cosmic

I noticed that Grace was looking at golden plaques with inscription and realized they look like something made based off the Voyager Golden Record, made by Astrophysicist and Cornell University professor Carl Sagan and singer John Lennon. It was sent out in the probes Voyager 1 and 2, I believe. It has a message etched on it which says, "To the makers of music, all worlds, all times."

For reference, pictures below show the Voyager Golden Record.

People keep talking about the science in PHM like yeah, obviously. Math saves the world, equations translate the universe, whatever.

But what gets me is how hard the story leans into something else: Music!!!!

Like the whole movie quietly argues that sure, math is universal because it is precise. It lets completely different species understand each other.

But music is what lets them feel each other.

When we first see Grace's old memories, the first one shown was him teaching the kids about soundwaves being affected by frequency. This is probably a foreshadowing that it will mean so much in the next few parts of the plot. Specifically Rocky.

Rocky’s language is not framed like cold data, even if it technically is. It is patterned, tonal, almost harmonic. Grace does not just decode it, he recognizes it. There is a difference. Even in the book, he always mentions how Rocky drops an octave when he expresses sadness and grief.

And that is why it hits that even someone like Eva Stratt, who reduces everything to outcomes, to sacrifice, to necessity, can still be pulled into something as unnecessary as music.

The movie soundtrack uses songs in many different languages, and it quietly circles back to the voyager golden record. That record was created in case any life beyond earth ever finds it, to teach them what humanity is. In the same way, the music in the film becomes a kind of message too. It represents human diversity, culture, and emotion, everything that exists beyond just Grace and his perspective, showing what it means to be human to someone who is not human at all.

There are 27 songs from all around the world put in the Golden Record btw. <3

Science lets different life forms understand each other, yes. But something like music exists on a smaller, quieter level. It does not need translation in the same way. It just needs recognition.

And maybe that is the point, that even at the edge of everything, when all you have left is survival and logic and numbers, the thing that still reaches across the gap is not just understanding. It is resonance.

In one of the phm fics I’ve written, Grace is peer reviewing an Eridian academic paper about music as the universal language and I got ridiculously into it before I realized this could be a whole other fic and I needed to stop 😅

Here’s a line from before I stopped myself:

“I think music may be as much of a universal language as we claim math and science to be, and perhaps intimately intertwined with the evolution of intelligent life.”

like. imagine you are grace. you have a life you enjoy where you get to teach kids you’re fond of about a subject you love. you’ve been hanging out with your friend marissa weekly for years (!) and you have a lot of peers on project hail mary who you respect and even have fun with. but! you’re also like 40, and you know how the world works - at the end of the day, at the end of the project, all of those people will go back to their parents and families and partners. the people whose names are on their emergency contact forms and birth certificates and marriage licenses and apartment leases. no matter how much you care about them, and no matter how much they care about you, there is always someone else in their life who is Above you, and Before you, because That’s How The World Works.

so like… yeah. lmao. aroace grace not opening himself up all the way because he anticipates pain and wants to avoid that is a kind of protective hedging that i find very likely for him to engage in? even if he opens himself up to the people around him, the fact is that most of those people will only reciprocate to whatever degree they/society deem acceptable for friendship, even if they like him a lot.

I know these are supposed to be unintentional compliments, but this idea made me laugh too hard not to draw. The Eridian Hating Committee has been digging a little too deep for dirt on Grace.

Rocky is going to take this as a personal attack bc how DARE anyone threaten his leaky space blob.

Ambush hunters

Part 3 of the comic

…please say this hasn’t been done 🥹

…please say this hasn’t been done 🥹