Project Hail Mary (novel by Andy Weir)

Cafe Society
1

I didn’t see a previous thread on this, but over the weekend I re-read Project Hail Mary, a 2021 novel by Andy Weir (author of The Martian).

I read it for the first time about a year ago, and thought it was good enough for a re-read. It has a lot that I liked from The Martian, especially the detailed problem-solving by the protagonist. The narrative framing was also very clever with the main story interspersed with relevant flashbacks. And I thought it was neat that both stories were equally interesting: the real-time story as well as the gradually revealed backstory.

I like to think that the world’s governments could indeed come together in a bid to save humanity. As Samuel Johnson put it, “…when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

One question did occur to me this time:

The astrophage obviously hold a tremendous amount of energy. Where does that energy go when they are consumed by the natural predator that Ryland Grace discovers (the “Taumoeba”)?

Unless I missed it I don’t recall ever seeing an explanation or even any discussion for this.

The best explanation I can surmise is that the taumoeba also convert the energy into mass (i.e. the mass of the taumoeba themselves).

2

This book really struck me as The Martian 2, in the sense of it being another book about sciencing the shit out of a series of dangerous problems. (though clever and new problems) Plus, the protagonist is pretty juvenile in his reactions. Which is okay overall, just not anything I’d recommend.

Also, oof, the country/region stereotyping….

3

I seem to remember the problem the OP is looking for being addressed, but can’t remember the answer off the top of my head.

For those looking for opinions as to whether or not to read it, I’m with Maserschmidt. The main character is the Mariest of Sues I’ve ever read. I don’t care how much daily contact you have with your new alien buddy - you’re not going to just pick up their language.

4

I really liked it though clearly Weir is still developing as a writer (and clearly as a human being - his protagonists are clearly thinly veiled versions of himself).

Weir seems to have his milieu, which is “perhaps unrealistically capable, sarcastic geek millions of miles from the nearest human being science-ing the hell out of the situation just to survive”.

5

Loved this book. I don’t remember how he explained what you spoilered.

6

Rocky was a great character - but wholly unrealistic. Basically Weir wrote him as little more than a human with an alien language. And of course there were cute little aliens in a coassroom for the teacher to teach…

Still, it’s a fast, fun read. Just don’t take it too seriously.

7

I’m a big Weir fan but this novel didn’t work for me. It seemed too implausible for me to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the story. I kept thinking “This is only happening because the author wrote it that way.” Which I realize is true for every work of fiction - but you’re not supposed to be thinking that while reading it.

8

Jazz, in Artemis, is highly capable and sarcastic, with the same problem-solving habit, but she doesn’t have the inclination to be a geek, and she spends all of her time in the midst of a thousand or so other humans (several of whom are the problems she’s trying to solve).

9

I don’t disagree with any of the comments here, including the ones about the story being unrealistic and juvenile but also a fast, fun read.

My favorite character is probably the project administrator, Eva Stratt. Her character is undoubtedly unrealistic and one-dimensional, but don’t you just wish there was someone like her to take charge in a crisis?

I did find it poignant that she pragmatically half-expected to be put on trial for abuse of power after launch of the Hail Mary.

10

True enough, but I didn’t much like Artemis. Small sample size so far but it seems Weir does better when his protagonist is isolated and a geek.

11

As long as we’re talking about Artemis, I’ve always had a question about something from that book.

If I’m recalling correctly, in the book it said the Artemis colony had an atmosphere that was only twenty percent of the air pressure of Earth’s atmosphere. To compensate for this low amount of atmosphere, they had removed all of the “unnecessary” nitrogen and the air people were breathing was basically pure oxygen.

Is that realistic? Oxygen has some bad chemical reactions, like being corrosive and causing fire. Wouldn’t a pure oxygen atmosphere being a massive hazard? Breathing pure oxygen also causes lung damage and other health problems if it’s done long term.

But I think most of these are based on the assumption that we’re talking about pure oxygen at normal atmospheric pressure - in other words, five times the amount of oxygen than we would encounter naturally. The air in Artemis doesn’t contain more oxygen than the air on Earth; it just isn’t diluted by a large amount of nitrogen. So does that make a difference? Are the hazards of pure oxygen caused by its percentage or its amount?

Another question was about that low air pressure. Putting aside the oxygen issue, what are the long term effects of breathing air at only one fifth normal pressure? Would your lungs atrophy?

Would there be any effect from that lack of nitrogen? I know it’s a neutral gas but I’m wondering if it does something important that I’m unaware of.

Finally, could you maintain such a low pressure pure oxygen atmosphere? A large amount of people were breathing this air. So every time they exhaled they were putting carbon dioxide into the air. Would this build up and make the air unbreathable? Of course this also happens on Earth where plant life reverses the process and puts oxygen back into the atmosphere. Would the same process work in a low pressure atmosphere, assuming they had set up enough plants?

12

This is how the early space missions went. For example, the Apollo missions had ~5 psi in the capsule of nearly pure O2.

The important part is the partial pressure of oxygen in the mix. Pure O2 at 5psi is going to provide similar oxygenation to ~30% O2 at 15 psi, which is about the most humans can really handle safely.

The Apollo astronauts handled this fine for several days.

But you are probably right that the ‘best’ option in terms of long term health is to replicate earth conditions as closely as possible.

As for fire hazard, that is certainly a concern. Cabin/suit pressure and overall atmospheric mix are concerns, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. The lower pressure simplifies some of the engineering but pure oxygen is certainly a fire risk.

And just like scuba diving, astronauts have to do some extra work to purge nitrogen from their system before EVAs (with pure oxygen at low pressure in their suits) or else risk the bends. So rather than a lack of nitrogen, the presence of nitrogen can be problematic in some cases.

It is a concern but possibly a lesser one.

We know people in the Himalayas have lived at lower than sea level pressure (as low as 8-10 psi with lower O2 content) for centuries, so that’s a good sign, but the ultimate test is to expose lots of people to the intended conditions and see what happens. The longest anybody has been in space continuously was just over a year and that was on the ISS where the cabin pressure simulates earth normal.

Yes, and CO2 was one issue for Apollo 13. They had sufficient O2 but needed to rig up a system to filter out CO2 because the mission design did not plan on the LM handling the CO2 for all 3 astronauts for the duration but the scrubbers in the command module weren’t compatible with the ones for the lunar module (D’oh!).

And bringing this around to Weir, it’s also a point in “The Martian” (the novel, less so the movie). Watney’s concerned more about the ability to scrub CO2 if he has to do a lot of EVAs than having sufficient O2.

13

You don’t want to be breathing pure oxygen forever - you want a ‘buffer gas’ like Nitrogen to allow the pressure to be higher while keeping the prtial pressure of O2 down.

Argon is a perfectly good buffer gas, and there is probably a significant amount of argon on the moon - Argon-40 created from the decay of potassium isotopes. There is even some evidence for large sources of Argon underground:

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017JE005352

Weir should have had his people breathing an Argon/Oxygen mix. It would have had the comedic side effect of lowering everyone’s voices.

14

A good point. But the Artemis colony was much more extreme. Normal air pressure at sea level is around 15 psi. The Himalayas drop down to around 8 psi, which is still above half of sea level air pressure. Weir was talking an air pressure of around 3 psi.

And he was talking about a colony where people were born in this environment and grew up in it. I feel (admittedly with no hard evidence) that this would have a bad effect on lung development. I’d speculate that if you moved one of these people to Earth they wouldn’t be able to draw in enough air to keep them alive. (A variation of the old SF trope of Earth’s increased gravity being a handicap for people who grew up on the moon.)

15

Not really… I don’t think, at the time of the novel, that there were any permanent residents who were born there. Jazz herself came up as a baby, but IIRC, she was the record for how young a permanent resident came there, and since her time, regulations had changed to require a minimum age for immigration. That’ll presumably change eventually, if Artemis is to become a self-sufficient community, but it hasn’t yet.

It’s also explicit that Jazz would never be able to visit Earth, though how much of that is due to the gravity and how much due to the air, I don’t know.

16

Okay. I haven’t read the book in a few years and I forgot those details.

But there were men and women who were living in the colony on a more or less permanent basis. How did they avoid people starting families?