jo?ra=m
 
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I find it hard to believe humanity would stake its survival on one extremely high-risk deep space voyage. Couldn't they have a backup plan in pumping the atmosphere full of greenhouse gases to make up for the sun being blocked?
 
exclaimedleech8 said:
I find it hard to believe humanity would stake its survival on one extremely high-risk deep space voyage. Couldn't they have a backup plan in pumping the atmosphere full of greenhouse gases to make up for the sun being blocked?
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Have you any idea how photosynthesis works?
 
Dew said:
Have you any idea how photosynthesis works?
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In real life, we have a buildup of CO2 in our atmosphere that's raising temperatures and one of the proposed solutions is to spray chemicals in the sky that block the sun.

I figure that in the movie, they have the opposite problem (a build up of organisms blocking out the sun) and so the opposite solution (purposefully building up the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere) would also work.
 
exclaimedleech8 said:
I find it hard to believe humanity would stake its survival on one extremely high-risk deep space voyage. Couldn't they have a backup plan in pumping the atmosphere full of greenhouse gases to make up for the sun being blocked?
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They did, to the point of nuking Antarctica. But that only buys time, and without sunlight you can't grow crops.

The one weakness of the movie is that it couldn't go into detail of just how screwed the planet was without sunlight. No credible alternative existed to Project Hail Mary that wasn't just delaying the inevitable.
 
'Lapsed marine biologist' (his own description) and sf writer Peter Watts has his take. Liked the film, but very disappointed that Rocky wasn't very alien at heart.

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=11659#comment-54662

His own TL;DR:

“I try to be scientifically accurate. That’s my whole shtick.”
—Andy Weir

“You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”
—Inigo Montoya

“We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.”
—Stanislaw Lem, Solaris

It at least pretends to care about science, unapologetically portrays the scientific process as a good thing, something that works, bitches. Christ knows that’s a message that needs as big a megaphone as you can find these days.
 
Brett Davidson said:
Liked the film, but very disappointed that Rocky wasn't very alien at heart.
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I always disliked those "not very alien" concepts, because they are mostly used to push some weird philosophical ideas under the guise of science fiction. Stanislav Lem never bothered to think, how exactly thinking ocean on Solaris could evolve. Peter Watts wrote his "Blindsight" without even bothering to think "wait, how the hell my brilliant non-consciousness aliens were supposed to evolve or function?" And now he is scoffing at Weir, because Weir actually thought from biological, not philosophical point of view.
 
Dilandu said:
I always disliked those "not very alien" concepts, because they are mostly used to push some weird philosophical ideas under the guise of science fiction. Stanislav Lem never bothered to think, how exactly thinking ocean on Solaris could evolve. Peter Watts wrote his "Blindsight" without even bothering to think "wait, how the hell my brilliant non-consciousness aliens were supposed to evolve or function?" And now he is scoffing at Weir, because Weir actually thought from biological, not philosophical point of view.
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To be fair, Watts' critique of the presentation of Rocky is that it was inconsistent with his biology. For instance, if Eridians need to have someone watch them sleep and he had no-one to watch him sleep for the decades of his solitude, how was he still sane?

Lem's pretty thorough in explaining the evolution of the alien 'necrosphere' in The Invincible and the culture in Fiasco.

Maybe Rocky kept the corpses of his deceased crewmates around so that he could pretend that they were watching him...
 
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Brett Davidson said:
Lem's pretty thorough in explaining the evolution of the alien 'necrosphere' in The Invincible
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Nah. He just pushing for his favorite idea of "smaller is better", not realizing that square-cube law have nasty problem for small size as well as big one. His explanation is based on handwaved force field that magically stops everything, and somehow could be powered by miniscule energy supply of tiny Y-shaped crystal (how those tiny crystals didn't melt from the waste heat he never bothered to explain), and he couldn't invent any plausible way for those tiny crystals to defeat large machines except handwaved ability to erase memory (i.e. magic). Nah, while book is good, Lem's explanations did not hold water.
 
martinbayer said:
And not a single laser beam was fired in that movie - This is what Science Fiction *REALLY* is supposed to be about.
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I have to point out that the Spin Drive is basically a death ray. At full burn it puts out over a petawatt of infrared light.

When Hail Mary was falling in the atmosphere, the plume of superheated gas in front of her should have been a sun-bright plume of plasma dozens of kilometers long.

You really do not want to point the Flip Drive at anything unless you want to annihilate it...
 
MihoshiK said:
I have to point out that the Spin Drive is basically a death ray. At full burn it puts out over a petawatt of infrared light.

When Hail Mary was falling in the atmosphere, the plume of superheated gas in front of her should have been a sun-bright plume of plasma dozens of kilometers long.

You really do not want to point the Flip Drive at anything unless you want to annihilate it...
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In any extreme scenarios like that, as always in human drama, it comes down to intent to kill, per the Greek rules of tragedy versus comedy...
 

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