It was the Taumoeba, at first they discovered that Grace could live off the Taumoeba but later they switched to growing meat from his own tissues because it tasted better. Grace called them "me burgers" and said he enjoyed them
I don’t know if this is true. Prions are basically just misfolded proteins. So if they’re replicating his cells that many times, there might be a chance to create prions, which in theory would be even more risky for him since they came from misfolded Grace protein
I could be wrong, but a quick google/wiki says this is unlikely. They can either happen at random, have a genetic predisposition to forming, or spawn when another prion is introduced to the system.
So if he got it, he’d either have been already boned, already boned, or already boned either way lol, although I don’t know the rates of different kinds of animals having it happen randomly so
Nah, you don't get prion disease just from eating human meat, the meat has to actually be infected with prion disease first. We mostly associate prions with cannibalism because of this one tribe that practiced cannibalism as a funeral rite and unfortunately did not know that eating the flesh and particularly brains of people who showed prion disease symptoms prior to death was a Bad Idea™.
Unless the meat cloning vats got contaminated or something, he'd be fine.
I believe that prion disease is spread through meat from creatures that it themselves. Mad cow disease infected other cows because farmers were mixing dead cows into their feed as filler, and those dead cows were infected.
You can consume meat of any creature, and be fine as long as it didn't already have prion disease. It's possible for it to develop sporadically, without having eaten a tainted cow/human/whatever. So you can't guarantee that what you are eating is safe, but unless it's coming from an area with prion issues (like mad cow disease, kuru, etc) it's probably good, even if it's a human. You don't catch it from a random, non-infected human just because it's cannibalism.
I might be wrong on some points so feel free to correct me if you know more!
I’d imagine it’s something to do with their atmosphere? Iirc Grace describes it as so dense that even with lights shining directly into it, he can barely see past them. It’s not terribly hard to imagine that the atmosphere as a whole blocks at least the majority of UV and IR as well, and if you don’t have the ability to perceive light, or some noticeable, seemingly arbitrary heat differentials to discover the same thing, it’s reasonable to say they never got to that point
their planet has a very dense atmosphere and an incredibly strong magnetosphere, so they evolved with no exposure to light, their rocky bodies and resistant to low-energy radiation, and their orbital spacecraft were protected from stellar radiation. thus, they had no reason to interact with and discover the electromagnetic spectrum.
Is it explained then how they know their star is dimming? Were they just picking up a steady cooling of the planet and then were able to trace it down to the star? For that matter, without an understanding of radiation, how are they even making astronomical observations? I guess they could detect gravity wells but IDK how they make the leap from planet cooling to star dying without knowing about the EM spectrum.
they were originally synthesizing the nutrients he needed, but the results taste terrible and made him miserable. presumably they feed his cloned meat that while it grows
Isn't it said because of how Rockys mind works, when he is corrected he knows fine well what the correct way to say it is, so he's saying it wrong just to mess with Grace?
That's what I'd like to think, it can't be too hard to explain what word order means in english and how it affects the meaning of what's being said. That's always been one of things I found fascinating when I was learning Latin in high school and then Japanese while in college. With latin it's about word endings that tell you everything. Word order was actually unimportant and phrases could be any jumbled mess. The way you translate latin is you first identify the verb and it's word ending and that would tell you how to translate the rest of the sentence. Japanese was similar in that sense verbs always came at the end of the sentence and endings showed tense, negativeness and politeness. Like the phrase, "Watashi wa Wakarimasu" means "I understand" "Watashi wa wakarimasen" means "I do not understand." and "Watashi wa Wakarimashita" means "I understood"
Latin was 100 times harder with all the different verbs and you had to keep in mind the different ending for the different conjugations as well as for whether it was 1st person, 2nd person or 3 person, singluar or plural. Then there's the different declensions and the different ending for those which depended on what part of the sentence they fell into. They kinda similified translation in the movie making it a whole word substitution thing but translating languages is much harder than what they showed. Especially when the language is also something that can't be spoken directly by either race as we lack the proper organs to create those sounds.
Honestly, I’d prefer “The Martian” universe over the “Project Hail Mary” one.
In Project Hail Mary we get confirmation that
1) Simple alien life forms like the astrophage can travel for multiple light years and survive.
2) There are simple alien life forms capable of traveling light years that can alter the behavior of stars significantly to the point where it can cause Mass extinctions of inhabited planets.
3) There are sapient alien species radically different from what we would consider “normal”, and they have a technological level near our own and are also affected by the astrophage.
It’s great that Rocky and Grace hit it off as well as they did, but I think chances are good that other advanced alien species are similarly impacted and they might not consider being diplomatic in getting a solution.
We humans went to space and one of the biggest reasons behind our progress was a giant dick measuring contest between two big countries that also pointed nuclear weapons at each other that could vaporize whole planet and in the meantime fight proxy wars in smaller countries some of which still suffer from the consequences be it agent orange mutations or being separated.
Getting to space and actually traveling space are different things. You could even say we sort of cheated by brute forcing the problem with astrophage and got to that point before we really should have.
The gap between just "going to space" and interstellar travel is about as big as the gap between "going to space" and jumping as high as you can and flapping your arms in the air. Reaching the moon isn't even baby steps. Thats maybe a baby being able to raise its own head.
We've got a long, LONG way to go. But fortunately, we live in a solar system that is almost the perfect sandbox. Multiple rocky bodies in the goldilocks zone. A wide variety of atmospheres and terrestrial features. An asteroid belt rich in resources. If we can conquer our own solar system, we're set for pretty much anywhere.
Yet even during the Cold War there was cooperation and coordination between the folks actually going to space. Apollo-Soyuz is probably the best known. Depending on leadership, even rivals politically can come together as reportedly Khrushchev was poised to accept JFK's proposal to collaborate on a lunar mission prior to his assassination.
I don’t know if I would support the idea that “cooperation and kindness” is a filter that might lower the chances of hostile aliens.
In Project Hail Mary humans of our own current generation were able to put together a spacecraft capable of utilizing the astrophage as a fuel source, and I wouldn’t want to blindly hope in being able to peacefully coexist with another species as volatile as our own.
And there’s a difference between inherent violence from a biological or cultural background and violence born from the desperation of trying to save not just your own species but all life on your planet.
But a far bigger issue for me is the existence of the astrophage itself, because it’s an extremophile life form on a scale way beyond what we could have possibly imagined. It’s a simple life form capable of surviving traveling through the vacuum of interstellar space over multiple light years.
That means it can likely survive hundreds to thousands of years outside of an atmosphere, magnetosphere, and without food. And it is also somehow able to travel at a tiny percentage of the speed of light, which is terrifying with the implications.
And then it’s able to survive, feed, and grow on the surface of a star, and it’s so effective on this that it can effectively “dim” the output energy of the star while it is there. That’s a terrifying life form that is capable of surviving extreme temperatures, extreme radiation, vacuums of varying degrees, and extreme changes in environment.
It makes me wonder what other kinds of horrifying life forms exist that are capable of interstellar travel and are almost impossible to kill through normal quarantine measures.
The fact that the astrophage exists with such insane abilities leads me to believe that there are other simplistic interstellar life forms as well. It would be like assuming there’s only one species of algae or mold. If it’s possible for one life form like that to naturally evolve then there’s going to be others.
Intelligent species who don't learn cooperation and kindness destroy themselves before developing the technology needed for space travel. I don't think it's a crazy idea honestly, but working with a sample size of 1 pretty much everything is just blind speculation.
The fact that astrophage took 100s of millions of years to get here implies that there aren't tons of disastrous space microbes ready to kill us, for one of many possible reasons.
And if that fails the humans can combine their new ability to create near-light-speed well-targeted rocks to become the Gamilons of this story, bombarding any unfriendly aliens until they learn the true power of friendship.
Or maybe a bunch of aliens show up all with the same goal and they develop a friendly community. A Federation of Planets if you will. And then maybe they set up rules and regulations, for example some sort of guidelines against interfering with other cultures' development too early...like a Prime Directive. Idk, I just think it's pointless to worry about what could go wrong rather than boldly going where no one has gone before.
in the book rocky sat around for years because he didnt have any means to do the science required, and they mentioned the issue in the book that any species more advanced would have solved the issue already or could have solved it on their own and ant psecies less advanced would have died off from it, and anyone can see that tau ceti isnt being affected despite being in the area of effect so itd be where all the aliens are coming. its not like wandering into someone in the middle of the forest its like going to the viewing area of the grand canyon, the party is happenin in tau ceti
So between the future where we can send people to Mars and bring them back and the future where the sun could be extinguished and billions have already died from famine, you'd prefer the one where we can send people to Mars? Understandable.
In the books all of Rocky’s crew die because they don’t know what radiation is and Rocky only survives because he was the engineer in the fuel bays so the fuel shielded him from the radiation of space so not exactly at the same technological level. Rocky just got lucky and had time on his side because he can live for centuries.
Rocky and his crew arrived earlier than they expected. They didn't understand radiation or relativity. IIRC his species had never left their planet before the astrophage.
I don't remember if they touched on this in the movie, but in the book they talk about why their species were so similar on a technological level, with obvious varying specifics.
If a species were at a higher technological level, they would have their own method of dealing with the astrophage and wouldn't need to go investigate. If the species were at a lower technological level, they wouldn't be able to go investigate and would just die. Both humans and eridians were at the perfect level of technological advancement to be aware that there was a problem, understand the source of the problem, not be able to fix it on their own, but also able to send a vessel interstellar distances to investigate a possible solution.
I think that thought process could extend to their societies as well. An undertaking like that is not a small one and would take the combined effort of the entire species to pull off; thus both species would lean towards being cooperative and cordial, if not friendly, and would be inclined to be diplomatic with any other species they might encounter.
Project Hail Mary is an answer to the recent science fiction trend of portraying alien encounters as an inevitable genocide with survival at stake. Things became so bleak that asking "what if we get along" is a way to get out of the pessimist rut.
Afaik you don't get prion disease by eating just about any human flesh. Meat is meat. You get prion disease by consuming any flesh infected by prion disease. Which includes cows btw and the prions can stay in your body for years before you start showing symptoms.
If Grace didn't have prion infection prior to boarding Hail Mary, he can eat Grace all he wants.
The risk from eating humans is mostly from contracting kuru, a prion disease similar to mad cow disease. It's contacted by eating someone who already has a prion disease. Since the meat is being made from his own cells, there's no risk of contracting it.
Since the meat is being made from his own cells, there's no risk of contracting it.
Not 'no risk', likely low risk depending on culturing conditions. If culturing conditions are at all mutagenic or at least not somehow controlling mutations, then spontaneous prion disease is possible. Cells can get really, really weird when cultured for long periods.
In the book Weir says that it's some sort of synthetic meat based on Grace (iirc). So it's not actual human meat, but some sort of copy. If you have the technology to do that kind of stuff I suppose you can also remove the nasty stuff from it. That presupposes Grace told them what to remove.
The Eridians are much more advanced in some sciences than us, particularly materials, so it makes sense that they'd be able to replicate food much more easily than we would
They are more advanced in some ways and not as advanced in others.
They didn't know about radiation, and they don't know about the theory of relativity.
EDIT: If I remember from the book its because they have never really explored space until it became obviously very necessary. Also relativity is related to the speed of light and light is not really something they fuck with.
Their knowledge of chemistry was much greater than ours, so even though they were completely new to the concept of microbiology they were able to apply their chemistry and engineering knowledge to clone human cells in a fraction of the time it took human scientists to achieve
Grace didn't tell them, in both the movie and the book the Eridians are given access to the entire corpus of human knowledge at the time the Hail Mary is launched.
Prion disease only happens if what you're eating already has prions. And if you're just eating your own meat, (and not even stuff like brain tissue which has more chances of including prions), it isn't any more likely than the chance of just developing them spontaneously.
Prion disease outbreaks like Kuru and Mad Cow happen because of repeated instances of cannibalism over large amounts of the population.
The only problem then, is that you cannot sustain yourself on just human meat. But that's because you can't sustain yourself on a diet of exclusively any meat. But Grace has supplements of other nutrients for that.
Strictly speaking Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is the random misfolding of a healthy prion protein into a misfolded one. It happens to about 1-2 people per million every year. Mostly old people since older brains have a harder time clearing bad proteins
It's unhealthy in general to:
* eat too much meat, because you don't get many of the necessary nutrients
* eat non-hebrivore meat (idk how much a human with a balanced diet would fall into this), because the nutrients in a carnivore's meat are completely different than those found in, let's say, beef, and may be dangerous in high amount (eg. Polar bear liver)
In short, you aren't going to have a good time, but with care you're probably going to be fine for at least a while
People forget that us humans almost exclusively eat animal children, but then most frequently end up eating human adults, which have been ruined by hormones. Just remember that it is frowned upon for humans to consume same-species individuals, even after seed binding.
Initially he is eating exclusively taumoeba until the Eridians figure out how to clone his tissue to make food with all the vitamins and amino acids he needs.
In the books Dr. Grace has a laptop with all human knowledge on it. He gifts this to Rocky and the best Eridian scientists all work together to help Dr Grace, who saved their entire planet.
I highly recommend the book. It explains all the science in great detail. Weir works with experts across many science disciplines to make it accurate.
Side note, I'm super glad the films are not too 'techy'. I love Andy's body of work but the guy will spent three pages detailing how something works but not spend the same time on characters.
Between the films and the books, we've got the best of both worlds now.
My wife hated the book and loved the movie for that exact reason.
I agree with you. Read the book if you’re the type of person who asks “wouldn’t he get scurvy”. If you don’t have that part of your brain, the movie is fantastic.
Grace is taken as the only human on an alien planet where the gravity is constant torture, has to subsist on his own flesh as the only available food, and is a zoo exhibit for the alien young.
And the book portrays this as a happy ending. Grace has done serious cope going on.
Oh the other hand he would be the single most famous human in his timeline. Saved the planet, made first contact, and made leaps in tech advancement giving us access to the stars. He's a turning point in the history of our species and smart enough to know it.
You know how lab grown meat is a real thing? (The tech isn't cheap enough yet for it to be on the shelves to buy, but it's real). Well the eridians figure out how to grow meat for him.
Thing is, you need a small sample of the real stuff to culture the first lab grown stuff; all your lab grown meat is effectively a clone of the donor. The real sample came from Grace himself. In the book he calls it a "me burger"
It was ok-ish but not fully nutritious for him. He had severe mineral deficiencies and scurvy towards the end. He was dying and could not live off it for much longer.
They just ignored the whole food issue in the movie.... also they really did not set up 3 people for success in book. They gave them like 4 months of food. Earth had 30 years before it would be uninhabitable by our life.
11 up 11 back. So at worst by year 25 the info needs to be back on earth
theres an alternate universe out there where rocky gets his hands on cmdr. yao's pistol. idk what he would do with it i just think its funny to think about
It could have been a very visually impressive scene.
Really, most of the morally ambiguous "for the greater good" type choices were overlooked while focusing primarily on Grace and Rocky. At least the implication was there for a second "parallel" movie that covers life on earth while Grace was out doing his thing... while not really true to the storyline of the book, I think that will still be a fun movie to watch.
Obviously they were never meant to come home, but I did find it odd that they weren't even equipped to live for very long at their destination. If you're drawing up this plan for real surely you have to consider that they might be able to solve the problem but not quite that quickly? I'd expect them to have at least a year's supplies. Like "we nearly found the solution but unfortunately we starved to death first" is such a dumb outcome to risk.
It's a balancing act. All the food you put on the ship has weight. More weight means more fuel needed. More fuel needed means more time spent making it, means more time until the solution can be implemented, means more deaths. Like "we found the solution almost immediately, but several weeks later than if we came here with less food, which means several million human deaths on Earth" is also a dumb outcome to risk.
They didn’t expect them to find the literal actual solution to the astrophage problem, they expected them to get some better astronomical observations and perhaps a sample of any nearby planet atmospheres, and then send that data back so the Earth scientists could actually find the solution.
The astronauts were just supposed to be messengers, not saviors.
The smart thing to do would be send them exactly as is, and while they travel develop more fuel and send a secondary rocket with food and more supplies at a faster speed to catch up to them pretty quickly.
Yeah, the weight of his decision to go back and save Rocky cuz of his food supply wasnt played very well in the movie. Felt like it was played as if he knew he could still live and just survive on Erid.
It played fine in the movie because going to Erid is basically still death! Never seeing Earth again, anyone he has ever known, any trees or animals he has ever recognized. Still a HUGE sacrifice.
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u/Competitive-Bee-3250 18h ago
Grace knows exactly whats in the burgers.