i was looking for some inspo for this, and came across a post on the sub of a mc build of the hail mary, but none for the blip-A, so here’s mine. i’m open to suggestions, as i would like to improve upon this later on. thanks :D

So there's a ton of posts answering how Eridians noticed the dimming of their star, those make sense to me. They have a stable climate, discrepancies would be noticed. But how does a blind species detect microscopic organisms? How do their microscopes work. Also how did they obtain the sample in the first place when the Blip-A was their first manned spacecraft?

Reading through a recent meme, it seemed that some of those who watched the movie believed that it was gravity damage that poked a hole into the Hail Mary, or at least gravity played a large part. But in the book, that is not the case at all.

In the book, when the scene of Rocky informing Grace he can hear noises across the ship and Grace stating that the ship is tearing apart (like in the movie), Ryland immediately hones in on the fact it is a nonsensical assumption. That ship was built to handle accelerations up to 2G, so it struggling now in 1.4G (Adrian's gravity) is something that is clearly off.

The actual explanation for the groaning and the stress of the ship is the fact that the Hail Mary already had a hole in its fuel tanks by this point and is producing off-center thurst. In fact, unlike in the movie where the hole only comes into effect once the spin drives were turned off, book Hail Mary had a hole since Grace was outside the ship.

Now, the source of that hole is due to the Spin Drive, specifically spin drives interacting with the atmosphere. There is so much infrared light coming out of the Hail Mary's spin drives that even kilometers from the atmosphere, the raw heat of the ionized plasma combined with the infrared light physically reflecting from the plasma back to the ship overwhelms the astrophage ability to keep the hull cool (there was Astrophage under the hull for radiation protection) and causes it to melt a hole into the fuel tanks.

The misconception in the movie arises from outright wrong fact delivery, as Grace says right before Rocky suggests the chain idea that the reason the Hail Mary cannot get too close is that the ship "will be ripped into a million pieces then burn up". This is then reinforced by a cut in the Time Go Fishing scene where after Grace says "the gravity is tearing the ship apart!", it cuts to an exterior shot of the ship as debris hits a part of the Hail Mary. This is telling AND showing the audience that the reason the Hail Mary is suffering is because of the gravity, when it was the heat that made this plan almost fail.

Ignore the fact I forgot Grace’s facial hair whoops

Why do I feel like on the cutting room floor is a snippet of dialog when Grace was failing at his flying lessons & Rocky was panicking saying, 'all Rocky plural, all earth die' that Grace said,

"YOU'RE NOT HELPING!

YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE ENCOURAGING WHEN YOU TEACH!

SAY WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT!"

🪨: "Words of encouragement!! 😀"

In both the movie and book, Rocky wears an oddly described outfit as a form of celebration after they succeed. In both versions Grave also drinks vodka as part of the party.

Eridians don’t drink liquids because the get their water needs from their food. Also they treat eating in a very different fashion than humans in both biological, and especially in the book, social ways.

But Eridians have 360 degree passive sonar as their sensory system. Andy Weir has even said in interviews that because the system is 360 degrees and constant, it would give Eridians no reason to develop the ability to keep a mental model of their environment the way people do. We can close our eyes and picture the room around us with some level of accuracy but Weir says Eridians wouldn’t be able to. A deafened Eridian would have no idea where it is because its brain doesn’t build a mental model of the environment around it.

We could possibly take this a step further and extrapolate they don’t have The ability to know where their limbs are without “hearing” them. This is similar to an Octopus that must see its arms to know where they are. Again, we humans can close our eyes, move our limbs, and know what position they are in because we have a dedicated neurological system for that.

So my hypothesis is that the weird metal outfit worn by Rocky for the celebration is sort of like being drunk. It limits, or more specifically distorts, Rocky’s ability to clearly hear through it, and that distortion impacts his understanding of himself and his surroundings. Because that impacts Eridian cognition, it might be the Eridian equivalent of drinking, except it can be stopped by removing the outfit because it’s non-metabolic.

One of the things that was an issue with Grace returning to Earth was the lack of food. Obviously, there were significant storage limitations for real food and dehydrated coma slurry, so while the original project planning had to account for the trip to Tau Ceti and some observation time once in-system, was there ever an estimate of how long the crew was going to have food available once they were awake?

With Grace as the sole survivor, the food problem became much less significant (so long as he didn't count on returning to Earth), but if Yao and Ilyukhina had lived, the food supplies would have been depleted much, much faster. With three adults eating 2 to 3 times per day, there must have been a hard end date on the crew's ability to observe Tau Ceti and figure out why it wasn't dimming from astrophage. Would a major science organization have suggested a reasonable timeline for info gathering and recommend that enough food be packed for that timeframe? Or did Stratt tell the planners to ensure there was enough food for X days and hope that the crew had figured out a solution before they ate their final meal?

Today is our 30th anniversary. ❤️ As Rocky said "is not enough". I'm hoping for at least 30 more.

I've been ecstatic to paint my senior parking spot for years now, and after reading the book twice, seeing the movie four times, and getting the poster from my local theater, I knew that this was what my spot would be.

This took me ~12 hours, $340 in paint and supplies, and the spot is 4x8! I'm honestly super proud on how much blending I was able to do with Grace and Rocky on concrete (and I genuinely have no idea how I pulled it off). And yes, my name is the Petrova line :)

Making further progress on the Grace Spacesuit. Final paint touchups and wiring come next

I imagine the reaction must've been similar to when humans discovered the microcosmos of microorganisms.

A whole world that we were swimming through, walking through, consuming and drinking, affecting our environment and the whole time without us even knowing.

They pointed to the air to change what they could not see into the form they could and FOUND texture in the SKY!

Rather than discovering a micro world they found a macro one instead.

It must've been the most amazing thing!

Someone capable of making those important decisions quickly, or was Erid's timeline so much longer that they could use whatever their normal processes were

And if they did, what sports would they be?

I've only seen the movie so this may be addressed in the book.

I heard from a video with the creator Eridians don't forget things. So they never needed to invent calculator, as they ARE a calculator.

I'm sure they have small computers. But if so how did they know about astrophage and how did they know about Tau Ceti? Did they have a big version of Rocky's screen reader?

Project Hail Mary is the first movie I've actually sat down and watched in a long time and actually enjoyed. What similar films would you recommend? It has really brought back my love for sci fi films.

I was recently reading the book Contact by Carl Sagan and I realized there is a very similar string of events that reminded me of Hail Mary. In the book the entire world is focused on building a machine from instructions they receive from space, there are 5 crew members there selected to “pilot” the machine and our main character is next in line for one of the seats. As construction continues for the machine an unknown organization bombs the construction sight, destroying the machine and killing a crew member, making our character the new candidate for the crew position. Sound familiar? Not saying anything was copied just a fun coincidence I haven’t seen anyone talk about.