Hello, and welcome to the Physics World Stories podcast. I'm Andrew Glester, and I'm delighted to say that today we're joined by Andy Weir, the writer of The Martian and, of course, Project Hail Mary, and doctor Becky Smethurst, you may know her as Doctor Becky on YouTube, as we talk the science behind
Project Hail Mary. The new film, based on the book by Andy Weir, adapted by screenwriter Drew Goddard for the Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directed film, which is currently, as we speak, in cinemas. Those not familiar with Andy Weir's books they are dense with lovely beautiful depth of science behind the stories. You'll hear all about that in this podcast in this process, but he's really keen on getting accurate science into
his stories. If you haven't seen the film yet, I do recommend that you find a way to watch it, get yourself to the biggest cinema screen you can find to watch the film and then come back and listen to this episode. If you don't mind spoilers or if you've seen the trailer, I don't think we'll be talking about anything in here that is a spoiler that isn't already revealed in the trailer for the film, But if you'd like to, go away, watch the film and come back. We'll still be here when
you are ready. But to kick us off, who better to describe the story than the man who wrote it, Andy Weir? The initial sizzle is that a guy wakes up aboard a spaceship with no memory of who he is or why he's there. And as his memories start to come back to him, he realizes that he's on a last ditch desperate, space mission to save humanity from an extinction level event. So no pressure. Also, he's the only survivor. There are two dead people in the ship with him. I mean, Ryan Gosling,
contacted us. So, I mean, that was awesome. Drew Goddard, I was the one who, like, really pushed for Drew. I mean, everybody loves Drew. He said, like, guys, I just don't have the time to work on this. I'm sorry. And so I was like, okay. Well, here's a copy of the book. I hope you enjoy it. Because I like Drew. He's a friend of mine. And then he read the book and said, like, well, I think I would like to work on this. And so
that was very flattering to me. And, then he said, but I you know, guys, I I've got, like I wouldn't be able to consider starting for at least, like, six to eight months while I'm working on this other stuff. And I so I pushed I pushed for every everybody in the production. I'm like, let's wait for Drew. Let's let's just wait. We're not gonna be shooting anything during the pandemic anyway, so let's just hold on and and wait for him. So we did. But
Drew is just such a fantastic screenwriter. I mean, he did such a good job on The Martian. He gets me. He gets what I'm going after, and so I just feel much more comfortable with the with the screenplay in his hands and with anyone else. Yeah. Fantastic. Much more from Andy Weir later in the podcast, But that interview did take place before the film came out, so I wanted to have a conversation with someone, well, an astrophysicist, about it since it has. My name is
doctor Becky Smethurst. I'm an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, and I also share a lot of my knowledge online, including on my YouTube channel, doctor Beggin. Okay. And you've been, quite active in, videos about films, I think. Mhmm. And I think, well, I don't know about you, but I've been particularly excited and looking forward to, Project Hail Mary since I read the book when they came out. Yes. Yeah. I listened to the audiobook last year, which was narrated by
Ray Porter. And I don't usually listen to audiobooks. It was weird. Like, I was just like, I'm doing a bit of, I'm doing a few jobs. I was like, I I need someone to listen to. And I thought, I've been meaning to read that book for ages. And I was doing honestly, it was one of those books that you're like, I'm a different person on the other side of this. Do you know what I mean? And the audio book was just so well done. So I've been so excited for
this film. Yes. And there's so much science in the book, in the story as well, which I think is just so nice if you just sort of I don't know. If you just love science and you have that sort of, like, oh, just do a quick back of the envelope calculation. You don't want this. It's one of those books that really scratches that itch. Yeah. I don't I'd so I I've spoken to Andy Weir a few times. I know you've spoken to
him, about this book. And one of the times that I called him to to chat to him, it was a Sunday morning where he was. And, and I was like, oh, hi, Andy. How are you doing? He said, yeah. I'm alright. I'm just working out what would actually happen if you were stuck between the moon and New York City. He's just doing the maths on that, which is What a fun job. And that's where these kind of Yeah. Ideas come from is
that that it's just who he is. He just thinks about problems and then tries to work them out, and then there's these these stories come out of them. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct. You'll find a solution. You are my solution. When we first spoke many, many years ago before the Martian film came out, you said you were writing a book called Zeke. Yeah. And it had things like interstellar travel in it. Did aspects of that find their way into this? Yes.
They did. So Zeke, I worked on it for about a year. I got about 70,000 words in. For reference, the Martian is a 100,000 words. And I was about 70,000 words in when I realized one day, oh, dear. This book sucks. It's it's no good. The the the story isn't interesting. The plot is too convoluted. The characters are boring, and I'm still in the first act. So this is gonna be some 900 page ego tome that no one's gonna wanna read. So I gave up on it, and I
I back burnered it. In fact, then put the stove that has that back burner in a backroom. You know? I just figured it was done, but there were a few diamonds in the rough. There were a few nuggets in there that I thought were really cool. And one of them was this well, Ingeq, it was an alien technology called black matter, and it was this fuel that you could use for your spaceship. It would mass convert, itself into basically light and shine that out the back of your ship for propulsion.
So that was in ZEK, and I I thought, like, well, I want I want to use that. That's really cool. So I said, like, that was kind of the nugget that started the story with hail Mary. I was like, okay. I want this to be a story, but let me think here. What what would I we couldn't possibly have black matter in the modern day. There's no way we'd be able to invent that. So what if we found it? Okay. Well, it's annoying to me that
it's an alien technology. If we if we find this incredible alien technology, that means I have to explain that there is this advanced alien race who for some reason isn't around and stuff like that. And I thought like, well, what does black matter do? It also absorbs all light and turns it into more black matter. That's why it's called black matter. It's black. And, I thought, like, well, that's interesting because we have a substance that takes energy and makes more of itself.
That sounds like a life form. Right? And so I'm like, oh, instead of an alien technology, it'll just be a naturally evolved life form that does this. And I'm like, okay. Why does a naturally evolved life form need to do, like, interstellar travel? I'm like, okay. It's an interstellar life form. Okay. Well, it needs a lot of energy
to do interstellar travel. I'm like, okay. Well, let's have it live on the surface of stars, and it's like algae, and it spores out like mold does to go get other stars and stuff like that. And it's all just evolution. So it is an alien, quote, unquote, but it's not like, take me to your leader. It's just like, hey. Don't mind me. I'm mold. I'm just gonna breed. And, then I got to thinking like, oh, okay.
That'd be cool. And then then humans could get a hold of some of this stuff, and then we'd start breeding it in farms, and then we'd be flying around our solar system. We could colonize Mars and Venus. Oh, we'd have to make real we'd have to be real careful to make sure none of that crap got into our sun or we'd start breeding out of control, and that'd be a disaster. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. Holy shit. That's a book. You know? Like, right there, that's that's it. So I'm
like, forget all that other crap. We're doing we're we're starting with that. You know? This life form starts affecting the total solar output of of our sun, and now yeah. That that's the shower epiphany that led to the book. The sun is dying. You are the only scientist who might know what this is. I'm just a teacher at Grover Cleveland Middle. We have a doctorate in molecular biology. I need you to come with us. This is Project Hail Mary. I loved the film. It is it it is obviously different
from a book. You know, anybody who's ever loved a book and then gone see a a film adaptation, it's going to be different because it's a completely different medium. So a lot of the science that is communicated, obviously, in the book as you're reading this character sort of in a monologue is is communicated visually in the film, which obviously, and in a monologue takes a lot of pages compared to a few seconds of a visual, you know, flash up.
So in that sense, it's very different. And so if you, you know, you love the science, like, the aspect of it there is is a very quick, you know, flash and you'll miss it. But in terms of the story, the characters, the visuals, the cinematography, the way it was filmed, just the heart and soul of this film is just incredible, and it's so joyful. Like, everyone raves about, you know, Interstellar as as a sci fi film and how
it is very epic. And, you know, I just Interstellar is missing some joy for me. Okay. Yeah. Like, yes, I like to come out of the cinema and be like, woah, and feel like I've been run over with a truck, but at the same time, I also love coming out of the cinema just with a huge smile on my face, and that's what this film did, and it's what the book did as
well. And so that kind of heart of the book and why, you know, I fell in love with it and why I was like, I'm a different person after reading this, is so there in the film, and I loved it so so much. They did such a good job on it. The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, they did they did great. So you've interviewed Ryan Gosling Mhmm. Andy Weir and Lord and Miller for, your YouTube channel. Obviously It's a mom's scream here when she I told her I was
interviewing Ryan Gosling. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, that's kind of my question. So, obviously, we'll post links to all of those on the Physics World website. Oh, nice. At at which people can find alongside this episode, of the Physics World Stories podcast. But, as a person, which of those are you most excited slash nervous about? Oh my gosh. I think just, obviously, naturally from maybe everybody in my life's reaction to telling them I was scared to be Ryan Gosling, it was
possibly that. I just sat there, and all I could hear is my mom and my sister's voices just going, like, And he was just absolutely so so lovely and just exactly as you'd imagine in real life. So I think the the the sort of nervous energy was definitely there. But in terms of, like, the the freak out science fangirl moment, it was Andy Witt. Like, because I loved The Martian. I, you know, obviously loved Project Hail Mary.
I've also listened to his other book after I finished Project Hail Mary as well, the one about the moon. Artemis. I'm currently trying to remember the Artemis. Thank you. Which was also great. And chatting to Andy was so fun because it was just like chatting to just another,
you know, science nerd kinda thing. He showed me this massive spreadsheet that he produced for the book that was literally just like, here's my spreadsheet that tells me, like, this is how much fuel the hail Mary spacecraft will need, and, like, you know, this is, like, you know, the temperature of this thing and, like, all of these relative relativistic calculations he'd
done and everything like that. And it was so fun seeing that because as a as an I mean, no. I don't think any of me and my colleagues use spreadsheets. I'm gonna put that out there. Maybe for a very quick thing or whatever, but for our actual astrophysics work, we are very much entrenched in Python coding, you know, is is the main language of choice. I think there's obviously a lot of simulations that are done in other things, like c and all that kind of stuff as
well. But mostly, it's it's all with code. And so any data tables we have is all in, you know, CSV if you if you have to be, but then also probably more what's called a FITS format, a flexible image transfer system, which basically can store images and data tables at the same time. So, like, any data that's taken at a telescope with all of the metadata that comes with it, it's like this telescope, this time pointing, this direction, etcetera, etcetera.
So most of the time, if you're seeing relativistic equations realized, it's it's in code. And so it was so wonderful to see it from someone who, you know, is is kind of like a science enthusiast in that way. Obviously, he has a bit of a science background with working at NASA and JPL from the computer science side of things. But seeing relativistic equations translated into, like, just a spreadsheet was so I think it was
like a Google Sheet, you know. It there was just something so, like, raw and incredible about that that just blew me away that, you know, he'd managed to to do it. So, yeah, I think during the interview, the most the most sort of, like, I was, I think, was actually Andy after you showed me that spreadsheet. So There are infinite possibilities for this to go wrong. This ship wasn't built for this. You want me to do it now. In general, my story start with some scientific idea.
For hail Mary, it's like, what if we had a a a fuel that could mass convert, you know, spacecraft fuel that could do mass conversion for thrust? Great. For the Martian, it was like, how could we put a humans to Mars and, you know, what are the fail safes on that mission? And that led me to thinking of all the things that could go wrong, etcetera. And for Artemis, it was, what is humanity's first city that's not on Earth gonna look like? What's it gonna be
like? So all I I mean, I always start off with just some I mean, this is not on purpose. It's just this is where my story is tend to come come from. I'm speculating on cool science stuff, and then I I speculate about that stuff all the time. Once in a while, I'll get far enough along that I think, oh, okay. This might be a good story. So it wasn't like I I sat down and said, like, alright. I'm gonna write a
completely different thing from The Martian. It was when I'm gonna write a book, I try to go with whatever I think is the best idea I have at the time, and Artemis was what I thought was coolest. And, honestly, I'd hoped that I I I had really hoped that it was gonna take off and it was gonna be a setting that I could write book after book in. I wanted it to be my own disc world. Right? But, it just wasn't as popular as a Martian. It did well. People liked it, but they
didn't love it. It didn't, like you know, people weren't people aren't clamoring at the gates for more Artemis. There are I I get emails, like, every day saying, oh, make more Artemis. But, I mean, there's not enough of a demand, and my my publisher's like, don't make a sequel to Artemis. Make something new. Art Artemis is a a crime novel slash heist kind of thing. Yeah. And this is sort of a return to my hard sci fi
isolated scientist roots. I was acutely aware that it's very similar to The Martian in that respect, so I tried to I I tried to not duplicate any plot beats from The Martian at all. Like, for instance, Ryland's ship works. Like, nothing breaks down. Everything functions the way it's supposed to. He has other problems, but, but the ship works. If Grace, Rocky, save stars, we can go home. I think this is a one way trip for me. Let's get into some of the science of,
project hail Mary. Now Andy Weir has a thing in every book Mhmm. Which he calls a MacGuffin, which is he likes it to be really scientific scientifically accurate, but there's one thing in each thing that he allows himself, that's not scientifically accurate. He makes up a little bit of science for the fiction side of it, but everything else has to be consistent. Yeah. In this particular book and film, it is the astrophyte. Like a space algae, which also stores energy that can be used as fuel.
Yes. How do you feel about it? I really like the idea that, like, if we ever found life in the universe, the the likelihood is it's not going to be, you know, intelligent life or have or even evolved life. Like, the fact that it could be, like, single cell organisms that we end up finding, and that first contact would be with something like that, I think is a very I don't wanna say realistic, but more probable,
side of things. You know, for example, if we were sending missions to Titan, for example, Saturn's moon, with the Dragonfly mission, a little drone that's gonna fly around. You know, we're sending things to things like, you know, Enceladus, Saturn's moon, plans possibly with Europa, things like that. All these kind of moons of the solar system that life, if we found it in the solar system
could possibly be there. And also, obviously, with this ongoing searches with perseverance as well for life on Mars or past life on Mars, the likelihood is if we find anything there, it's going to be tiny, right? It's going to be tiny microbial life. So I think in that sense, like, I don't think that's a story that's as explored as much as first contact with little green men, you know, classic aliens, that kind of thing. So I really liked the aspects of the story, and
I think it really surprised me. In terms of energy storage, you know, it's just mass energy equivalence is sort of the the crux of the story there is if they can take in the sun's energy and store it and then release it later. It's just e equals mc squared, and you can get an a stupid amount of energy to to accelerate a spacecraft up to close the speed of light. Great.
In terms of whether a single cell can store that much energy with that much energy efficiency is ridiculous because it's like a billion times more efficient than, say, energy storage that, you know, like, in terms of life met metabolising on Earth can do in terms of energy from sugars. You break apart a sugar molecule and you release the energy from the chemical bonds, and that's the energy that we then use to power life. It it's like
a billion times more efficient than that. So we don't have anything in terms of the the sort of the biophysics, to actually come anywhere close to that. But I think that's what's that's what's fun about Andy's work, and he says, you know, that kind of energy storage aspect. He sort of did a bit of a hand wave. He like, oh, it's neutrinos. The cell that's storing the energy, which he likes to joke, you know, you get down to the quantum level, and that's when things start to break apart.
And he invented this whole term in the book called, like, super cross sectionality or something like that, which is fun because it's sort of a borrowed word from particle physics when we talk about cross sectionality of particles and whether they're likely to intersect and things like that. So I like that you know, the idea is is is obviously a sci fi, but the fact that it's rooted in some elements of of physics and made that effort to do that,
I think was incredible. Because there's a lot of sci fi that's just like, oh, yeah. We can go warp speed, you know, close to light speed. Don't don't question it. There's a a fuel. Don't question it, you know, and stuff like that. And and this, I think, is is like, well, how do we solve that problem with the plot point in the story, is is really cool. There is a a centrifugal force that causes, gravity. Yeah.
On the ship. I mean, from a filmmaking point of view, it means that Ryan doesn't have to, be on Walk around. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you have to float all the time. You can walk around. Yeah. Exactly. But from a science point of view, why would you do that if you were in space, and how would you how do you do that? Yeah. There was actually two types of artificial gravity in the film, which are realistic.
So one of them is, you know, he wakes up, first of all, in space, and, the ship is accelerating just in a straight line. So his spacecraft is oriented so that, you know, the the floor is like a one big long column, basically. So he's he's kind of, like, climbing up ladders and stuff to go all the way up this column. And so because the chip is accelerating in a straight line, you feel the acceleration. So that's like when you're in a car and you put your foot down and you really
do get thrown back in your seat. Right? That's the first type. So it's it's an artificial gravity in that way because he's just getting permanently thrown back into his seat door into the floor of this big, long column. But then the other aspect of the artificial gravity is the centrifuge you were talking about. So it's really cool what the ship does is it basically rotates that long column 90 degrees.
So then you've got, like, one big long cylindrical room, kind of like the International Space Station. And then what the ship does is it rotates so that that, long groom is always sort of being thrown backwards in a way. So if you think about it like you hold hands with a friend and spin around or you get on a roundabout and spin around. You feel that force pushing you backwards,
rather, it's it's such a centrifugal force. So, basically, once this ship of his is spun around into one long room, he's always being pushed down into what now becomes the floor. And so the long column that he was climbing up with the ladders now becomes his floor. And it and it's it's a an idea that's been explored so many times, not just in sci fi, but also, you know, as as sort of people consider, you know, long journeys to Mars and things
like this. If you're gonna send humans to Mars, you know, living in, zero g for longer than a year, which is always really been tested so far, with humans, you know, is is is is an issue. So can you create, an artificial gravity in that way? And depending on how fast you spin gives you how much gravity you feel. The faster
you spin, the more gravity. But also, the further away you are from the center of the centrifuge, so how with, you know, the distance from the thing that's spinning, basically, or the distance from the I guess, how long your arms are if you hold hands with your friend. Right? The longer your arms get, the the the higher the force gets. It's a it's a really interesting idea to see realized on film, because I think just thinking back on, like, okay. Who's done
this before in terms of artificial gravity? You've seen it in the Martian, actually. Like, the Martian ship that they they took to Mars and back, like, had a big centrifuge where the the crew compartment was, like, a big circle, and the whole circle was rotating. But, again, in terms of getting the right artificial gravity, you end up with, like, quite large things that you need to to make
this happen. So the fact that you can have a sort of ship that spins out on cables the way this does to make it so that it rotates around and then can then get your centrifuge, I think is a nice way of sort of getting around that that problem. But it's like, would we need to do that if we were doing this kind of long distance space? That's the big question, isn't
it? So that's what I was sort of alluding to was, like, we've only tested it with astronauts for usually spans of six months is is tends to be the longest that people do in space, but I think it was was it Mark Kelly that did a year in space? So in theory, you know, people can spend an extended amount of time in in very low gravity. And, I mean, I would say with with, you know, little to to minor effects from it.
Obviously, there's muscle mass loss, there's bone density loss, things like that from not having that force pulling you down. But I think in terms of, like, long term studies, they're still ongoing. Thankfully, Mark Kelly had a twin, so we've quite literally got a control for who stayed on Earth and who went to space for a year and experienced, zero g for that, like, extended period of time. So those kind of
studies are still going on. So I don't think we'll we'll fully know from a scientific perspective and a medical perspective to say, you know, is it an issue to to spend that long, without gravity? So there's another thing which happens, which is about relativity and time. And how do you think they dealt with that in the film? I thought they dealt with it well. It was very much sort of one of those things that if you knew it was happening, it was there.
But if you weren't aware with it, it wasn't gonna trip you up in the film, which I think is is is sort of a a good way of doing it. So you're very you'll hear the ship's computer say at one point that the the journey time is about four years. And I won't say what journey time that is, but, the technically, the light travel time for that journey would have been twelve years. So if you're, you know, if you're if you're in the know, you'd go, oh, hang on a minute. What's going on there? You
know? And you'd think, well, are they somehow going faster than light? Because as Einstein told us, nothing can go faster than light. Traveling at the fastest speed there is in the universe, about 300,000 kilometers a second or a 186,000 miles a second for those in imperial. And, so you think, okay. Well, how is he doing it? Well, he's doing it at three times faster speed than light. But, actually, what's happening is that you've got what's known as time dilation.
So the four years is the time that the ship will experience traveling at close to the speed of light. So time dilation is a is a prediction of Einstein's theory of special relativity. It's one that we have proven using very precise clocks, atomic clocks that have been flown around the world while one's been left on Earth and the times compared afterwards and that they're different. So you can get time dilation in two
ways. Basically, the the faster you travel, the less time you experience compared to someone stationary. And, also, if you're in a heavier gravity, the less time you experience compared to someone who is in less gravity. That was a a plot point that was explored in Interstellar, in the bit that annoyed me the most. Just screaming at the screen going, he's like 70. Get back on this shit. But yeah. So, where was I? I get so distracted by Interstellar every day.
Yes. So in in in Project Hail Mary, it was it was sort of nice to hear that that was happening. And in the book as well, there's a plot point where someone else doesn't know about relativity, and they were confused and this kind of stuff, you know, about how long it would take and how much fuel was needed and things like that. So it was really cool to to see that that was sort of realized in the film as well, that time dilation was was sort of not necessarily explicitly said,
but was recognized. There's a character in the film called Strat. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct, including us. Doctor Grace, the world is counting on you. I mean, she's my favorite character in the book. How about you? She's one of mine too. I I it's funny because I've seen some people criticize her as just kind of very one not one dimensional, but that is sort of like the bossy female role. But I'm like,
yeah. But if you'd had a man playing that role, you wouldn't have even questioned it in a way. So I love her. I think she's great. And I just think she's no nonsense, and she's just absolutely just, yeah, cracks on and and it is wonderful. And I love how she was played by Sandra Huler as well in that no nonsense way, but with sort of this deadpan humor as well, was very, very well done. So I really enjoyed how she brought that character to to life in the film as well.
I always probably see bits that I still wish it ended up in from the book that weren't in the film and things like that, But that's that's, you know, even unless you made a five hour film, you know? If we did have something like this happen, if we had a a situation where the Earth was in dire peril, what Andy Weir does in his story is is give all the power to one person. Which I think is a terrible idea, but great for a story. Yeah. Okay. Okay. It's 11.9 light years away. The astronauts
die in space. It's what you Americans would call a lung shot. Hail Mary. I get it. What Earth is gonna sign up for this? I mean, I would not wanna live in a world that has a Strat at all times. Strat had unrivaled authority. She's probably the most powerful human being of all time, And, like, she could tell countries what to do, and it's kinda like an ancient Rome. They had what was it? They, they could, declare someone
I forget what it was. It was I forget the name of the act, but basically, the senate could vote for that person to have, like, complete dictatorial power for a certain length of time and then and then go back. And that's kind of what happened for Earth is that everybody said, like, okay. We don't have time for slow ass UN committees to try to figure out the best, you know, color for the flight manual cover. I mean, we we don't have time for that. We need
this to go very rapidly. So they put all their eggs in the strat basket and had her just run everything. And they picked the right person. I mean Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Didn't they? K. The the thing in the book is that we don't have time to do it by committee, so we give it to one single person. The thing is the committee would decide the person. Right? And, it still take ages.
But I think the fact that we have those kind of committees in due process in all aspects of whether it is space agency, government, you know, United Nations, whatever it might be, I think is is good. Yes, it will slow things down, but the kind of power that Strat has in the book. And I think perhaps that is the thing that doesn't come across in the film is the just
just how much power she singularly has. Like, the scene in the book where she's in a courtroom, and they are, you know, suing her because she's put every single, you know, book and, piece of software ever, you know, that's been, ever, you know, ever produced by humans onto the onto the Hail Mary ship because we don't know what would be needed. And they're suing her for, like, IP. You know? And she's like, I just don't have time for
this. You know? Like, I every government in the world has said I can do this. Why are we here? And just walks out. You know? And I just I I wish I had that, a bit more Strath in me sometimes, you know, to just just no nonsense and just go no, and and shut that kind of side of things down in in a way. If we did have to, give all that power to one person, is Straub the right person to give it
to? Is there anybody that you can think of on earth who we would say, like, you're the right person to give this money? Absolutely not. No. I don't think it was and and if anybody said they were the right person, that would make them less of the right person Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Is the problem. So I have a tremendous amount of
faith in humanity. You can probably tell from my writing that I'm a pretty optimistic guy, especially when it comes to humanity and human nature and our ability to cooperate and work together. And if anything, I think the pandemic has shown that we do that. So I do think that the world works together when there's
a common problem. If it's a direct and immediate, problem like COVID, We're not so great at it when it's a slow burn like environmental damage, but you you can't expect us to all be completely perfectly efficient at all times in every way. But I do think that that humanity is pretty awesome.
And the one example I like to give is if you, you know, if a guy falls on the street and breaks his leg and a total stranger helps him, calls the calls an ambulance, helps get him to a hospital, Do you see that on the news? No. It doesn't make the news because it's so normal. It is so presumed in human behavior to help each other out like that that it's not even newsworthy. What's newsworthy is when someone doesn't.
And so the fact that you see all this negative stuff on the news, look at the negative stuff you see on the news and remind yourself, the only reason it's on the news is because it's abnormal. It's very abnormal. So when you see people being callous or being horrible to each other, that is abnormal by definition because it's on the news. What you don't see is the billions of little acts of
acts of, selflessness by humanity every day. This might be very hard for you to understand, but some people are not good at things. You know who you are. You're gonna do great. I conquered zero g in five hours. Yeah. Object approaching. Oh my god. You know a lot about space. You know a lot about communicating. Maybe you might be in the room in you maybe you might be in one of those discussions. But what you might not find yourself doing is in a bar with karaoke.
It No. You would find me that's where you'd find me. Oh. That's the more likely scene in the film that you'd wanna be doing karaoke. I do a great Bonnie Tyler. I've just put that. Is that right? Because that was what was that's actually gonna be my question, which is, you know, if you were kind of in that situation, maybe you're falling for someone, maybe you're not, who knows. May Oh, I didn't like that aspect of it, actually. I was like, no. There was
no relationship there. Don't they really did do. But anyway Yeah. There's a Maybe some people read into it that I didn't, but yeah. I don't know. But, the the world's kinda failing. You've got a a choice of a song. What do you pick? Yeah. Well, my usual karaoke song is Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler, but that feels not appropriate for The World is Ending. So what would I Total Eclipse is a bit on the nose as well, wouldn't it? The end of the world as we know it, I guess.
Amazing. Yeah. I think Sign of the Times was a great track to pick. But yeah. The National has a song called Light Years. It's like you're only light years away. Yeah. That would be appropriate for this. That's that would be amazing. For this story. Do do you do a good night when you're in the, it No. I've not got enough sad dad in me. Well, I've got loads of sad dad in me. Maybe I'll try it. I just have a big grin on my
face throughout the whole thing. But can anyone do my good Matt Biddens channeling again? Okay. There's another right. So, I don't know how to do this without spoilers. Well, the trailer shows you Rocky. Right? So This is and I know that so I I particularly as a book fan as well. So I went into Project Hail Mary completely blind. I did not even read the blurb. I just was like, it's a sci fi thing. Cool. Just tell me more. So I had all the reveals that the character had as
well. And so I understand why people were so annoyed that they put something in the trailer that I think you're about to say, but, like, they put something in the trailer that was a big, big reveal. So I met an alien. He's kinda growing on me. At least he's not growing in me, you know, which was a concern for a little while. I'm Grace. I'm gonna call you Rocky. Thumbs up. No. That's thumbs down. If we do the thumbs up, it's close enough. Yeah. No. It's it it is a shame,
isn't it? But they are two different things, aren't they? And that's that's just one of those. What what I love about the book when I was watching the film, I was like, I remember this, the start of the film. You have that, Ryan Gosling, Brian and Grace character going around the ship. I mean, that just lasts for ages in the boat. Right? It's just pissing. And and I like the bit where he drops something, and he realizes,
that fell weird. Mhmm. Mhmm. And that's how he realized he's he's in space or at least in a centrifuge because it was falling at a different gravity. It was at 1.5 g rather than one g. The sun is not the only star dying. Every star was infected by its neighbor except one. Why? We don't know. Which is why we build a ship to go there and find out. Now Andy Weir does famously do an awful lot of work into the background and the science that goes into
his books. One time when I spoke to him, he said that he would go away and spend a day, maybe half a day, maybe two days on the maths of a particular problem for The Martian, and then it would end up as being one sentence in the book. So I asked him about how he went about creating the world, which admittedly, at the time that he was writing this, the science was suggesting there was actually a real planet, a real exoplanet orbiting the star. So he was basing this on real science
at the time. As it happens, the latest data suggests that actually there isn't a planet there, and it's aspects of the star that are creating the dimming that we're seeing. Here's Andy Weir. There are actually three biospheres involved in this story. There's ours, Earth. There is, planet Adrian is what they ultimately name it, which is a planet in orbit around Tau Ceti, and that is basically the homeworld of astrophage.
And, then there's, the planet Arid around the star 40 Eridani, and that is the home world of the Eridians, which is an intelligent alien race who has the exact same problem that, that the humans are having. And so they did the exact same thing. The reason everybody went the reason these two ships both went to Tau Ceti is because for whatever reason, Tau Ceti is proven to be immune to astrophage. It's the only star in the neighborhood that's not dimming. Okay. So that's the setup.
As for designing Rocky, and Rocky is the nickname that our protagonist gives to the alien that he meets. For the design of Rocky, I had decided early on that of these three biospheres, they're way too close together for it to make sense for them to each be a separate genesis. Because, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, Forti Aridani, Sol, that's the name of our star, and Tau Ceti are all really close to each other. Tau Ceti is 12 light years
from here. Forti Aradani is 16 light years from here, and the Milky Way galaxy is a 100,000 light years across. So it's just, like, absurdly close together. So I decided these are not separate genesis events. There was a single genesis event. I'm not talking about the religious type of genesis. I mean, life evolved actually on the planet Adrian on
in orbit around Tau Ceti. And then a, an ancestor of astrophy, a like a 4,000,000,000 years ago ancestor of astrophy, which was another interstellar traveling life form monosyllular thing, seeded Earth and arid with life. And so we are actually all very distinctly related. So this made things a lot easier for me. I mean, I did that on purpose to explain why we're all so close together, but also, I don't have to invent all the chemistry and stuff for new life. I just say,
like, okay. If you look at the cells in Rocky's body and if you look at an astrophage itself, you'll see there's mitochondria, ribosomes, DNA, all the cellular machinery that is present in our own cells. And that made it so much easier. I didn't have to invent all that crap. Right? And then, so that having been said, I'm like, okay. It's the same cellular machinery as we have on Earth. What would this alien species be like? And so I'd selected as the planet, 40 Eridani b. 40 Eridani is a real
star. It's a solar analog. It's very similar to the sun. So I said, well, what do we know about that planet? And it's very close to its star. It orbits it orbits in forty six days. It's I think it's even closer to 40 Aradani than Mercury is to the sun. Right? It's very close. And it's about eight times the mass of Earth. We know that. And so I decided, alright, there's gonna be life on this planet so it has to have an atmosphere.
Okay. It needs an atmosphere. And also, if if a planet's that close to its star, the the solar wind from the star tends to basically sandblast the atmosphere off, unless you have a good magnetic field. So I decided Arid would have a good magnetic field. The way a planet gets a good strong magnetic field is by having a liquid iron a liquid ferromagnetic core and spinning really fast. Earth spins, you know, once a day.
That's why, we have a a much stronger magnetic field than, for instance, Venus, which very slowly spins. Okay. So I'm like, okay. So they spin fast. Now I'm learning things. Their planet, their day is very short. It's like six hours. And their year is very short. It's like forty six days. Okay. Great. And I'm like, okay. But they're very, very close to the star, so it's gonna be really, really hot on the planet.
And there are a lot of different planets can be all sorts of different temperature based on what their atmosphere is and how thick it is and what it's composed of. Like, Venus is actually hotter than Mercury despite being further away because of its atmosphere. So I decided it's gonna be really hot. It's gonna be way more than the boiling point of water, and we need water to survive. And I was like, well, hold on.
I arbitrarily decided it would be 210 degrees Celsius on the surface of their home world. And, I said, well, if you have, like, 29 atmospheres of pressure, 210 degrees Celsius water is liquid. So I'm like, there you go. You got liquid water. So all these things came from, you know, the environment that they live in came from starting off with the real data. And then just kind of extrapolating and making stuff up as needed. So now I'm like,
okay. We got a life form that lives on the surface of a planet with 29 atmospheres of pressure. And that atmosphere I'd I had decided as pure ammonia because it has to be a pretty heavy molecule to not get sandblasted by the sun anyway. That's why Venus still has its atmosphere because it's it's a bunch of carbon dioxide, and that's heavy. So I'm like, alright. Ammonia. Well, that much ammonia in the atmosphere, it would have, like, I figured that atmosphere
is almost like an ocean. It's basically, like, there's there's, life kind of in the upper atmosphere that absorbs light and, like, and grows that way, and then there's life below that that eats that, and and then there's life below that that eats that life and so on. At the surface, there'd be no sunlight reaching the surface, just like there's no sunlight reaching the sir the the bottom of our ocean. And so I'm like, oh, okay. Then iridians don't have eyes. They don't have vision. There's
no such thing as vision. But they do need some sort of three-dimensional spatial knowledge. So sound. They have, like, echolocation. Like, they can hear with sound really well. And then everything else kinda came from that. It's really hot. And I had a lot of fun putting them together. And and the big epiphany I had on that was, okay. I decided that, an iridian's body is almost like if a beehive had arms and legs and could move.
Like, there's actually only a an iridian weighs, like, 300 plus kilograms, But there's only eight there's, like, less than five kilograms of actually living biological material in it. So just as you have hair and the lenses of your eyes and your fingernails well, not you, Andrew. But just wanna be absolutely clear. I could have edited that bit out, but there's something quite lovely about one of your favorite authors making fun of you being follically challenged.
He's not referring to my fingernails with that joke. It is very much to do with the hair or, well, the disappearing of the hair on my head. Anyway, back to Andy Wing. And, just as you have all those things and that's dead tissue that your body created and is now part of your body, but it's not living anymore, An Iridion's body is almost
entirely that tissue. Even their blood vessels, everything like that are all made out of this dead tissue, and they have little worker cells that swim through their bloodstream to do things to maintain the body. And I thought that's a really cool concept, so I got to do that. He was supposed to be a likable character. Right? I mean, I did that on purpose. I wanted him to be, like, oh, you like him. He's cool. And this is really a story of friendship. Yeah. This book.
Friendship is magic. Right? But, I had no idea the response to Rocky. People are, like, saying, I would die for a project. I'm Grace. I'm gonna call you Rocky. We're here for the same same reason. His son is dying too. If we're gonna save our planets, we have to learn how to communicate. I also got to meet Rocky as well. In all the press junkets, I got to meet Rocky. Did you? When you asked me before who did I find Philip?
They didn't give me any warning. I didn't know ahead of time, and they were taking me down, and I thought I was gonna go in to be Ryan, and I was like, okay, cool. It's the Ryan moment, and then they were like, okay, so here's Rocky, and I was like, oh. Amazing. Amazing. What a lovely I've I've been loving all this stuff that they've been doing with Rocky and the promotional stuff. It's been great. But there's one thing about Rocky.
Because his planet is so, the cloud is so dense as far as far as I understand it. This the the Iridians, as they know, have managed to do space travel without knowing about time dilation and radiation. Is that possible? I think radiation, yes. If you've got such a massively thick atmosphere, then perhaps, yeah, there's some filtering that doesn't make it down to the surface of the planet. You know? The Earth's, magnetic field protects us from a lot of it, but also the atmosphere does a lot
of hard work as well. So cosmic rays, radiation comes into the very top of the atmosphere and creates, like, a a big shower of other particles when it hits into a an air molecule. And we detect those, you know, on the ground with all sorts of things like chair and cover rays and stuff like that. And sometimes in particle accelerators, I think they can have an impact on. Correct me if I'm wrong, particle physicist. So, yes, I think that is a
a possibility in that respect. What what I had to suspend disbelief about is whether they would even know spaces there because they've also evolved that they they don't use light to communicate, to see, or anything like that. They just use sound. So if you don't know to to look up but they do know about light, I guess. So how how did they figure out light? But I guess that's like saying how did we figure out magnetic fields, I guess, because you you know, you can't see it. You
don't interact with it. How do you know it's there? So there is some sort of that suspension of disbelief, a little bit to sort of believe that side of the story. I guess that's the question for the the sort of the astrophysicist and the astrochemists out there and things is, like, how life like that would would evolve and whether that would be realistic.
So I can understand the not knowing about time dilation and relativity, because if you think about it, we went to the into the moon without knowing a lot of more modern day science in the past fifty years. Right? It was just thrust in that direction in a tin can and off you go kinda thing.
So I can understand that it that whole they have if I can just this if I can suspend disbelief that, okay, they knew about space despite not having anything to detect light with, and they'll know about it, I can suspend disbelief that they managed to build a spacecraft and and hop on over there. Would you do the trip? Would they have to kind of induce a coma in you to to get you to go to space?
There's two very warring sides of me because one side of me is very happy with my feet on the ground looking through a telescope and not going anywhere near space. The other side of me is the one that is, like, I always get a window seat on an airplane. Like, I'm the person that's, like, yeah, just two hour flight when it flew by, because I was just looking out the window the entire time. That was
my TV. Right? I literally just took a flight from Palm Springs to Seattle, and I must have gone over eight national parks. And I was I was literally just like I saw Yosemite from a plane, and I looked down the whole of Yosemite Valley and was like, this is the coolest experience. And, like, everyone else is just watching film.
So that part of me, I just I would love to go to space because I would just stare out the window the entire time at the view of Earth, at least, if I was in orbit around Earth. I I I guess if I was to go on a long journey, the view would be a little bit it would be the same. Well, I guess it wouldn't be the same starry night. It would be fun to see how constellations change and things like this, and you
would have a perfect dark sky. Right? You would have the darkest of dark skies, so that would be great. I think I've always said if space travel becomes as blase as air travel currently is for us, then you may find me one day going to space, from the sort of commercialization of space travel and things like that. But if I could have ever remote it, probably not. I say probably most likely not.
In terms of a long mission like this, though, I wouldn't be the person that would be volunteering to be the science specialist. Unfortunately, I don't have the, the brave gene as Ryan yeah. Rylan Grace puts it in the film. Yeah. You don't need that. You just need to find someone to be brave for. That's what I'm I knew you were gonna say that. I do I need I'd I'd I'd alright. Fine. I'd I'd get on it for my cat. Amazing. What's your cat's name?
Pippin. Pippin. Guess guess what? That's a reference to full name, Peregrin Took. It means when she's being crazy cat, I can call her full of a took. Brilliant. Brilliant. Okay. So there's there is a a beautiful moment in the film, for me at least, where, Grace has to use basic geometry, a sextant to, work out how to move. And, what I really love about that, and it's what I really love about Andy Weir's work generally, is that he he's found a way in that story to make it so that you can't just
use a computer to do it. Right? You have to do the the foundational math so that you have to do the foundational geometry of it to make it work. My concern, and I don't think I'm alone in this, is that what we're doing currently in society with AI Mhmm. Is to remove all of the need for that. So if we do find ourselves not necessarily in a situation where we have to, you know, navigate stars, but maybe where we have to solve complex issues. If the tech fails us, we're in difficulties, aren't we?
Do you share that? Do you think it's important for people to understand and learn about the foundational aspects of our universe? Yeah. Definitely. I think the oh, I mean, you could have made this argument twenty years ago about the overreliance on tech. Right? It's just new tech with AI. You know? You see the story crop up over and over again.
And I think, you know, the argument then was, oh, if we've got you know, if we can just code up, you know, all of this stuff, then then we'd never do the maths and we'll lose our basic math skills. But then you learn by the doing the coding and things like that. I guess then the new argument is if you can just ask AI to write you the code to do this specific thing, then you don't understand the the black box of what's going on inside it and and understand the the science
behind it. So, yes, I just I wonder whether it's sort of a hypothetical question of whether you'd ever need to do a back of the envelope calculation with using a sextant of which direction to go in rather than having a computer to necessarily have to do it. But I do worry about the over reliance on tech, especially if someone in academia, you know, supervising students and things like that. And you you think, okay. Well, how much are they actually, you know, just very gung hoing with the
date? Because I'm an observational astrophysicist, so it's very much, like, data driven, and it's like, we want to understand this data specifically, you know, can you grab this and grab that? And, you know, if we're saying, okay. Can we do something with this data or have to code up, you know, say it's a statistical test or whatever it might be.
You want the student to be able to understand the statistical test because they need to understand the ins and outs of it to actually understand how to interpret the data afterwards. Right? So you need a a a pretty good foundational stats knowledge. And even twenty years ago, it's like, okay. Well, we've coded it up in a Python package. Just grab that and and run that on your data kind of thing. Are you actually understanding what it's doing?
The you know, if you take it a step further with AI generating that code for you, then there there's an extra layer of, like, has the AI actually done what you want it to do, first of all? But then also, yeah, again, are you understanding what's going on under the hood to be able to actually make that scientific interpretation? So, yeah, it is something I worry about, but at the same time, I think, well, we've been here before, and we've adapted.
So Yeah. No. That's fair. I was just thinking then, but I because I do a lecture on, practical uses of AI for science journalists. One of the things I get the students to do is to get I give them each a paper and then they choose an AI of their choice, generative AI of their choice, to ask it to explain that paper as if to a 15 year old. So they get that and then they have to make a note of everything that it says, and go back to the original paper, and find where what that AI says is in the
paper. And almost every single time, it's hallucinated something that isn't in the paper. Is Well yeah. Because it's just based on something that's been written before. Right? So it's not just pulling on the paper itself when you ask a Jedi to do that. It's being pulled on everything that's ever been written for a 15 year old on that topic or physics. So that's the thing with AI is that it doesn't always do the things that you ask it
to do. And that's the point of it, right, is because it is just the computer deciding what's what's relevant and things like that. So it's funny how I think far the conversation has come with AI since I started my PhD even just over 10 ago now. So I was very involved in, the Zooniverse project, which is a project where you get citizen scientists, so members of the public, to classify scientific data, huge datasets that we had no chance of
just going through ourselves. So it started with Galaxy Zoo with a million images of galaxies that needed classifying. Project's still going because you need human classified datasets to train AI. Now people are like, isn't this a solved problem? And, also, there's still some that AI can't do and things like that. But I remember sitting in a meeting where, you know, we were pulling in all the fields
of research. So all the scientists that you know, not just the galaxies people where I started, but they also had this problem, like, people who'd set up camera traps in Antarctica to take pictures of penguins, and they wanted to know how many penguins there were in an image where I have never seen so many penguins in my life. You know? To, people in, zoology, for example, as well, where they'd set up camera traps in the Serengeti, and every time something moved, it took a picture.
So they ended up with a lot of grass waving in the wind, but they also ended up with antelopes and zebras and lions and everything like that. And there was someone from the computer science department came in who was like, well, we think we can help solve this problem of of classification. And they were like, but it you know, we need the human classifications first because it was like, this is where our AI model is, and it they showed an image of a zebra walking through a grassy field.
And it was like the AI thought there was about 50 different antelopes in the field as well as the sky. You know? So it's just a clear blue sky. So it's it's funny thinking back to that meeting and thinking about where we are now in terms of how fast the technology has moved on. Because in terms of, like, for example, galaxy classifications, you know, we were at sort of, like, the 70% level back ten ten years ago where it was
like, yeah. AI can do maybe, like, 70% of them, but that's only if we take the human classifications we already have and make the images so that, actually, the same classification can be used on four different images because we've just rotationally flipped the image, so it's technically different four different ways. Whereas now, the AI is at the sort of 99% level, and it's only the 1% level we're still asking people about.
And we also have sort of, like, from the AI, we have, like, a confidence score. So So it can be like, I am confident in this classification to this amount. And if it's not passing a certain threshold, we can still show it to people as well just to double check it. So it's just yeah. In ten years, the the technology in terms of how it can be applied to the research side of things is just absolutely shot up. But there are a lot of black boxes as well. And it's fun to
see how people are going, oh, okay. You know, Google have developed this tool, and it's a black box. But can I then apply it over here? And how does that compare with something that's been specifically written as an AI tool by an astronomer, by an astrophysicist who knows what it specific science case it will be used for. And it's interesting to compare the different answers that you get. So that's a slight detail from the main topic of this podcast, which is, of course, Project Hail
Mary. We'll get back to that very shortly with Andy Weir. But if you get two academics talking to each other, then these things do tend to happen. And in case you're interested, I teach on the master's in science communication at UE Bristol. It's been going for about fifteen years, and we do all sorts of things, including writing, podcasting, of course, radio, TV, and, filmmaking, wildlife filmmaking, all that sort of
thing on the course. But let's return to Andy Weir, and I asked him about the character of Rylan Grace. Is it somebody who is based on him? So I'm always trying to get better as a writer. And my biggest weakness in my opinion is characters. Character depth, growth, story arcs, character arcs, and so on. Like, in The Martian, there is no character depth or growth at all. Like, no one would accuse The Martian of being literature.
Mark Watney has the exact same personality at the end of the book as he did at the beginning. He undergoes no change at all. And you don't really know anything about Mark by the time you finish the book other than he's a guy who didn't wanna die. Okay. And, you know, he's got sort of a quirky personality, but that's that's it. Okay. So for Artemis, I said, like, alright. I'm gonna make a care and Mark is, of course, based on my own personality. As you can tell, I'm a smart ass.
And but he's he's all the aspects that I have in my own personality that I like and none of my many, many flaws. So he's just the the idealized version of me, what I wish I could be. Jazz in Artemis was also based on me, but she's got all my flaws. I said, like, I'm gonna make a deeper, more nuanced, and interesting character. Jazz is young. She's, like, 26. And so I said, like, I'm gonna give her all the flaws I had when I was her age. Like, I was a screw
up. I was ostensibly intelligent, but kept making bad life decisions and that sort of thing. And people were always disappointed in me because they're like, you could be doing so much better, you dipshit. Anyway, so, It's alright now. What's that? Yeah. I'm doing okay now. But if you met me when I was 26, you'd be like, dude, please Are you not? Like, get better at life. But,
so I gave her my flaws. And, what I found out is that, my the the flawed and more realistic version of me is not a character people have a easy time rooting for because she was such the architect of her own problems. People had a tough time, like, rooting for her. And so, you know, I I said, like, okay. I went too far. I made her too flawed. Okay. Alright. Now for Ryland, I decided I wanna grow more. So for Ryland, I said, I'm not gonna
base him on me. I'm gonna just make a character that is not me, not based on any part of my personality. He's still humor. I mean, there's no way to keep your own personality out of your characters at least a little bit, but he's still kind of funny. But I started him off kinda blank without having much personality at all and just started writing. And as the story progressed, his personality started to develop naturally.
And then I went back and rewrote the early chapters to match the personality that had developed. So for the reader, it's a consistent, you know, personality. But for me, it was a lot of work to just slowly kinda see how that developed and kinda scary too. Because I'm the sort of guy who likes to sit down and have everything set up on a spreadsheet, and I kinda know what's going on. So to just jump into the void and start writing and hope that the
character comes out well. If you have seen the film, if you haven't seen the film, either way, I highly recommend you go and find a copy of the book and read it in whatever format you prefer. But if you have read the book and you've seen the film, of course, you can go back and experience them both again. But I wondered if doctor Becky had some suggestions for space related science fiction for us. I love Becky Chambers' books. So I I particularly loved A Long Way to a Small
Angry Planet. I thought that was great. And there is also a very short novel that she wrote called To Be Taught If Fortunate, which is, again, about sort of, like, astronauts in space that have been sent very far away from Earth. But it's more about the psychology of what that does to a human. So I found that a really interesting read. In terms of the the more fantasy side of sci fi, I love the Red Rising novels by Pierce
Brown. I thought that was very interesting sort of in terms of a it's like, humanity spread across the solar system. What does that do in terms of the politics and economics and everything of of that whole world? Complete disbelief on the science because there's people living on, like, moons of Jupiter and things like that. And you're like, okay. Well, they figured that out, I guess, like habitability, but whatever.
That's just all glossed over. You know, it's not very science heavy because it's sci it's more of the fantasy side of sci fi. In terms of films, I always have to just turn off my brain when I watch a a film most of the time, unless I'm doing a let's react to this so that we can use this as my Trojan horse of science education. You think you're you think you're watching a a fun react video on a film, but you're actually gonna get hit with science.
So weirdly weirdly, some of my favorite sci fi films are the ones you have to dis like, suspend your disbelief the most because I think I I can do it more. I think that's why I didn't like Interstellar was because they were like, it's the most scientifically accurate film. And I went in
like, right. Well, you know, every time there wasn't something scientifically accurate, I was like, you know, like they needed a Saturn five rocket to get off Earth, but all the other planets, they just went off in their little spacecraft like, what point? You know?
So I think, weirdly, some of my favorites are, like, the classics of, like, Deep Impact and Armageddon that came out within, like, a year of each other, and I watched when I was, like, 10, and I was just, like, these are the best films ever. You know? I also really enjoyed, weirdly, Don't Look Up that came out recently,
which is a film about yeah. Again, like, an apparently, I like asteroid films, which is a film about, like, a comet that's gonna impact with Earth that's discovered, but instead of the classic sort of scientists and the world bands together, and America saves us, usually, it's how it goes in the Hollywood films. Right? It's very much like a they just sort of ignore the problem, and they think, oh, actually, how can we make money from this problem and things like
that. And you think it it's a very, like it's probably the exact opposite sort of message of Project Hail Mary. Right? It's that humanity wouldn't band together and it wouldn't save it. And it's a very interesting commentary. It's less of a sci fi film, I guess, and more of a commentary on the world as it is today, but it's also very funny at the same time. The dark humor, I guess. More of a Star Wars than a Star Trek person, which I know makes a lot of my colleagues very disappointed.
That's interesting. Why is that? Like, I just I love fantasy, though. And I think because I can I like, if I if I'm reading, I'm probably more more likely reading fantasy than I am sci fi? Again, just because of the suspension of disbelief, it's just easier. It's more of an escape. I think. You know? Like, as much as I absolutely love my job, like, sci fi is still adjacent to it. And so it doesn't always feel like a full switch off in comparison to fantasy. No. That's fair.
But you're very excited about Project Hail Mary. Why why then? Yeah. And I think I think it just it when I listened to it, I was in a a really nice frame of mind that I could sort of enjoy it for what it was. And I went in knowing that it was going to be work adjacent, and it's become very work adjacent in the fact that, yeah, I've, you know, made science communication about it and stuff. So in the same way that I can be very joyful about work and everything like that, you you still
have joy for it. But if I'm if I'm fully wanting to to switch off and relax like I said, I put it on because I was doing jobs. Right? I was literally around the house, like, you know, cleaning or something, and I thought I'll put this audiobook on. So I wasn't, like, putting something on to fully switch off from, you know, everything. Like, you know, I wasn't, like, being, like, oh, I need something that I can just kill up and read by the fire on holiday. You know?
That would be a fantasy novel I'd like to thank doctor Becky and Andy Weir for joining me for this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast. Of course, you will find links to everything we've talked about on the Physics World website physicsworld.com. We'll be back next month with something else from this wonderful world of physics. I think I'll leave the last word to Rocky. It is time go.