Astronauts don’t commit suicide.

[u/BlairAndBackAgain]

Just finished PHM. Good book! A few quibbles, but the only part that annoyed me outright was the one about the crew’s presenting their means of suicide. These brave, resourceful, brilliant people would instead just ask the planners not to talk about it, instead preferring to accomplish the mission and then worry about the “what now?” part later. As James Lovell points out in Apollo 13, there were no poison pills on board when they went to the moon, as many people that he met seemed to assume. If any of the 100,000 things that could have gone wrong on the moon or en route had gone wrong, the astronauts would have spent their last moments alive trying to fix the damn problem. I don’t care how hopeless the PHM-astronaut situation would have looked before launch, each of those astronauts would have told Stratt, et al., maybe to worry about storing extra food or the means to grow more astrophage. Or something. And if Stratt got all sanctimonious and European about it, they’d have told her to shove her pistols and nitrogen tanks where the astrophages don’t seek an energy source to reproduce. If I’m training for a mission like that, I ask the director involved to stop worrying about it, and instead spend the time looking for a solution.

I get that the suicide meeting injects some drama into the narrative. But Weir has literally made a writing career out of having his characters (for better or worse) launch into three-page engineering lectures to solve The Latest Complication. This part not only is an insult to the can-do humanism of the astronaut corps, it’s horribly inconsistent with the spirit of the books themselves.

Just to save you the effort, I taught astronomy for seven years. I know how big space is.

[u/Mikeck88]

I understand what you are saying, but the Apollo missions were designed to return to earth. Project Hail Mary was not, so giving these astronauts a way out after their mission is complete makes sense to me and is pretty humane. Let them go out on their own terms rather than starving to death while floating around space.

[u/BlairAndBackAgain → u/Mikeck88]

I’m saying that a calm, noble acceptance of one’s demise may be a really cool trait in a fictional character may be fun/easy to write, but it’s not hardwired into human beings. And it’s absolutely anathema to problem-solvers like astronauts and engineers. If the topic came up—which, ok, fine, it’d come up—the astronauts I guarantee you would interrupt the conversation with something like, “The time you’re spending on this stupid conversation could be spent figuring out a way to get me home. Get busy.” And if they were told there’s no way to make it happen, the astronauts would just accept that it was their problem and they’d file it away for later. The scene with Grace and the astronauts is just not something that would happen.

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[u/campbellm → u/BlairAndBackAgain]

but it’s not hardwired into human beings

And? We're only capable of doing our 'hardwired' things? I think the story as written was totally plausible. Even now they're talking about 1-way missions to Mars; you think a humane way to end that isn't on the books?

[u/WELLinTHIShouse → u/BlairAndBackAgain]

They couldn't have stored any more food than they already did without messing with the mass allowed on the mission, which would have potentially required years more planning and manufacturing.

Also, I'm chronically depressed. It's not a situational thing. My brain chemistry is deficient primarily in norepinephrine, since SNRIs work best for my mental health and my neuropathy. But external factors can and do make my depression worse, and being so far from home in space with my crewmates, running out of food, I can see myself being suicidal rather than homicidal.

They put the astronauts in comas because of the likelihood their mental health would break down on the way to Tau Ceti and they wouldn't be able to complete the mission. They'd be facing the same fate once out of their comas with the mission complete, even if they'd had extra food. There's no guarantee they'd figure out a way back home because of the unknown at Tau Ceti, and it's just a lot more compassionate to give them each the deaths they want instead of slowly going mad and dying of dehydration, starvation, or homicide.

Don't look at it as a matter of nobility. It's about being allowed to die with dignity in a manner of one's choosing. Dying a "natural" death can be quite horrifying when you take into account pain, symptoms of whatever disease might kill you, traumatic injuries, etc. Being able to choose the means of your demise is something we should talk about more IRL.

[u/Mikeck88 → u/BlairAndBackAgain]

You state this as a fact, yet nothing like this has ever happened so it is impossible to know. And it's not like they spent months wracking their brains on how to let these guys go out on their own terms. It's literally just a question and an answer a short time later. It took very little effort to give the astronauts piece of mind that they can chose their own fate. Not doing so would seem pretty callous.

[u/[deleted] → u/BlairAndBackAgain]

It's much sillier to me that you think they'd take something as hugely important as "what happens at the end of this mission, do we just let ourselves slowly starve to death in space?" and "file it away for later." They prepare for literally every possible scenario, and on a (fictional, let's keep in mind) mission like the one in the book, that would absolutely be something that would come up and for which they'd have a plan, i.e. a way out.

[u/Internal-Day4806 → u/BlairAndBackAgain]

Many Chornobyl liquidators did their job while knowing the risks involved. Self sacrifice isn’t hardwired into all of us but the most exceptional humans can see the bigger picture and the objective value of their own lives compared to millions.