Project Hail Mary Is Not Hard Science Fiction

Project Hail Mary Is Not Hard Science Fiction

By Robert Korczynski

The most successful space film in years, Ryan Gosling’s Project Hail Mary has been talked about by critics as a triumph of hard science fiction. But is it? The only reason they are calling it that is because it is "competency porn," an industry term for movies where the protagonist is seen working out math on whiteboards, and because the story comes from Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, which is hard science fiction because it uses technologies that we have today, and a planet that we can actually get to.

By doing hard science fiction about Mars, Weir effectively ended more than a century of speculation that we would find alien life in our own backyard. That started with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells more than a century ago, who wrote stories about civilizations on Mars and Venus because both planets are technically in the Goldilocks zone of our star, at least as far as the definitions we used to look for near Earth-sized planets around stars like our sun. It wasn't until the Soviets actually sent probes to both places that the dream died; they proved both planets are uninhabitable and devoid of life. Now, to keep the fantasy of alien friends alive, authors have to look much further away. They have to invent hand-waving science fiction like wormholes, jump gates, warp speed, folding space, or subspace just to be able to get to these distant stars.

The Three Star Shell Game

SETI has spent decades coming up empty-handed, and this movie is a desperate attempt to ignore the silence of the universe by using magical plot devices to invent an alien friend. The reason they used 40 Eridani A is because it is an Orange Dwarf star. Why does that matter? Because SETI is currently obsessed with orange dwarfs after their 60-year failure to find any near Earth-sized planets in the Goldilocks zone of any sun-like stars, and then failing to find any planets with atmospheres around red dwarf stars. They keep changing the definition of Goldilocks zone and habitable zone and changing the class of stars.

The Yellow Dwarf Failure.

For decades, the search for life focused on G-type stars, which are stars like our Sun, looking for Earth 2.0. They were specifically searching for planets that were 75% to 150% of the mass of the Earth orbiting in the Goldilocks Zone aka the habitable zone where water can be a liquid. The Drake Equation assumed that near Earth-sized planets orbiting Sun-like stars would be common, but the reality proved otherwise. The Kepler survey of 80,000 stars included 2,000 that were oriented edge on (so that we could count the planets as they passed in front of the star) and none of the 2,000 had any near Earth-sized planets in the Goldilocks Zone. This was a random sampling of all of the yellow dwarf stars we can see in the night sky, so we will never be able to gather any more data. The search is over.

The Red Dwarf Pivot

Instead of admitting that they failed to find any near Earth-sized planets in the Goldilocks Zone of any stars like our Sun, they just started looking at M-type Red Dwarfs, which make up 70% of all stars in the universe. Then only after they had spent all of the grant money they had raised to study red dwarf stars, they finally admitted in science journals that the coronal ejections of red dwarfs would blow away the atmosphere of any planets that orbited them, and then immediately asked for more grant money to study orange dwarf stars. Again, this was done without admitting to the public that they had failed to find any planets with atmospheres around red dwarf stars; they just moved the goalposts.

The Orange Dwarf Goalpost

Now that the Red Dwarfs have been debunked, they have moved to Orange Dwarf, K-type. They are now literally calling these Goldilocks Stars in an attempt to appropriate the term Goldilocks Zone, which was originally the area around a yellow dwarf star where water could be a liquid. Just because Orange Dwarfs fall in between Yellow and Red Dwarfs does not make them special. The only star we know that has life in the entire universe is our Sun, which is a Yellow Dwarf star. There is no reason to believe that just because they failed to find any near Earth-sized planets in the Goldilocks Zone of any yellow dwarf stars, or any planets orbiting any red dwarf stars that had any atmosphere, that orange dwarf stars would somehow be a Goldilocks star. It is a blatant misappropriation of the term Goldilocks Zone to keep the funding flowing for a few more decades.

The Habitable Zone Lie

The planet Erid is based on a planet known as 40 Eridani A b. In the real universe, this planet orbits its Orange Dwarf star every 42 days, putting it five times closer to its sun than Earth is to our Sun. This places it far outside the Goldilocks Zone where water can be a liquid. It receives nine times more stellar flux than Earth, which is more radiation than even Mercury receives. To resuscitate this dead world for the SETI fantasy, the film invents a 29-atmosphere air supply to shield it from the heat.

While near Earth-sized planets have been discovered with similar orbital periods to the Earth around orange dwarf stars (specifically planets within 5% of Earth's mass and 5% of Earth's orbit as reported by science communicators such as Anton Petrov) the author didn't choose to use one of those planets. He wanted an extremophile that came from the biology of oceans here on Earth because that's a trope. While life may exist on those stable Earth-analogs, it would still require science fiction hand-waving to be able to travel to an orange dwarf star. Instead of grounding the story in a world where life could actually form in a stable orbit, Weir chose a scorched rock and hand-waves an impossible 29-atmosphere pressure cooker into existence. There is zero physical evidence of such dense atmospheres existing on planets five times closer to their sun than Earth.

The Mass and Density Lie

To make the alien Rocky feel grounded, the author leans on the discovery of 40 Eridani A b, which has 8.5 times the mass of Earth. However, we have only calculated its mass; we do not know its diameter. Instead of admitting that an 8.5 mass planet (the absolute upper threshold of a potential rocky planet before it becomes a Neptune-like, small gas giant) is likely a gaseous world, the author invents a radius that allows for a surface gravity of only 2.0g.

This ignores the math of planetary density. Since an iron core makes up about one third of the Earth’s mass, an 8.5 mass planet following that same composition would have an iron core alone nearly three times the mass of the entire Earth. To get the gravity to a manageable 2.0g, the author limited the diameter of the planet to double that of Earth. That is not how gravity works. A planet with that much mass couldn't be only two Earth diameters, which is the math used to create 2.0g gravity. A planet that massive would have more like 3.0g or 4.0g, which is a typical Super-Earth.

Even with only two times Earth's diameter and 2.0g gravity, combined with 29 atmospheres of pressure, they also couldn't make orbit; but this is all just science fiction. Standard rocket fuels could not achieve orbital velocity let alone deep space by any species that evolved there because the "gravity well" and atmospheric drag are insurmountable. It wouldn't matter anyway because the physics breaks. They took a physical mass and invented a fake size to create a planet that is technically rocky but has enough gravity to seem alien, even though a planet with that specific composition and size has never been observed.

The Rotation and Tidal Locking Fraud

Physics dictates that a planet at 0.2 AU should be tidally locked, with one side scorched and the other frozen. Weir ignores the massive tidal braking forces of the host star to invent a planet that spins so fast that it has a 5-hour day. He claims this fast rotation creates a "strong magnetic field" to protect the atmosphere. However, at 10 times the solar flux of Earth, X-rays and UV radiation would still cause thermal escape, stripping the atmosphere regardless of the magnetic field.

A 29-atmosphere environment at 210°C is essentially a supercritical fluid, a hot pressure cooker where complex organic molecules would shake themselves apart. Just because Venus has a thick atmosphere doesn't mean a planet closer to its sun than Mercury can support life.

The Hand Waving and Hype

Despite the high-tech window dressing, Project Hail Mary is fundamentally the exact same plot as the 1980s film Enemy Mine. In that movie, a human and a reptilian alien end up stranded, and must engineer their way out. This film is not innovative; it is a direct continuation of the last 120 years of science fiction tropes. Everything we see is just a variation of life here on Earth.

Hollywood typically just takes an animal that exists in the oceans of the Earth and makes it the dominant life form on a different planet by hand-waving a lower or higher atmosphere to justify the look. It is a carousel of terrestrial biology in space:

The Crustacean/Shrimp: In District 9, the aliens are bipedal and look like large shrimp, leading the humans in the film to literally call them "Prawns."

The Reptilian: In Enemy Mine, Louis Gossett Jr. plays a reptilian alien that is just a bipedal lizard archetype based on Earth's desert-dwelling reptiles.

The Squid/Cephalopod: In Arrival, the "Heptapods" are essentially giant, floating squids or octopuses that communicate through ink-like symbols, mirroring Earth's cephalopods.

The Starfish: In Project Hail Mary, the alien Rocky is described as a five-legged, high-density starfish-like being, once again pulling directly from marine biology.

The Magic Black Fluid

To bypass the staggering distances and the physical impossibility of reaching distant stars, the film relies on the "Astrophage," a magic black liquid that appears to be similar to the black goo in District 9, it is a magic plot device that stores infinite energy and ignores the laws of thermodynamics. In Project Hail Mary the Astrophage not only causes the sun to dim, but also allows for humans to travel at 92% of the speed of light.

Conclusion

From the fake planetary density to the non-existent 29-atmosphere shield and the refusal to acknowledge tidal locking, every scientific element of this story is a lie. Moreover, like every other science fiction project, it requires, if not faster-than-light travel, a magic fluid that allows you to travel at 92% of the speed of light. It is a calculated manipulation designed to prop up the SETI dream of finding life around orange dwarf stars and to justify the continued funding of a search that has turned up nothing but silence. The reality is that we appear to be a Rare Earth in a universe that, despite the hype, remains empty of any signals from the stars.