‘Project Hail Mary’ brings a new kind of alien to the big screen

Science Friday is brought to you by progressive insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance

companies to see if you could save some cash? Well, progressive makes it easy to see if you could save

when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at progressive.com. Progressive

casualty insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states.

Hey, it's for Lictman and you're listening to Science Friday. Happy big budget sci-fi movie

released day to all who celebrate. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct,

including us. Project Hail Mary comes out this weekend. You may have seen ads of a days to

Ryan Gosling in a spacesuit or maybe you know the book that it's based on. Here's the premise.

A microbial alien species is dimming the sun and the earth is going to turn into a frozen,

lifeless tundra, unless someone figures something out and quick. The solution? Put failed molecular

biologist and middle school teacher Rylin Grace on the case. I put the knot and astronaut. I've

never done anything. I've never done a space where I can't even moonwalk. This is your warning.

There will be spoilers. So our protagonist finds himself in space. He meets a new buddy,

Rocky, an alien from the planet, Erid, who is very cute despite having no face and looking like a

pile of rocks. It is super fun to see a scientist and his alien sidekick try to save the world.

And the movie raises lots of interesting questions about alien life, which is why I'm so happy we're

talking about it with the perfect guests, author of the book Project Hail Mary and the Martian

Andy Weir and astrobiologist and planetary scientist Mike Wong. Andy and Mike, thanks for being

here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, this is going to be fun. Okay, Andy, kick us off. This story

is your baby. It must be so gratifying to see it come to life and executed in such a fun and

beautiful way. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, to see just hundreds of, you know, world-class people

like putting all of their effort into making this thing that fell out of my head a reality is,

is, you know, it's pretty humbling actually. Okay, so given that, I'm going to ask you to put on

your petty writer hat. What is like the tiny little thing we can all look out for in the movie

that you would have done differently? Well, I can't really think of anything that I would have

done differently. There are a few tiny little things like, oh, there's this scene would have been

a good opportunity to do this thing or there's some omissions from the book that obviously only

like 5% of a book is going to make it into a movie. But I wish, you know, there are a couple scenes

in the book that aren't in the movie that I'm like, I would have only been a couple of minutes

to kind of add to that. But I don't have any specific gripe. I think it's a great adaptation that

came together really well. I know that sounds like a cop out, but that's just genuinely how I feel.

It does sound like a cop out, but I understand. What was your level of involvement?

I was very involved. I was a producer on the film, so I was there for the whole shoot,

and I was always like, you know, Ryan considers the screenplay to be sort of a vague suggestion,

and so, you know, he'd add a bit and stuff like that, and so a lot of the takes that are in the

movie are things that he just ad-libbed and stuff like that because he came up with like better

versions than what we wrote. Can you think of an example? Like, is there one that comes to mind?

I mean, just generally like the phraseology and just like how he phrases things. Like one thing is

when Rocky is rolling around in his lab, and so again, he said, Rocky, Rocky, Rocky, my hand is up.

You know, that was all him. And there's another line where he's going through potential voices

for the voice synthesizer for Rocky, and he just said, you know, like a Meryl Streep. Man,

she could play anything. He just ad-libbed that. That was a great line. Actually, I should remember that.

So yeah, and then we went and asked the real Meryl Streep if she could read a line for us for the

movie. And she agreed. So yeah, we got to do that. That was pretty cool. And like I said, Ryan

would go script a lot. So I'd go up and whisper the director's. I'm like, okay, he said, he said

milligram. He should have said nanogram. That sort of thing like they'll get it right on the next

take. Okay, Mike, what about you? You saw the movie, right? I did. Yes. What did you think?

I absolutely loved it. It was just such a joy to watch. I mean, I also read the book, and I've

got to say I know the book came out several years ago, but I only got around to reading it last

May because we run the summer internship program at my institute, Carnegie Institution for Science,

and the intern that we had admitted to the program last summer wrote in their application,

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir inspired me to want to be an astrobiologist. And when we admitted

this person into the program to work with me, I was like, I guess I got to read this book now to

know what the kids are getting inspired by to go into my field. The main character of this story,

Ryland Grace is kind of an outsider scientist. He's been sort of shunned by the establishment.

Mike, I'm curious, when you see a scientist portrayed that way, you know, what do you make of it?

How does it make you think or feel? I really identify with Ryland Grace. I'm an astrobiologist,

and Ryland's big thing, the reason why he's shunned is because he wrote his dissertation about life that

is not water-based at all. And I've actually written papers about how we should stretch our

definitions of life such that we would be attuned to looking for life that doesn't follow the same

characteristics as life on earth, including life that may not be water-based or carbon-based or,

you know, use ribosomes or mitochondria, et cetera, et cetera. And so I really identified with that

aspect of Ryland. I also really identified with his love for teaching. That's something that I'm

also very passionate about, too. So I saw myself in this character. And, you know, when I see

somebody like that shunned by his community, I think about all the times that people have really raised

eyebrows at me and the rest of the astrobiology community thinking, is that a real science? I mean,

how can you even do astrobiology when you haven't yet found signs of life and space to which I've

developed a kind of funny answer, which is I tell them, oh, but we have found life in space.

And people's eyes widen and their jaws drop and they wait with baited breath for me to divulge

some state secret about where we're keeping the alien bodies. Right here on earth. Exactly. No,

Andy's with it. You know, I just remind them, your life in space. We're all life in space. You know,

when we discovered that our planet was an inhabited world that our entire biosphere was on the

crust of this regular rocky world orbiting a very ordinary star in one of a trillion galaxies

in the observable universe, you know, we discovered life in space. And the great question that we

get to ask now is, is there more of us out there? And I'll go ahead known up to this, which I

knew at the time that I was writing is that I portrayed Grace's view as like, you know, life

doesn't need water as being this radical idea that partially got him like that that got him

ridiculed within the community. But it is actually a commonly held theory by many, many astrobiologists.

I just wanted something that the reader could understand that would kind of like explain why he left

academia. And did you identify with Ryland as the outsider or not anymore? Are you too big now?

I'm just, I'm too big. I mean, you guys are lucky. I'm here, frankly. No. I mean, I always feel

like an outsider. I think everybody always feels like, maybe that's just me projecting on to

everyone else. But I always feel like I'm an outsider wherever I am. And I reject that. Although

I will, I will take a step back and say like, Ryland is the first time I made a main character that

wasn't just directly based on my own personality. Like really? Yeah. Mark is Mark Watney from the

Martian is all of the aspects of myself that I like, magnified, and then all the aspects of myself

that I don't like erased. So he's the idealized, perfected version of me. Jazz Bashara from Artemis,

also known as Andy Weir's other book, is sort of an amalgamation of all of the flaws I had when

I was her age. You know, theoretically very smart, yet still making bad life decisions. And

most of her problems are things that she brought about and stuff like that. Self-created. We can

all relate to that. Yeah. And so that was based on me as well. People turns out they like the pretend

idealized version of me more than the more realistic version of me. Everybody likes Mark. People

didn't like jazz that much. But then Ryland was the first time I decided, okay, I'm going to try to make

a character that isn't based on my own personality. So I started off with a core central thing of like,

okay, what makes him a little different than most people is he is so pathologically conflict

diverse, like almost a phobia of conflict that he would rather leave his profession than defend his

his theories. And he would, he retreats to the safety of a middle school teacher where the

children aren't going to challenge him, you know, and they he's the cool teacher and all this

stuff like that. And he's he's afraid. And I think feeling overwhelmed and afraid, well, that's

something we all can can can really kind of get behind. I think we've all been there. Yeah. And don't

don't downplay being a middle school teacher because that actually seems like one of the most

frightening and difficult jobs I can think of. The point is, but the point is he went into an

environment where he went out of his way to be like the cool teacher that the kids like, right?

That was that I mean, and he loves he loves to educate kids, but it was really important for him

to be like beloved by the by the kids. Yes. And a lot of teachers will tell you, okay, it's nice

if the kids like you, but it's more important that the kids learn. Yes, right. Sure enough,

we have to take a break, but don't go away because we're going to get to my favorite part of the movie.

The aliens. Stay with us.

On the broad side, we take you into the heart of the south with stories that'll surprise you.

Bigfoot apparently loves glow sticks. Exactly. He's a raver.

And topics that dig into the muddy margins of history. Right, the good, the bad, the ugly.

It's not clean at all. It's so messy. Lead second, this, this is actually real.

Listen to the broad side. One story every week exploring the rich traditions of the south.

I'm so excited to talk about the aliens. I want to start with the microbial sun eating species

that sort of kicks off the drama here. Andy, what was your inspiration around that form of

alien life? Astrophage. Yeah, this all started off with I wanted to come up with a story where

humanity had access to a mass conversion based fuel. Because if we had that right now, we'd be able

to colonize the solar system like now. It'd be easy because we have the energy. The problem is

storing the energy in a small enough volume and mass that we can use it for spacecraft.

And so I was like, I want to say have that now, but it's way beyond our technology to make right now.

So I, it's a bit too much suspension of disbelief to have some mad scientists invent it.

Then I went through a phase where I'm like, maybe they find a crashed alien spaceship. But then it's like,

okay, then the other stuff on the spaceship would probably be even more interesting than the fuel.

And I don't want to focus on that. And then I thought like, well, maybe it's like,

maybe they find some fuel. Maybe they find a crash alien spaceship and everything's all

completely rotted because it crashed here like a billion years ago. But the fuel is still good.

And maybe the fuel makes more of itself. Maybe it's a reversible reaction. So you can,

you can shine light on the fuel and it'll absorb it and start turning that into mass and

and something like that. And then I said, absorbing energy and making more of yourself sounds like life.

Right? That's what plants do. So I thought, okay, what if it's a biological entity? What if it's not

like aliens who say, take me to your reader? What if it's just an invasive species, basically?

And so I said, oh, okay. So then we have singles-celled organism that does mass conversion for

storing energy. And then I'm like, why? Why would it do it? Like, why would anything evolve that?

And how would it get that much energy? And I said, like, well, it doesn't have to live on a planet

just because we do. It lives on the surface of a star. People call it like, oh, it's eating the sun.

They're not eating the sun. They're living on the sun. It's like algae isn't eating the ocean. It

just lives there. Right? And so it's absorbing energy from the sun. And I'm like, why? And I'm like,

oh, so it can spore out to get the, so it can go out to get the things it needs to reproduce,

because you can't even find carbon and oxygen until you go like to the middle of a star. And so

it would need to go somewhere else to breathe and all that stuff like that. So the end result was

I came up with astrophage. And then I thought, Andy, can I just pop in here? I love that this very

gripping drama was reverse engineered from like the nerdiest possible starting point. It's

delightful. Thank you. I almost always start with like, I want this science thing. How do I make

the science thing happen in a story? Anyways, I came up with astrophage. And then I thought like,

oh, okay, initially I thought, oh, okay, humanity gets ahold of some astrophage. And they're like,

oh, we can breed it up and we can colonize the solar system and stuff like that. And in the back of

my mind, I was like, well, we better make sure we don't let any of this crap get on our star,

because that would be catastrophic. And then, and then like a few seconds later, I'm like, okay,

erase everything else. That's the story. So there, there we have it.

That's amazing. Michael, as our planetary, our resident planetary scientist and astrobiologist,

what was your take on the astrophage? I love how the astrophage sort of subverts a lot of

expectations we have about encountering alien life. I mean, just contrast the astrophage with like

the alien from the aliens series, right? The aliens are these big monstrous macroscopic

monsters that are, you know, coming and eating us, whereas the astrophage is just a microscopic

organism that isn't even infecting us, right? They're just doing their business, mining their own

business, absorbing sunlight and converting that into energy. And yet, they still present this

extraordinarily scary doomsday scenario, not one that, you know, it's like immediate, we're going

to all die because aliens are coming to like eat us or infect us. But simply by dimming the sun,

they are essentially, to me, an allegory for climate change. You know, we can see our future,

decades in advance, that if we allow this thing to keep going, our entire way of life is going

to disappear. Okay, we have to talk about Rocky. So astrophage are not the only aliens in Project

Hill. Mary, you know, in my opinion, the star of the show, I'm sorry, Ryan is Rocky, who becomes

Ryland's buddy. Rocky is extremely charismatic, I think. And once they solve the sort of language

barrier problem with a kind of computer auto translator, they're off to the races. So Andy,

I loved Rocky's look. He's not humanoid at all. He's like a rock tarantula about the size of

golden retriever. Is this how you picture aliens in your mind? Well, so the truth is, I don't have

a very visual imagination. So when I'm writing the characters are just sort of blobs. Like, I put a

lot of time and effort into working out Iridian morphology and biology. I went down there.

Rocky's an Iridian. Rocky is an Iridian. Yeah. And I spent a lot of time going down that rabbit hole

because speculative evolution is fun. I suspect Mike would agree. But I couldn't have told you

like a visual image of Rocky. I knew that. Okay, he's got a thorax and he's got like five legs and

there's joints and three fingers at the end of each hand. But I couldn't have told you like whether

his legs were skinny or wide or if they were bumpy or smooth. Like, I just don't have a very

visual imagination. So when I was seeing it, my mind, it was all just blobs. So what's kind of

neat is when I saw, when they were shooting it, I went to the creature shop and saw the model and

and then, you know, saw the sets and everything like that. For me, I didn't have the cognitive

dissonance that a lot of writers have when they're reconciling the screen version with their,

you know, with their what happened in their mind when they were writing it. For me, it's just like,

oh, so that's what that looks like. Now, I know it becomes canon, you know.

I mean, so I also, you know, because we're an audio medium and I think about sound a lot. Like,

I also was very interested in the sounds Rocky was making. That's not bad.

Is there sort of internal logic to that? Like, did you come up with a language? Like, if I don't

do what Ryland does, would it be consistent? I don't think so. I had made suggestions to the

production. I don't know if they followed it, but the reason Rocky sounds the way he sounds

is because an irradiance body is basically like a self-contained biosphere. They eat food to

power it and excrete whatever they don't need, but they're not exchanging air with the atmosphere.

They internally have an oxygen carbon dioxide exchange system going on within their own biology.

So because of this, they're not breathing in and exhaling. So if they need to make noise,

they need to do it inside their body. So they have basically like air bladders that push across

vocal cords back and forth to make sounds. And they have five of them because everything is

like pentosymmetrical in irradiant biology because I arbitrarily decided it would be.

And so they can make chords. And I was like, what would that even sound like? Well,

it would sound like whale song because that's what whales are doing. They're pushing air from

their lungs through their vocal cords into their mouths and holding it there and then re-enhaling it

so that they can push it through again. So it's like, you know.

I love that. Mike, as an astrobiologist, what did you think of the depiction of Rocky?

Well, first, I'm so glad that Andy admitted first that he's not a visual person and just

pictured a blob when he thought of Rocky because that's what I thought of too when I was reading

the book, you know, just this blob thing. So I loved seeing Rocky come to life on the screen.

And, you know, who knows what kinds of very interesting different life forms can exist on other

worlds, especially when those worlds like Rockies have a very different geology and therefore

environment that evolution we need to play with and navigate through to generate these highly

evolved forms. And so, you know, I love whenever science fiction gives us alien morphologies that

look very different from us because one thing that we think might be true about biological evolution

is that it's very path-dependent, you know. The small decisions early on that, you know,

we decided to use this particular molecule like DNA. Well, maybe not all life out there does use

DNA as its genetic molecule. And then things like, you know, the body plans, what kind of symmetry

you have, those could be locked in early on due to a chance mutation. And then from then on out,

you've got, you know, fivefold symmetry instead of bilateral symmetry or something like that.

And so, that's great to play around with because I think the possibility space for the diversity of

life in the universe is so much wider than the possibility space that was actually sampled through

evolution here on this one terrestrial planet that we call Earth. And even then, like on Earth,

the population of life is so incredibly diverse. So, that's one of the reasons I really wanted

the alien in this story to be truly alien. I wanted to be completely incompatible with all

things human. Like, if you put an irridian in the human atmosphere, he'll die. If you put a human

in an irridian's atmosphere, he'll die. Like, they're just completely incompatible. And

because it always, a little bit bothered me and kind of like, softer sci-fi when the alien is

just like a human with some forehead bumps, you know, I get it because that makes production easier

and it makes storytelling easier because you can directly interact, stuff like that. But, I mean,

even on Earth, in our own biosphere, if you exchange the positions of a shark and a camel,

they're both going to die, right? So, something that evolved on another planet is almost certainly

not going to be compatible with us. Yeah, I mean, I thought that was a real feat of storytelling

that you could learn to love by the end a, you know, tarantula rock. You know, that you feel

emotionally attached to it. Yeah, well, easier done in a novel than in a movie. So, for me, you know,

anyone reading the novel just understands that Rocky is an entity that has feelings and stuff

like that. And so you can be attached to him. It's a lot harder in a visual medium. And the directors

like understood the assignment. They're like, okay, we've got a creature made out of basically rocks

that does not have a face, doesn't have eyes, can't make facial expressions at all. And we need the

audience to love him. Gestures were very important. Yeah, it was all just about body language.

The puppeteers, James Ortiz was a head puppeteer and the voice. And they really did a fantastic

job. Mike, I know you read the book and saw the movie. I want to hear your astrobiologist,

planetary scientist, gripes. There have to be some. I read the book. It was a joy. And I loved

the movie. And really, you know, it followed so much of the book. But there are a couple of things.

One omission that I was a little disappointed to not see is the element of relativity. How

Rocky's species can't, you know, see light so they don't have an understanding of light. And

therefore, they don't know about Einstein's theories of relativity. And that played an important

part in the book in terms of the amount of fuel that was used, but also this idea of time dilation

and space dilation. But it wasn't really explored that much in the movie. And I was wondering,

is that just because we don't want to belabor the audience with that explanation? Or what was the

reason for not landing on relativity too much? I think one of the main reasons is because

it wasn't critical to advancing the plot. And you have to be laser focused on that when you're

writing a screenplay because you don't have a lot of space in room where we're not going to stop

the forward momentum of the plot to give a, you know, an explanation of special relativity or

general relativity as a case maybe. Now we do mention, I think, that Ryland only experienced four

years during his like 13-year journey. So it's there and they know it's there. Also just minor

correction to your quibble. Eritians absolutely know about light because they have scientists who

have discovered it. They don't have an organ to perceive light, but they know about it. I often get,

just sorry, like a random aside here, I often get like emails like, how did the Eritians know about

a patrol line? They can't see light. I'm like, we can't see infrared light either. But we knew about

our patrol line. How do you explain that? It's like science technology. They work to the stuff out

and found ways to, you know, learn about their environment and put it into a form that they can,

that they can perceive. It's not hard to follow. Andy, is this the occupational hazard of writing

mainstream sci-fi? We're like tons of smart people are like, well, actually. Yeah, it is. And not

only that, but I'll go the next step. I bring it on myself by saying, by writing hard sci-fi. So I

tell people how I wrote this to be as scientifically accurate as possible. And then the scientists are

like, really? All right. Okay. Let's go. Let's go. Just take up this gauntlet here and dust it off.

And let me see what you know. You have had, you know, several gigantohits. What's next?

I guess my next gigantohit. I don't know. No, I'm working on my next book now. I'm not talking

details publicly, but I can tell you it's science fiction, of course. And it's not a sequel to it.

It's a safe space. We're just, it's just us. Yeah, it's just us. Yeah. So everybody wants a sequel to

Project Hail Mary. I get it. But like I just don't have enough good ideas to make a compelling story

yet. I would rather not make a sequel than make a crappy one. So right now I'm working on another

idea that I've had bouncing around in my head for quite a while. And I've been wanting to work on

that. So that's, that's my next book. Looking forward to it. Andy, we are author of Project Hail Mary

and Planetary Scientist Mike Wong. Thank you both for being here today. Thank you for having me.

This was fun. This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis. And if you have strong feelings

about aliens and how they're portrayed in the movies or anything else really in the science

universe, please give us a call 877-4SyFry. We love hearing from you. We'll catch you next time.

I'm Flora Lichtman.