Project Hail Mary

by Andy Weir

think in imperial units. That’s a clue. I’m probably an American. Or English. Or maybe Canadian. Canadians use feet and inches for short distances. I ask myself: How far is it from L.A. to New York? My gut answer: 3,000 miles. A Canadian would have used kilometers. So I’m English or American. Or I’m from Liberia. I know Liberia uses imperial units but I don’t know my own name. That’s irritating.

I know what’s going on here. They say hunger is the greatest seasoning. When you’re starving, your brain rewards you handsomely for finally eating. Good job, it says, we get to not die for a while!

Cool thing about pendulums: The time it takes for one to swing forward and backward—the period—won’t change, no matter how wide it swings. If it’s got a lot of energy, it’ll swing farther and faster, but the period will still be the same. This is what mechanical clocks take advantage of to keep time. That period ends up being driven by two things, and two things only: the length of the pendulum and gravity.

Somehow or another, whatever it is, the Petrova line is stealing energy from the sun.”

Maybe it’s a sense of closure, or maybe it’s just the calmness that comes after a crying jag.

All right. I’m well fed. I’m feeling a little better about things. Food will do that. I need to focus on some positives.

“You spent years combating the assumption that life requires liquid water. You have an entire section here called ‘The Goldilocks Zone Is for Idiots.’ You call out dozens of eminent scientists by name and berate them for believing a temperature range is a requirement.”

“They’re wrong!” I crossed my arms. “There’s nothing magical about hydrogen and oxygen! They’re required for Earth life, sure. But another planet could have completely different conditions. All life needs is a chemical reaction that results in copies of the original catalyst. And you don’t need water for that!”

“It lives on or near the surface of the sun. Does that sound like a water-based life-form to you?” She was right. Water simply can’t exist at those temperatures. After about 3,000 degrees Celsius, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms can’t stay bound to each other anymore. The surface of the sun was 5,500 degrees Celsius.

Hmm…11,872 kilometers per second. Velocity is relative. It doesn’t make any sense unless you are comparing two objects. A car on the freeway might be going 70 miles per hour compared to the ground, but compared to the car next to it, it’s moving almost 0.

“What would you call an organism that exists on a diet of stars?” I struggled to remember my Greek and Latin root words. “I think you’d call it ‘Astrophage.’

He was our leader. I can see his face now. Young and striking, eyes full of determination. He understood the severity of the mission and the weight on his shoulders. He was ready for the task. He was stern but reasonable. And you knew—you just knew—he would give up his life in a second for the mission or his crew.

Human suffering is often an abstract concept to kids. But animal suffering is something else entirely.

Light is a funny thing. Its wavelength defines what it can and can’t interact with. Anything smaller than the wavelength is functionally nonexistent to that photon. That’s why there’s a mesh over the window of a microwave. The holes in the mesh are too small for microwaves to pass through. But visible light, with a much shorter wavelength, can go through freely. So you get to watch your food cook without melting your face off.

The two holdouts didn’t want to go to Venus anymore. They wanted to go back to the sun. Why? Because one of them just divided and created the other. Astrophage hang out on the surface of the sun gathering energy via heat. They store it internally in some way no one understands. Then, when they have enough, they migrate to Venus to breed, using that stored energy to fly through space using infrared light as a propellant. Lots of species migrate to breed. Why would Astrophage be any different?

It’s simple, really. Get energy, get resources, and make copies. It’s the same thing all life on Earth does.

And I know why I’m here! Not just in vague terms like “Oh hey, the world’s ending. Make that not happen.” But very specifically: Find out why Tau Ceti wasn’t affected by Astrophage.

Like…you would get hit by less energy if you were on the surface of the sun than if you were standing behind the Hail Mary at full thrust.

That means this journey took at least one thousand days. Over three years. Well, it takes light twelve years to make this trip, so it should take me a long time too. Oh, right. Relativity. I have no idea how much time it took. Or, rather, I have no idea how much time I experienced. When you get going near the speed of light, you experience time dilation. More time will have gone by on Earth than I have experienced since I left Earth. Relativity is weird. Time is of the essence here.

Old Russian space-agency documents were a mystery to me, but scientific papers were my forte for a long time.

carapace,

The tape measure is metric, thank God. It’s going to be confusing enough using base-6 Eridian seconds. The last thing I want to throw in there is imperial units—even if they are natural to me.

In my atmosphere, rubber that hot would burn. There’d be all these nasty, noxious gases coming off of it too. But there’s no oxygen on Rocky’s side of the wall. So the rubber just kind of…stays a liquid. It floats off to the tunnel wall and sticks there.

For the next several hours, we expand our shared vocabulary to several thousand words. Language is kind of an exponential system. The more words you know, the easier it is to describe new ones.

I can’t imagine explaining “sleep” to someone who had never heard of it. Hey, I’m going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this. And if I can’t do it for a while, I go insane and eventually die. No need for concern.

The octave is a universal thing, not specific to humans. It means doubling the frequency of every note.

“Humans,” Stratt said. “I want to know how this affects humans, and when. I don’t care about the mating grounds of the three-anused mud sloth or any other random biome.” “We’re part of the ecology, Ms. Stratt. We’re not outside it. The plants we eat, the animals we ranch, the air we breathe—it’s all part of the tapestry. It’s all connected. As the biomes collapse, it’ll have a direct impact on humanity.”

“And just like that another climate denier is born. See how easy it is? All I have to do is tell you something you don’t want to hear.”

“Mm,” he said. “Western Antarctica is a roiling mass of ice and snow. This whole region is a giant glacier, slowly marching to the sea. There are hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of ice here.” “And we’re going to melt it?” “The sea will melt it for us, but yes. Thing is, Antarctica used to be a jungle. For millions of years it was as lush as Africa. But continental drift and natural climate change froze it over. All those plants died and decomposed. The gases from that decomposition—most notably methane—got trapped in the ice.” “And methane’s a pretty powerful greenhouse gas,” I said. He nodded. “Far more powerful than carbon dioxide.”

I leaned to Dimitri. “Are all Russians crazy?” “Yes,” he said with a smile. “It is the only way to be Russian and happy at the same time.” “That’s…dark.” “That’s Russian!”

Ah, the c-word. “Culture.” We have an unspoken agreement that cultural things just have to be accepted. It ends any minor dispute. “Do it my way because it’s how I was raised,” basically. We haven’t run into anything where our cultures clash…yet.

Ilyukhina held her glass up for a few seconds and finally burst into cheers. “Tower is clear! Launch is good!” She gulped her vodka. “It’s only a hundred feet off the ground,” I said. “Maybe wait till it reaches orbit?” DuBois sipped his wine. “Astronauts celebrate when the tower is clear.” Without a word, Yáo took a sip of his beer.

Do you believe in God? I know it’s a personal question. I do. And I think He was pretty awesome to make relativity a thing, don’t you? The faster you go, the less time you experience. It’s like He’s inviting us to explore the universe, you know?”

This is one of those things I frequently have to explain to my students. Gravity doesn’t just “go away” when you’re in orbit. In fact, the gravity you experience in orbit is pretty much the same as you’d experience on the ground. The weightlessness that astronauts experience while in orbit comes from constantly falling. But the curvature of the Earth makes the ground go away at the same rate you fall. So you just fall forever.

“Intelligence evolves to gives us an advantage over the other animals on our planet. But evolution is lazy. Once a problem is solved, the trait stops evolving. So you and me, we’re both just intelligent enough to be smarter than our planet’s other animals.”

It’s pointless to try to salvage this. It’d be the same as trying to separate good meat from the botulism infecting it.

“For fifty thousand years, right up to the industrial revolution, human civilization was about one thing and one thing only: food. Every culture that existed put most of their time, energy, manpower, and resources into food. Hunting it, gathering it, farming it, ranching it, storing it, distributing it…it was all about food.