@astrodicticum Du hattest ja bei der Folge "DAS UNIVERSUM" wo ihr den Film "Project Hail Mary" besprochen hattet, gefragt ob es wen gibt, der das Buch nach dem Film gelesen hat.
Ich bin gerade mit dem Buch fertig geworden. Muss sagen, im Film konnte ich gut folgen. Es gab nur vereinzelt Punkt, zB wie sie die Astrophagen am Planeten sammeln wollten, war mir nicht klar, wie die Sammelbox funktioniert.
Beim Lesen des Buches sind mir dann erst weitere Punkte aufgefallen, wie komplex alles ist. Die wissenschaftlichen Experimente und Überlegungen waren sehr spannend zu lesen. Das Buch kann ich jedenfalls empfehlen, auch wenn man den Film gesehen hat.
Ich habe es als englisches Ebook auf meinem eBook Reader gelesen. Ich habe allerdings ein paar Wochen gebraucht, weil die Motivation nicht so hoch war, weil ich ja das Ende durch den Film kannte. Aber jetzt war ich mehr motiviert, weil ich als nächstes das Science Buster Buch "Aus - DIE WISSENSCHAFT VOM ENDE" lesen möchte.

#hailmary #buchtipp

Media Diet #2

https://niklasbarning.de/2026/06/01/media-diet-2/

Die stellare Karte aus Project Hail Mary basierend auf den Daten der ESA Gaia-Mission (Gaia DR3)

Zitat des Erstellenden:
„[…] Using the GAIA DR3 database of over 1.8 billion stars I recreated the in-ship starmap from Project Hail Mary. I've been obsessed with this book/ movie […]“

Link:
https://valhovey.github.io/gaia-mary/

Credit:
- valance photography / Instagram
- ESA / Gaia DR3

#HailMary #Astronaut #Space #Weltraum #Karte #Map #Astronomie #Astronomy

The “Project Hail Mary” Plot Needs Much More Than a “Hail Mary”

Project Hail Mary is a 2021 science fiction novel by American writer Andy Weir. It centers on school teacher and former biologist Ryland Grace, who wakes up on a spacecraft headed out into interstellar space on a special mission to save all life on planet Earth.

I watched the movie of the same name (which premiered in London on March 9, 2026). I found it quite entertaining, but of course it is pure fiction. There is very little correct science in the story line. Though the film dealt properly with local gravity in the spacecraft, which is often ignored in scifi films. Down below I give my further thoughts on the “science”.

The plot of Andy Weir’s story involves the local region of space around our solar system being “infected” with some sort of contagion. There are some bacteria-like creatures called “astrophage”, which appear as black dots, that can live on the Sun’s surface consuming its energy, causing its output to be blocked, and within 30 years their dimming effect, if not stopped, would kill the Earth due to lack of sunlight and massive global cooling. The astrophage are doing the same to thousands of stars in the vicinity of our solar system, except for one nearby star, Tau Ceti. To find out why is the mission.

The following is a good summary of the plot from Wikipedia.

In 2032, Ryland Grace awakens from an induced coma on an interstellar spacecraft. Initially erratic and amnesic, Grace learns that he is the sole survivor of the three-person crew on a spaceship light-years from Earth, which embarked on its journey to the Tau Ceti system over ten years earlier.

Throughout various flashbacks, Grace remembers that he is an American middle school science teacher and former molecular biologist. Years ago, scientists observe an infrared line, named the “Petrova Line”, forming from the Sun to Venus. They discover a microorganism, termed “astrophage”, proliferating on the Sun’s surface, causing it to dim, and predict it will cause catastrophic global cooling within 30 years; Head of the Petrova Taskforce, Eva Stratt, recruits Grace and other scientists to study it.

Grace discovers that astrophages are single-celled organisms impenetrable to electromagnetic radiation. The astrophage breeds on Venus, using the planet’s atmospheric carbon dioxide and energy and hydrogen from the Sun. The Petrova line is created by astrophage propulsive emissions as they migrate between the Sun and Venus. Their emissions can be used to construct an incredibly efficient spacecraft engine. The astrophages have infected other stars within Earth’s solar neighborhood; Stratt discloses Project Hail Mary, an international effort to send a crew to Tau Ceti, the only undimmed nearby star, to investigate. It is a suicide mission; the Hail Mary spacecraft can carry only enough astrophage fuel for a one-way trip, but the crew’s research will be sent back to Earth via probes.

In the present, as Grace approaches Tau Ceti, an alien spacecraft docks with the Hail Mary. It is made of a solid material composed mainly of xenon, which Grace dubs “xenonite”. The ship’s pilot is a rock-like, five-legged, crab-like alien from a planet in the 40 Eridani A system; Grace calls the alien “Rocky”. He deduces that Eridians “see” via echolocation, and creates a machine translation system to interpret Rocky’s musical chords-like speech. Rocky is a mechanical engineer and also the sole survivor of a mission to stop the astrophage. Neither can survive in the other’s atmosphere, so Rocky enters Hail Mary using a small, pressurized ball of xenonite as a space suit. As they learn to work together, the two develop a genuine friendship.

Following Tau Ceti’s Petrova line, Grace and Rocky discover that the planet Tau Ceti e, which Grace names “Adrian”, harbors an organism (“Taumoeba”) that preys on the astrophages, controlling their population. After learning that Grace cannot return home, Rocky offers enough astrophage to refuel the Hail Mary.

Grace continues to remember more and flash back to the origins of his mission: when an astrophage explosion kills the original crew’s scientist and his backup, with no time to train a replacement, Stratt asks Grace to take his place. When he refuses on the basis that he is untrained, Stratt has him drugged and put aboard the ship. Grace struggles to come to terms that he was not brave enough to volunteer for the journey.

While gathering the organism from Adrian’s upper atmosphere, a fuel leak causes an uncontrollable spin that renders Grace unconscious. Rocky breaks his spacesuit and saves Grace, but is severely injured. While Rocky recovers in hibernation, Grace learns how to selectively breed Taumoeba to survive in Venus’s atmosphere. Rocky revives, and the two friends depart for their home planets.

En route to Earth, Grace discovers that the organisms have evolved to pass through their xenonite containers and are eating Hail Mary‘s astrophage fuel. Grace repairs the problem on his ship but realizes that Rocky’s ship is made entirely of xenonite, which would allow the Taumoeba to consume all his fuel, stranding him and dooming his world. Grace chooses to save Rocky and the Eridians rather than return home, sending the Taumoeba and his research to Earth via the probes.

Stratt receives the probes, allowing humanity to stop the astrophage. On the Eridians’ planet, Grace lives in an artificial biodome. Rocky tells him that Eridian scientists have finished preparing Hail Mary for its return to Earth, and Grace considers whether to return. While contemplating the news, Grace begins another day of teaching science to Eridian children.

The Eridian’s spacecraft and everything in it seems to be made of solid Xenon. Rocky the surviving Eridian creature offers Grace some toylike icons as communication tools on first contact. Grace determines that they are made of solid Xenon, called Xenonite.

See the portion of the Periodic Table below that shows the Noble gas group (number 18) which Xenon belongs to. It is a group of inert (unreactive) gases, which includes Helium, Neon, Argon and Krypton.

To form Xenon into a solid at standard atmospheric pressure (1 atm), which is what was shown in the story, an ambient temperature is required below its normal melting point of -112 °C. But that was not the temperature inside the spacecraft

Under high pressure, Xenon undergoes structural phase transitions while remaining solid. It transforms from a face-centered cubic (fcc) to a hexagonal close-packed (hcp) crystal structure under increased pressure. At about 50 GPa, it becomes a compact solid that melts at 3000 °C, significantly higher than its ambient melting point. Above 140–155 GPa, solid Xenon becomes metallic.

Some small figurines that the alien Rocky made were apparently of solid metallic Xenon.

The suggestion in the film was that Rocky lives in an atmosphere containing Ammonia gas but it is at at least 10 times the pressure of Grace’s atmosphere of 100 kPa, therefore 1 MPa. That is way less than the needed 50 GPa to form it into a sold at standard temperature. (1 GPa = 1,000 MPa).

Before discussing why this might be in the plot, I suggest the author could have chosen Krypton instead. It also is a noble unreactive gas at standard temperature and pressure. It forms a solid at 5 GPa, 10 times lower pressure than Xenon. But still that is 50,000 times higher pressure than the standard 1 atmosphere pressure inside Grace’s spacecraft.

The alien Rocky made his Xenonite from pure Xenon. Therefore he could have perhaps made Kryptonite from pure Krypton at 10 times lower pressure. The science-fiction author could have alluded to the strange properties of Kryptonite from the planet Krypton in the superman stories.

Regardless of the impossibility of solid Xenon at 1 atmosphere pressure and normal room temperature as routinely illustrated in the story I believe it fits with the authors evolutionary worldview.

The alien creatures evolved on a planet in the star system 40 Eridani A where the suggestion is that the ambient pressure is much higher than Earth. The “life-forms” are not Carbon-based like with Earth biology, which breath Oxygen to form Carbon Dioxide.

Instead the Eridian creatures metabolize Ammonia gas, a reference to the infamous Miller-Urey experiment (specifically mentioned in the plot), where Hydrogen, Ammonia and Methane were combined in a spark chamber to form basic amino acids, and that these allegedly formed the biomolecules of life on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago.

Of course it is all nonsense, because though the amino acids were detected in the end products of the Miller-Urey experiment, more than 50% of those products comprised of a thick heavy tar which makes life impossible. Not to mention the improbability of forming complex informational coding in DNA molecules from a random collection of amino acids, especially in a violent atmosphere of lightning strikes that would destroy the fragile putative molecules. See the discussion on the Miller-Urey experiment here.

The Eridian creatures’ bodies are made of rock-like silicates. This is an allusion to life evolving not with Carbon to form body structures but with Silicon or Silicates. See Silicon Based Bugs and The Essential Role of Carbon in Life’s Chemistry.

The title of the story, and the name of the Earth-built spacecraft, is “Hail Mary”. Though the origin of the expression is originally from a Roman Catholic prayer, in Latin Ave Maria, it is commonly used in a sports context.

In American football, a Hail Mary is a long forward pass thrown into or near the end zone, typically used as a last-ditch effort in the final seconds of a game when the chance of completion is low. The term metaphorically describes any desperate, low-probability attempt to achieve success. That is how the protagonists saw the trip to Tau Ceti in the story.

But the reality is that the American football Hail Mary is a dead certainty compared to the impossibility of life evolving elsewhere in the universe with the added impossibility of it developing in the first place based on silicates and Ammonia gas. So the “Project Hail Mary” story needs a lot more than a “Hail Mary”.

It needs a supernatural Creator who created life on Earth, not billions of years ago but less than 10,000 years ago. Life has never been found anywhere else in the universe. Even the atheists have to agree with that as much as it pains them.

And the fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. The odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row.

Professor Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these odds. He wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology . . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

Theoretical physicist and atheist evolutionist professor Dr. Paul Davies has said that “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor and theistic evolutionist Dr. John Lennox has said “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator . . . gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”

As a story “Project Hail Mary” is new and fascinating. But as science it is fundamentally flawed. Life is assumed to have evolved along a line different to the biochemistry we find on Earth. But that is the problem. Life is a true miracle and just hoping it evolved elsewhere in the universe without the Creator is no answer.

Related Reading

• Life in the Universe is the Ultimate Miracle
• Alien Life on the Exoplanet K2-18b is Already Disputed by Scientists
• Origin of Life | Coded Information from Space?
• Is Earth Unique? The Case Against Extra-Terrestrial Life
• The Cosmos Might Be Mostly Devoid of Life
• Life on Earth 2.0—Really?
• Review of Sean Carroll’s book The Big Picture (parts 1 – 11 combined in single PDF)

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13-May-2026
The #cinema effect: Turning films into a gateway to #science
A new JCOM paper shows how the “Science & Cinema” format uses film clips and expert discussion to spark public reflection on climate change, scientific accuracy and the boundary between fiction and reality.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1127521

#scienceCommunication #publicUnderstanding #HailMary #scienceFiction #film

#hailmary

Bestes Futter für die Seele

Friends,

I can tell you this happened:

Apr 26 10:20:39 skapet sshd-session[32158]: Failed password for invalid user root/1234567 from 94.227.227.108 port 40762 ssh2

#ssh #passwordgropers #passwordguessers #hailmarycloud #cybercrime

(yes, echoes of the #hailmary cloud https://nxdomain.no/~peter/hailmary_lessons_learned.html )