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

Happy big budget sci-fi movie release day to all who celebrate.

“If we do nothing, everything on a planet will go extinct, including us.”

Projects Hail Mary comes out this weekend. You may have seen ads of a days to Ryan Gosling in a space suit, or maybe you know the book that it's based on. Here's the premise. The microbial alien species is dimming the sun, and the earth is going to turn into a

frozen, lifeless tundra, and less someone figure something out and quick. The solution? Put failed molecular biologist and middle school teacher, Rylan Grace, on the case. I put the knot and astronaut.

I've never done anything.

I've never done a space. Well, 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, Erin, who is very cute despite having no face and looking like a pile of rocks. It is super fun to see a scientist and a alien sidekick, try to save the world. 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 Weer, an 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, 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?”

Ha, 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 of scenes in the book that aren't in the movie that I'm like, I would have

only been a couple of minutes. It could have added it, 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, yeah, you know, he'd add up and stuff like that, and-- Ryan Gosling. Yes, Ryan Gosling. Yeah, and so a lot of the, a lot of the takes that are in the movie are things that he just adlibbed and stuff like that because he came up with 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 stuff like that, 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

adlibbed, you know, the girl's street, man, she could play anything. He just adlibbed that.

“That was a great line, actually, I remember that.”

So yeah, and then we went and asked the real girl's street 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 out and script a lot, so I'd go up and whisper the director as I'm like, okay, he said, he said, milligrams, 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 intern trip

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.

I'm curious, when you see a scientist portrayed that way, 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 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 in 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."

You're on earth? Exactly, no, Andy's with it, you know, I just remind them, "You're 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 there more of us out there? And I'll go ahead and own 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 rooted killed 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.

“Andy, do you identify with Ryland as the outsider or not anymore? Are you too big now?”

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. Really? Yeah, Mark is Mark Wattney 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 Basharra from Artemis, also known as Andy Ware'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. So I've 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

their 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 theories. And he would get 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.

“He's afraid. And I think feeling overwhelmed and afraid, well, that's something we all”

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, I mean, and he loves that 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.

Little Richard, and we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through

“the BBC's vast archives. Discovering for going interviews that change exactly how we see”

these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I mean, mental geochie and chai right, and this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives wherever you get your podcasts. 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 call an Isis 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 space

craft. I want us to have that now. But it's way beyond our technology to make right now. It's a bit too much dispensative to have some mad scientists invented. I went through a phase where I'm like, maybe they find a crash alien spaceship, but then it's like, okay, then the other stuff on the spaceship would probably be even more interesting than the fuel. I don't want to focus on that. Then I thought, well, 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 in a little absorbent and start turning that into mass and something like that. And then I said, absorbing energy and making more of yourself sounds like

“life. 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 single 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 is an 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 that 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 nerdyest possible starting point. It's delightful. Thank you. I almost so you start with like, I want this science thing. How do I make the science thing happen in a story? Anyways, I came with astrophage and then I thought, like, oh, okay, initially I thought, okay, humanity gets a hold 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 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 like a few seconds later, I'm like, okay, wait,

erase everything else. That's the story. And so there we have it. That's amazing. Michael,

as a, 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're essentially, to me, and 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 Hellmarry. You know, my opinion, the star of the show, I'm sorry, Ryan is Rocky. It becomes Ryan, Ryan's buddy. Rocky is extremely charismatic. I think, and once they solve the sort of language barrier

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 and went down there in Rocky's an iridian. Rocky is an iridian. Yeah. 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 was all just blobs. So it was kind of neat as when I saw when they were shooting it. I went to the creature shop and saw the model and then saw the set 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, 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 it a language? Like if I don't do what Ryland does, would it be consistent? I don't think so. I was so disappointed. 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 airblatters that push across vocal cords back and forth to make sounds. They have

five of them because everything is like pentasymetrical in irradiant biology because I arbitrarily decided it would be. And so they can make cords. 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 Rocky's have a very different geology and therefore environment that evolution we need to play with and navigate through to generate these, you know,

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, 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, fifold 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 iridian in a human air atmosphere, he'll die. If you go to human and iridians atmosphere, he'll die. Like, they're just completely incompatible. And

because it always, you know, 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

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, 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 them. 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 the 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, right? They're half to be some. I read the book. It was, 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 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 be laborer the

audience with that explanation or what was the reason for not landing on relativity too much?

But 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. Eridians 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 irradiance know about a

petrovaline? They can't see light. I'm like, we can't see infrared light either. But we knew about our petrovaline. How do you explain that? It's like science technology.

“They, 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, hey, I wrote this to be a scientifically accurate as possible. And then the scientists are like,

really? All right. Okay. Let's go up this gauntlet here and dust it off and let me see what you have had, you know, several giganto hits. What's next? I guess my next giganto hit? I don't know. No, I'm working on my next book now. I'm not talking details publicly, but I can tell you 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 my head for quite a while. And I've been wanting to work on that. So 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 877-4-Sy-fry. We love hearing from you. We'll catch you next time. I'm Florlik Tman.