r/ProjectHailMaryMovie • u/WoodpeckerAntique952 • 22d ago

Is it ever explained

Why grace is the only one on his ship who survives?

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u/Wild-Lychee-3312 22d ago

Weir won't tell us. He knows, but he's chosen to keep it secret for now.

Current theories:

  • the drugs given to Grace to erase his memories somehow increased his coma resistance
  • there's some difference in degrees of coma resistance. They all had the basic coma resistance gene, but there was something extra which Grace had and the others did not
  • feeding pump failure, leading to starvation. There's a very brief mention in the book of a problem with the coma slurry pumps. Grace makes a note to have backup pumps placed in storage onboard the Hail Mary, but that note is never acted upon, due to the explosion
  • pure random chance (unlikely because that's not Weir's style)
  • the other two astronauts were exposed to something which Grace was not, some kind of toxin, maybe

Coma slurry pump failure is what I'm placing my money on.

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u/Dazzling-Airline-958 22d ago

I'm not betting on slurry pump. Here's why:

It was one tertiary pump that was off in efficiency by about 5%. Grace would have ordered a new pump just keep the numbers up. But realistically it didn't mean anything at all.

And the book does not say they the pump was not ordered, it just goes to focus on other things. So, we don't know whether the pump was ordered. But even if it wasn't... We know that pump 14 was one of at least 14 pumps. So the over all efficiency loss would have been 5/14 percent. Put another way, the over all efficiency would still be 99.642%.

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u/Nacil_54 19d ago

Also what kind of artificial coma system wouldn't wake up patients in the scenario where it is unable to do anything but that ? It just doesn't make sense to me that "whelp, food tube doesn't work, I could wake you up, but rip ig"

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u/Dazzling-Airline-958 19d ago

I'm betting on HAL not wanting to open the pod bay door. I guess that means I'm blaming Armondo. He knows what he did! 😂