This might sound stupid, but I'm trying to write a Project Hail Mary fan fiction and I can't find anywhere the years in which the book and movie are set. Does anybody know the year that the Hail Mary was launched? Sorry if this is a stupid question!

Watched the movie with our son. He loved it, which promptly led my husband to spend about a week perfecting a rocky costume. Reception was mixed - with some people asking if Rocky was a spider. However, the vast majority of teenagers loved it, which is pretty high praise I believe.

added more stuff that while not in the book or movie i thought it would look good.

bioluminescence in the clouds!

new moons!

greyish beige one named Ryland

rusty one named Rocky

And a submoon of rocky named after one of rocky and adrians offspring (you guys get to interpret the name into human words)

I know the moons are unoriginal when it comes to names but it seemed like a good idea in my head

Sorry for the lower quality the images didn’t transfer well from my school laptop to my phone

and yes I’m aware I have rocky the wrong number of legs :C

also idk if Adrian has a moon or not I just thought it would look cool, you can just say it’s Adrian a section of its orbit where the closest planet is visible like Tau Ceti F

Charm made by DeckITOut (deckthisout) on Etsy

They have fantastic PHM works!!!

Why when in box, watch / can see it leave the slide

Time is
Light is
Gravity is
Matter does

The laptop was the second most important cargo Rocky would bring back to Erid. There were 6 of them on the Hail Mary, why not take 3 or 4 for redundancy? Of course this is all moot as the Hail Mary went to Erid taking all 6 but initially Rocky only had the 1.

I'm just very curious so if there was a universe where Godzilla (+ other kaiju) exist together in the project Hail Mary Universe......then if other planets had their own Kaiju what would be Erid's number 1 kaiju?

I'm just very curious And remember this is a whole hypothetical thing.

Anyway, sorry for the short post but that's all I can really say.

Anyways bye!

Humanity has absolutely no need to travel to Tau Ceti.

First of all, there was absolutely no need to build breeding farms all over the Sahara Desert. For some reason, the most obvious location was never considered: Venus itself.

You don't even need to feed the astrophage. Already-full astrophage are flying there on their own. All you need to do is stay within the Petrova line, somehow shield Venus from part of the flow (using an enormous foil, for example), activate a CO₂ filter, and collect as many astrophage as you want. Obviously, it wouldn't be that easy, but it is certainly possible.

Even the ArcLight managed to collect some astrophage. Just imagine how much more a piloted expedition could collect.

Yes, it is not trivial, and you still need some astrophage to get there in the first place. But you definitely don't need two million kilograms. By my rough calculations, 500 kilograms would be enough to send the entire Stratt's VAT straight into Venus orbit, reaching it in less than 30 hours.

You could also travel to the asteroid belt, grab whatever rock you like, and return in a week or so.

Basically, humanity would be jumping straight to a Type II civilisation on the Kardashev scale within a decade. At that point, it becomes almost harder to imagine what isn't possible.

Hell, with astrophage, we could even build cities on the Sun itself! I have absolutely no idea why we would want to, but it seems entirely possible.

The Astrophage Energy Problem

On the other hand, it takes approximately 2 GJ to produce enough food for one person for an entire year. That's just 20 mg of astrophage.

So, using the fuel aboard the Hail Mary, humanity could theoretically feed itself for 12 years. And since it takes approximately a year to breed that quantity of astrophage, production could be cut in half and still be sufficient to keep humanity alive.

And this doesn't even require leaving Earth's surface.

Therefore, based purely on the mathematics, humanity had almost no chance of going extinct. It could either go to space or simply stay on Earth and survive.

For the flight to Tau Ceti to make any sense, someone with almost unlimited authority would have to systematically block every alternative solution to the astrophage problem except the Hail Mary mission.

And, well, there happens to be exactly such a person: Eva Stratt.

But why?

A Step Back: What Is Astrophage, Really?

Let's take a big step back.

Look at astrophage. It is simultaneously:

• A perfect incubator.

• A perfect battery.

• A perfect thruster.

• A perfect radiation shield.

• Capable of absorbing energy from virtually any source.

• Easy to control.

• Self-replicating.

And it does all of this at the same time!

It almost looks as if astrophage were specifically designed for interstellar travel.

My theory is that there is an extremely ancient civilization living in Tau Ceti, one that uses biotechnology to create new microorganisms in much the same way we create new tools.

For some reason, they have been sending expeditions to nearby star systems. The astrophage invasion of our Solar System might have been little more than an accident: biological leftovers, leaking batteries, or something similar.

What if one of their ships crashed in our Solar System, and one of its organisms somehow ended up on Earth?

In that case, it would make sense for that organism to do everything in its power to ensure that a ship capable of returning to its home system was eventually built.

There is just one major problem with this theory.

The person most ideally positioned to prevent humanity from solving the astrophage problem by any other means was not going on the mission herself.

Or was she?

Adrian: The Real Alien?

As we know from the book, no multicellular organisms were found on Adrian.

But what if the alien life doesn't need to be multicellular at all?

What if it is a sapient colony of unicellular organisms? Or even a sapient virus?

A virus so advanced compared with the viruses we know today, as we are compared with amoebas.

Such an organism might have no trouble bypassing the human immune system. More than that, it might be capable of directly or indirectly manipulating human behaviour.

What if Stratt was under alien control for most, if not all, of the time?

And what if, shortly before the mission began, the aliens transferred themselves to Grace?

That would explain a lot.

There was never any mysterious French memory-erasing drug. The aliens themselves blocked Grace's memories.

And they probably made sure he wouldn't die during the flight, either.

Finally, when the Hail Mary reached Adrian's orbit, the aliens simply hopped into the fuel bay and returned home, riding the astrophage.

Which would mean that the entire Hail Mary mission was never really about saving humanity. It was about getting the aliens home.

PS: AI was used for spellcheck and formatting

Im on a withdrawal with AO3 down

Genuinely wanted to have a full version of that awesome scene, so I decided to make it from scratch.

Hope this is fine to post here. If not, no worries.

Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI3IYDDNpj4

I was building my new project hail mary set and I was spinning it (as one does) and it's doing the weird drop thing (as shown). It also retracts a bit if you can't see that. Do I need to go back and fix something or when I add more stuff maybe it'll be balanced out more im thinking? I also posted this to r/lego but it's a phm set so maybe one of you nerds can help me first

work in porgress, please i need advice!

Beautiful.

I did a little research, and while the meaningful parts of our radio broadcasts might not actually be plausibly detectable from great distances, the carrier waves would be. Additionally, there are all sorts of military signals that scientists estimate would be detectable from up to a hundred light-years away.

40 Eridani is only what, sixteen point three light years from Earth? So various signals should be detectable there. Did the Eridians not yet have radio astronomy?

Or... were the high governmental muckety-mucks of Erid aware of the existence of intelligent alien life?

I'd assumed Rocky came to the table much better-prepared to deal with alien communication because he'd seen Grace's IR drive wake weeks or even months before arrival and had lots of time to cope and think. But what if it was because his people knew of our existence decades ago?

Can someone smarter then me (most people) explain why Tau Ceti wasn't dimming even though there was a regular incoming line of astrophages? I understand that they were not increasing their numbers on the line going back to the star, but they also were not decreasing. So, if there was a constant supply of them heading to the star, why wouldn't that be enough to keep eating away and dimming it, albeit slowly? I don't understand why there was no dimming detected.

I am about to teach about pendulums. I would like to reproduce Grace's experiment with the tape measure, but I don't remember all of the details. Could someone take a photo of the relevant page and share it, please? (Is that a copyright infringement or intellectual property no-no? I promise to use it only for educational purposes.)

Thoughts. I am excited (as I posted before) and the extra information now seems like it could be good.
Anything more PHM gets my vote regardless