god’s favorite boy toy

https://archive.org/details/555-milf-tar/

Shout out to Black women in folk music! Gotta be one of my favorite genres.

Rocky says he will “go home 6 years slower” (and it’s always in human units) when giving away astrophage, but then on the Hail Mary, the trip to Erid takes ~4 years.

So I’m confused. Did Grace just have way more astrophage than Rocky after the donation then? But Erid is farther away from Tau Ceti than Earth? (~16ly vs ~12ly) And then I saw a timeline somewhere that Grace would’ve run out of food with a year to go if he’d gone back to Earth, but he just barely made it to Erid before completely running out?

I don’t know anything about the timeline for the food (and why he’d run out long before he reached Earth, I’m not sure how accurate that is) and again, this isn’t a plot point in the book but!! My assumption is that the journey from Tau Ceti to Erid is shorter in the Hail Mary, as opposed to the Blip A, because of mass. The Hail Mary is significantly smaller than the Blip A. It’s possible that the Hail Mary can travel faster because it’s smaller, but in the book the Blip A can travel close to the speed of light (like the Hail Mary) and the speed of light is the upper limit for how fast anything can travel. So my assumption is that it’s a thing with fuel efficiency again. Back to the car analogy: my tiny Hyundai has a lot less mass than a giant pickup truck. Which means my tiny car has less inertia, which means it needs less fuel to travel the same distance as the pickup truck. So if me and a pick up truck were going 100 miles using the same tank of gas, I could travel significantly faster using the same amount of fuel because my car is more fuel efficient. They’re on a time crunch to get to Erid, so if I was in a ship that could travel the same distance using the same amount of fuel but do it faster, I’d be putting the pedal to the metal so Grace doesn’t starve.